QUESTION FROM A READER: Nothing arises from nothing, according to my knowledge. There must be material or a component available for anything to exist, and for them to be accessible, there must be something else available. Now here is my question: Where did the stuff that caused the Big Bang to originate from, and what happened to create that material in the first place? Peter is 80 years old and lives in Australia. “The final star will fade away as it cools.”
With its demise, the cosmos will revert to nothingness, devoid of light, life, and purpose.” In the current BBC programme Universe, scientist Brian Cox issued a warning. The death of that final star will simply be the start of an endlessly lengthy, dark age. All stuff will finally be destroyed by giant black holes, which will thereafter vanish into the faintest rays of light. Space will continue to extend outwards until even the faint light is too far apart to interact. The activity will end.
Will it, or will it not? Surprisingly, some cosmologists believe that a prior, cold, dark, empty universe, similar to the one that awaits us in the far future, may have been the cause of our own Big Bang. The new series, co-published by The Conversation and BBC Future, aims to address our readers’ provocative questions about life, love, death, and the cosmos. We collaborate with expert scholars who have committed their careers to discovering new insights on the issues that affect our lives.
First, let us look at how “material” – actual substance – initially came into being. There was clearly none of that around at the Big Bang – or for hundreds of thousands of years following – if we are trying to explain the origins of stable stuff made up of atoms or molecules.
We, in fact, have a very good idea of how the first atoms produced from simpler particles once circumstances cooled enough for complex matter to be stable, and how these atoms eventually fused into heavier elements within stars. That knowledge, however, does not resolve the question of whether something may create from nothing.
So, let us go a little further back in time. Protons and neutrons, which together make up the atomic nucleus, were the first long-lived matter particles of any type. Around one ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, they appeared. There had been no material in any meaning of the word before that time.
However, physics allows us to continue tracing the chronology backward — to physical processes that precede the existence of any stable matter. This ushers us into the “great united period.” We have entered the domain of speculative physics since we cannot generate enough energy in our experiments to investigate the processes that were occurring at the time.
However, one probable theory is that the physical world is created from a soup of short-lived fundamental particles, such as quarks, which are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. There existed almost equal amounts of matter and “antimatter”: each type of matter particle, like the quark, has an antimatter “mirror image” counterpart that is nearly identical to it and differs only in one characteristic. When matter and antimatter collide, however, they annihilate in a blaze of energy, implying that these particles are continually generated and destroyed.
Nevertheless, first, how did these particles come to be? According to quantum field theory, even a vacuum, which is thought to equate to empty spacetime, is filled with physical activity in the form of energy fluctuations. Particles can emerge because of these oscillations, only to vanish again quickly. Although this may appear to be a mathematical quirk rather than true physics, such particles have been discovered in several investigations, Particles are continually being destroyed in the spacetime vacuum state, seemingly “out of nothing.” Nevertheless, perhaps all this truly means is that, despite its name, the quantum vacuum is something rather than nothing. The philosopher David Albert famously chastised Big Bang theories that promised to create anything from nothing in this way.
Let us consider the question: where did spacetime come from? Then we may go even further back in time, to the genuinely old “Planck epoch” — a moment so far back in the universe’s history that our greatest physics theories fail. This period began one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Space and time were both vulnerable to quantum fluctuations at this moment. Physicists usually divide their time between quantum physics, which governs the microworld of particles, and general relativity, which governs enormous, cosmic scales. However, a full theory of quantum gravity, combining the two, is required to adequately comprehend the Planck period. Although no complete theory of quantum gravity exists, there are several efforts, such as string theory and loop quantum gravity. Ordinary space and time, like the waves on the surface of a deep ocean, are often regarded as emerging in these endeavors. Quantum processes acting at a deeper, microscopic level produce what we perceive as space and time — processes that make little sense to us as beings entrenched in the macroscopic universe.
