SCIENCE
BEGINNINGS
JANUARY 2020
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
BEGINNINGS
JANUARY 2020
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
BEGINNINGS
JANUARY 2020
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
BEGINNINGS
JANUARY 2020
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
BEGINNINGS
JANUARY 2020
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
BEGINNINGS
JANUARY 2020
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
BEGINNINGS
JANUARY 2020
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
BEGINNINGS
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
JANUARY 2020
JANUARY 2020
JANUARY 2020
BEGINNINGS
JANUARY 2020
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
BEGINNINGS
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
BEGINNINGS
JANUARY 2020
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
Atractor de Lorenz - a famosa borboleta
[1] The Greek Creation Story | Mythology Explained - Jon Solo
[2] The Science Behind the Butterfly Effect, Veritassium
[3] How Chaos Theory Unravels the Mysteries of Nature, Seeker
[4] Chaos Theory | The Butterfly Effect (ft. Jabrils), Up and Atom
[5] This equation will change how you see the world (the logistic map), Veritassium
BEGINNINGS
JANUARY 2020
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.
BEGINNINGS
JANUARY 2020
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty (...) darkness was over the surface of the deep (...)
And God said:
– Let there be light!
And there was light.”
How did it all begin? When did it all begin? The wrong answer: the Big Bang.
This is probably one of the oldest questions that remains unanswered, even though many were the minds who took upon themselves to answer it. What is the origin of the Universe?
One of the most well-known answers to this question is nothing but the beginning of the most famous book of all times: the Bible. According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything else that exists today, and from the unbelievable nothing all the observable Universe (and non-observable, for all intents and purposes) was born. First the earth and only then light, so that we could see the vastness of the Universe.
We would expect that thousands of years later we would be facing a radically different situation, one in which almost everyone knows the scientifically correct answer to the origin of the Universe. There remain, however, two great ropes holding us back in this race for knowledge. The first and most important one is that the vast majority of people doesn’t know anything (nothing compared to what there is to be known) about the origin and evolution of the universe according to the theory which is most accepted by today’s scientific community. The second is that even scientists have no idea of how the Universe began.
As the great majority of the scientific community (in particular, amongst most Physicists) will tell you, the evolution of the Universe is described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is nothing but the theory of how space itself evolved with time.
There are many pieces to this big puzzle: from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, to Hubble’s measurements, the Friedmann equations and Hawking and Penrose’s theorems. However, taking only these into account, the bottom line could be summarized in the following way: we live in an expanding universe (space keeps taking more space and everything which is not close enough constantly drifts away from everything else), which means that if we run the movie backwards, everything was closer before and space took less space, and when it wasn’t possible to take any less space everything we see today was at a single point. Chances are, together with this idea, most people have heard the words Big Bang. Indeed, this is one of the ideas behind the Big Bang. Nonetheless, it is not the Big Bang in the Standard Model of Cosmology. It can’t be.
The Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe. In this theory, the Big Bang corresponds to an era very close to the “beginning” of the Universe, in which all matter and energy were concentrated in an extremely small space, very dense (in the limit in which the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe, this gives rise to the famous primodial singularity). With the Big Bang started the necessary processes for the formation of (almost) everything we see today, the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms, and a radiation dominated expansion. Only later could radiation escape everything that was surrounding it and propagate freely through the Universe, in what is known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), one of the main sources of information about the “beginning” of the Universe we have.
Even more interesting and mysterious is what happened before the Big Bang. Ironically, if this theory trully describes the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang, then it cannot simultaneously describe its evolution before the Big Bang: in simple terms, the Universe wouldn't have had enough time to be as big as today's data implies. In order to solve this and other conflicts between the model and observations, it was necessary to have a period of accelerated expansion before the Big Bang, with characteristics that even seem to suggest that we would never reach the primordial singularity (at least in a finite amount of time). This is what is know as inflation.
And how do we know this is not just science fiction? Far from me to judge whoever receives this information for the first time without the slightest amount of skepticism (on the contrary, even though the ideal atitude would be critical rather than skeptical). It is easy to think that we cannot possibly know what happened so long ago, since it is impossible to go back in time and measure anything at all. The truth is, we don’t need to. If my theory were “My mom is home”, I would not need to see or hear my mom to believe this was true: it would suffice to see her car stop upfront, her keys on the table, her handbag on the couch, the sound of opening drawers coming from her bedroom. Would I be certain she was home? No. But I would be so close to being certain that, for practical purposes, it would be the same. In that moment, I would know my mom was home.
It is very similar with the beginning of the Universe. We alternate between theories and obervasions, trying to explain what we see with new ideas and testing new ideas with what we see. The Standard Model of Cosmology has several characteristics we can choose to better describe what we observe and, after a choice is made, we observe another bunch of things to verify that this model actually works. We must know to look for the car keys and guaranty they are always the same colour.
What if they are not? What if only one person is home, but in the living room I find my mom’s keys and my sister’s handbag? At this very moment, we are facing a crisis in cosmology: two independent measurements give different values to the same thing, incompatible values even when we account for the error each of them may have made. Either we didn’t observe properly or our model is wrong. Right now, no one knows which one it is.
But what does it have to do with the beginning of the Universe? This thing with different values is what tells us the age of the Universe. It is true that no one knows how everything began, but at the moment no one knows when it began either. Was it 13.8 bilion years ago or 12.7 bilion years ago? No one knows. But what are a billion years, after knowing that nothing began at the Big Bang? Peanuts.