What If the Big Bang Wasn't the Beginning? New Study Proposes Alternative
What If the Big Bang Wasn't the Beginning? Was the universe created with a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, or has it been expanding and contracting for eternity? A new paper, inspired by alternative explanations of the physics of black holes, explores the latter possibility and rejects a core tenet of the Big Bang hypothesis. The universal origin story known as the Big Bang postulates that, 13.7 billion years ago, our universe emerged from a singularity — a point of infinite density and gravity — and that before this event, space and time did not exist (which means the Big Bang took place at no place and no time). There is ample evidence to show that the universe did undergo an early period of rapid expansion — in a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, the universe is thought to have expanded by a factor of 10 78 in volume. For one, the universe is still expanding in every direction. The farther away an object is, the faster it ...