Hello. Today I want to explain the truly unexplainable, so if you get to the end of this article still wondering exactly what was explained, I can say with confidence: absolutely nothing.
I will, however, be sure to leave you with more questions than you had before you started this article. I certainly have more. In trying to understand the different possibilities surrounding the beginning of our universe, I have become more educated on the subject. Unfortunately, becoming more educated has not necessarily made me less confused.
The Big Bang Theory — not the TV show — is our best scientific explanation for how the universe developed from an extremely hot and dense early state. Science can describe an incredible amount of what happened afterward, but what it cannot yet tell us with certainty is what caused it, what existed before it, or whether there actually was a “before.” Religion cannot, if you will forgive me, simply shine God’s light on the answer and settle the matter either.
So we are going to take a little journey through science, religion, time, physics and a few theories that may leave both you and me wondering whether we should have started this conversation in the first place. Let’s begin with nothing, or perhaps more accurately, with the question of whether there was ever really nothing at all.
That sounds simple until you stop and think about what “nothing” would actually mean. We usually picture emptiness, but even emptiness gives us something to work with. An empty room still has space. Darkness still has somewhere to be dark. Even the idea of waiting for something to happen assumes there is time in which it can happen. True nothing would be harder to imagine than that: no space to fill, no clock to tick, no energy waiting around, and no place for anything to suddenly appear.
Then physics comes along and makes the whole idea even more confusing. What science sometimes calls empty space is not necessarily empty in the everyday sense. At the quantum level, there can still be fields, activity and physical rules operating in the background. So when someone says the universe may have come from “nothing,” we have to stop and ask what kind of nothing they mean. If there were already laws, fields or even the possibility for something to happen, then maybe nothing was never really nothing at all.
And there we are. One question in, and the floor is already moving under us.
The Big Bang Theory itself does not say everything simply burst out of absolute emptiness. What it tells us is that if we follow the universe backward, everything becomes hotter, denser and more tightly packed. Eventually we reach a point where the theories we rely on stop giving us a clear picture. That does not mean science failed. It means we reached the edge of what the current tools can explain, and naturally scientists did not leave it there.
One idea is inflation, which suggests the very early universe went through a burst of expansion so fast that even calling it fast does not really do it justice. Inflation helps explain why the universe looks the way it does today and why enormous regions of space seem so similar to one another. That sounds promising until we ask what caused inflation.
Another possibility is that our Big Bang was not the first event in the story. Some models suggest an earlier universe may have collapsed and then rebounded into ours. Other ideas picture the universe going through repeated periods of expansion and contraction. Then there is the multiverse, where our universe could be only one among many. Each idea gives us a possible answer, and each answer immediately hands us another question. If another universe came first, where did that one come from? If universes keep repeating, what started the cycle? If there are countless universes, what is behind the whole system?
At some point, it begins to feel like we have not found the beginning at all. We have just kept moving the sign that says “Beginning” farther down the road.
And then Einstein enters the conversation, because apparently our understanding of the universe was not confusing enough already.
Relativity showed us that time is not one giant universal clock ticking the same way for everyone. Speed matters. Gravity matters. Two people can experience different amounts of time and both can still be right about what their clocks measured. Move fast enough and your time slows compared with someone who stays behind. That sounds like something out of science fiction, but time dilation has been measured and confirmed.
Which means that, in a limited sense, we already know how to travel into the future. If you could travel close enough to the speed of light, you might experience far less time than the people you left behind. Come home and they could have aged much more than you did. Unfortunately, science has been considerably less helpful about getting you back in time for dinner.
Relativity also gives us another strange idea to deal with. There is no single universal “now” that everyone in the universe shares. Space and time are tied together, and some interpretations suggest that what we call the past, present and future may all belong to one larger structure. That does not mean you should start making plans for a weekend trip to 1975, but it does mean that the way we experience time may not be the whole story.
Now take that thought all the way back to the beginning. What if time itself began with the universe? If that is true, asking what happened before the Big Bang could be the wrong question. There may not have been a “before” because there was no time yet for anything to be before anything else. I told you I was going to leave you with more questions.
Now religion gets a seat at the table.
Christianity and Judaism traditionally teach that creation ultimately comes from God. Islam also describes God as the creator of the heavens and Earth. In those traditions, God is not simply another object sitting somewhere before the universe appeared. God is understood as existing independently of creation itself.
Other religions approach the question differently. Hindu traditions include vast cycles of creation, destruction and renewal. Buddhism generally focuses less on finding one absolute first moment and more on causes, conditions and the chain of events that produces what comes next. I am not suggesting any ancient religion secretly wrote modern physics thousands of years early. That would be stretching both religion and science farther than they deserve. What interests me is the fact that people have been asking the same basic question for a very long time: where did all of this come from?
Religion often answers that question with God. Science answers by asking what evidence can be found. Then comes the uncomfortable question: if everything needs a cause, what caused God? The traditional religious answer is that God did not begin and therefore does not need a cause. God is eternal. Fair enough, but then the question can be turned around. If something can exist without ever having been created, why could that not be the universe itself, some deeper quantum reality, or whatever may exist underneath the universe we see?
Religion can send the question right back. Suppose science someday finds some basic field, law or underlying reality that has always existed. Why does that exist? If we eventually reach a point where science says, “That is simply the way reality is,” have we completely escaped the mystery, or have science and religion just reached the same wall from different directions?
There is another part of this that fascinates me. When religion describes God as eternal, we tend to picture something existing for an endless amount of time. But what if time itself belongs to the universe? Something existing independently of the universe might not experience yesterday, today and tomorrow the way we do. It might not exist forever within time. It could exist beyond time as we understand it.
No, Einstein did not prove God exists. I am fairly certain dragging him into that argument would annoy both physicists and theologians. But modern physics has made time strange enough that the phrase “outside of time” no longer sounds quite as simple as it once did.
And while all of us are trying to make sense of this, science keeps looking deeper. We build better telescopes, study older light, map larger portions of the universe and test ideas about dark energy, black holes, quantum physics and cosmic expansion. Each generation seems able to look farther than the one before it, and every time another door opens, there seems to be another one behind it.
Maybe science will eventually discover exactly what led to our Big Bang. If it does, someone will almost certainly ask what came before that. Maybe another universe came first. Maybe there was some kind of quantum beginning. Maybe universes have always existed in one form or another. Maybe our understanding of time is so limited that words like “before,” “beginning” and “cause” do not work the way we think they do. Maybe religion is right that something exists beyond what we can measure. Maybe science will one day uncover something neither science nor religion has imagined yet.
I do not know, and that may be the most important thing I learned while trying to understand all of this. There does not always seem to be one answer. One answer leads to another theory, another theory opens another direction, and another direction produces another question.
It is a little like eating a Lay’s potato chip or grabbing one McDonald’s fry. There is never just one. Perhaps knowledge works the same way. Maybe learning is not a straight road toward one perfect answer. Maybe it is a road that keeps branching the farther we travel.
Science has given us an extraordinary understanding of how the universe developed. Religion has spent thousands of years asking why a universe exists at all. Philosophy keeps asking whether either one has actually reached the bottom of the question. And perhaps reaching the bottom is not even the point. Maybe the real value is in being willing to keep asking.
Maybe the greatest mystery is not exactly what happened at the Big Bang, and maybe it is not what happened before it. Perhaps the question hiding underneath all the others is the simplest one of all: Why is there something instead of nothing?
If you came here expecting me to answer that, you apparently skipped my opening paragraph. I promised to explain absolutely nothing. After all of this, I believe I have succeeded.
But hopefully you are now just as confused as I am — and maybe just a little more curious.
By J Jones