‘Battle of the Big Bang' Review: A Question of Origins
This origin became known as the big bang, and that infinitely small point at which it all began was called a singularity: a place where all the known laws of physics break down. Time was purportedly created only at the moment of banging, so it made no sense to ask what came before the big bang, just as it makes no sense to ask what is north of the North Pole. Why it happened at all remained an awkward question, but the existence of such an inscrutable singularity at the birth of all things became the mainstream view.
It might be surprising, then, to learn that few experts in the field hold this view anymore. The traditional picture of the big bang is actually two separate ideas, explain Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper in 'Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins.' Researchers continue to endorse the hot big bang, the idea of a primordial explosion of energy, but most do not think it goes back to 'a state of infinite density where time stands still and the answers to all our origin questions meet their demise.' Mr. Afshordi is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Canada; Mr. Halper is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the creator of the YouTube series 'Before the Big Bang.' Their excellent book promises to map the 'quiet revolution' of 21st-century cosmology and introduce us to the revolutionaries.
In very different ways, these rebels are all addressing questions left unanswered by the old theory. One is the origin-of-structure problem: The big bang ought to have spread energy homogeneously throughout space, but we observe clumps of galaxies with vast spaces between them, and measurements of the cosmic microwave background—the fossil radiation from when the universe was only 380,000 years old—reveal an unpredictable pattern of warm and cold spots. Nor have we ever seen an inflaton, a hypothetical particle that is supposed to have driven a period of enormous growth in the size of the early universe.
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