Every so often, we run posts linking to people speculating about what happened before the Big Bang.
Pop science mag New Scientist offers to tell us the latest speculations, if we will but sign up eventually to pay something like US$22-$49 to discover,
According to the big bang theory – our best explanation for why space is expanding – everything exploded from nothing about 13.8 billion years ago. Cosmologists have been able to wind things back to within a tiny fraction of a second of this moment. But now they’re stuck.
Of course, any further attempt at discovery means assuming that 1) a Big Bang happened 2) anything at all happened before the Big Bang 3) our brains are shaped for truth, not “fitness,” in the Darwinian sense*, such that an explanation we can accept may represent reality.
The Big Bang is actually very unpopular in pop and high science, for reasons set out here.
Here are some posts we have done at Uncommon Descent for free, on various pre-Bang/no Bang/two Bangs/everywhere a Bang Bang theses, many of which you can follow up for free as well.
Universe before Big Bang? Almost surely part of multiverse (cue quantum bubble foam)
Physicist Rob Sheldon on a cosmologist’s recent claim that there were two Big Bangs
The latest no-Big Bang theory relies on a quantum fluid of hypothetical massless particles
Is that cold “No Big Bang” universe impossible at the outset…?
New No Bang theory posits infinite, very cold past
Iceball universe avoids Big Bang
Huffington Post announces: Universe shouldn’t exist
See also: Big Bang exterminator wanted, will train
* Science majors hardly know what they are doing when they sign on to Darwinism. But the little swine must find out for themselves and take action, or die intellectually. For many, the odds favour the latter fate.
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