‘WHAT came before the Big Bang?’ is a question that has plagued scientists for millennia, but experts may have the answer.
Several solutions have been offered up to the age old conundrum, including the possibility of God, multiverses and black holes, but the answer could be a lot more simple – nothing.
A group of scientists have come to the conclusion something can come from absolute nothingness, stating that our seemingly infinite universe could have come from nothing. According to the weird world of quantum mechanics – of which the late Richard Feynman, who is considered one of the godfathers of quantum physics, once said "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics" - there can be fluctuations in nothing which seemingly lead to infinity.
Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at SETI, told Space.com: "Quantum mechanical fluctuations can produce the cosmos. If you would just, in this room, just twist time and space the right way, you might create an entirely new universe. It's not clear you could get into that universe, but you would create it. So it could be that this universe is merely the science fair project of a kid in another universe. I don't know how that affects your theological leanings, but it is something to consider."
Even if there was “nothing” before the Big Bang, astrophysicist Alex Filippenko of the University of California says that the laws of physics would still be there.
He said: "The Big Bang could've occurred as a result of just the laws of physics being there. With the laws of physics, you can get universes.”
He adds that there is no need for a God in this scenario to kick-start the whole process.
Filippenko continues: “The question, then, is, 'Why are there laws of physics?’" And you could say, 'Well, that required a divine creator, who created these laws of physics and the spark that led from the laws of physics to these universes, maybe more than one'. The 'divine spark' was whatever produced the laws of physics. And I don't know what produced that divine spark. So let's just leave it at the laws of physics.”
However, Leo C Stein, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that we may never truly know what happened before the Big Bang because of inflation – the exponential expansion of the cosmos.
He wrote on Q and A site Quora: “One of the reasons the question is so hard to answer is that inflation wipes out a lot of the information about what happened beforehand (actually it stretches it out to scales that are larger than our observable universe).
That means that it's really hard to distinguish between two different models that both lead to the same kind of inflation.”