The conventional wisdom among cosmologists is that the universe experienced a period of “inflation,” a brief burst of accelerated expansion, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. But theoretical physicist Latham Boyle argues that inflation is a figment of cosmologists’ imagination, and that a better theory of the early universe suggests the Big Bang is a cosmic mirror hiding another universe just beyond the beginning of time.
What was the very early universe like, just a short time after the Big Bang? What happened at the Big Bang itself? What was the Big Bang?
Since the universe is expanding, it was denser and hotter in the past. Astronomers can see this directly because any observation of distant galaxies captures them as they were when their light was emitted toward us. For example, when we look at a galaxy one billion light years away, we are seeing how it looked a billion years ago. So looking further out means looking further back in time, when the universe was hotter and denser.
A particularly vivid illustration of this is the cosmic microwave background radiation. Your eyes detect light (electromagnetic waves in the optical frequency range) so the night sky looks dark – electromagnetic waves in the microwave frequency range do not register with human vision. But if you could see radiation in the microwave frequency range, the night sky would look bright in all directions. Where does this radiation come from?
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