Did our cosmos exist before the big bang?

New Scientist ^ | 12/10/08 | Anil Ananthaswamy

[LibWhacker]

ABHAY ASHTEKAR remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. "I was taken aback," he says. He was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. Mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. But then, instead of reaching the big bang "singularity", the universe bounced and started expanding again. What on earth was happening?

Ashtekar wanted to be sure of what he was seeing, so he asked his colleagues to sit on the result for six months before publishing it in 2006. And no wonder. The theory that the recycled universe was based on, called loop quantum cosmology (LQC), had managed to illuminate the very birth of the universe - something even Einstein's general theory of relativity fails to do.

LQC has been tantalising physicists since 2003 with the idea that our universe could conceivably have emerged from the collapse of a previous universe. Now the theory is poised to make predictions we can actually test. If they are verified, the big bang will give way to a big bounce and we will finally know the quantum structure of space-time. Instead of a universe that emerged from a point of infinite density, we will have one that recycles, possibly through an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end.

[Williams]

Duh - friggin idiots

[Twinkie]

Well, logically, if the scriptures are right and “in Him we live and move and have our very being” and “He is the Alpha and the Omega”, then any sort of “carbon dating” will show basically - infinity of all matter since everything is a part of Him or created by Him using ancient matter to create things with. (We never gonna figger it out just right cause there are things above our finite minds.)

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks KoRn.

before the big bang site:freerepublic.com

Google

[allmendream]

The Universe as a perpetual motion machine.

[tpanther]

Just wait. 5 trillion years. You'll see.

Exactly...

...the theory is poised to make predictions we can actually test.

Instead of a universe that emerged from a point of infinite density, we will have one that recycles, possibly through an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end.

No doubt measurable too.

Sheesh, what a farce!

[Kirkwood]

Old, old, old news. This was being discussed over 25 years ago in an astronomy class I took.

[Chode]

something about matter cannot be created nor destroyed...

[Redcitizen]

You left out the word billion between 25 and years. =) j/k

[csense]

...with no beginning and no end.

how convenient

[samtheman]

Cosmologists are still very much in the dark about dark energy.

Dark energy: a matter dark, indeed.

[LibWhacker]

It goes back even further. I first heard about it in the 60s. At the time, a philosopher friend told me that Nietzsche had come up with the idea, but it turns out it goes back much further than that even: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return. The difference, of course, is that Ashtekar, Bojowald, et al. have taken the physics further than anyone ever has.

[onedoug]

Well, God did.

[PasorBob]

Such sturm und drang from young Werther!

[js1138]

From 1960: