I have a confession to make. As a child I did something absolutely awful...
When I was a child, my grade school teacher bought me an ant farm for my birthday. I remember excitedly getting it all setup the moment I got home from school that day. Every day, I would come home from school and check it. Every day the industrious ants had built a new tunnel. Going back and forth across the tunnels, clearing new paths and thinking about...
whatever it is that ants think...
Then one day, the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up!
My teacher, who was at that time, literally the closest friend I had in this world, broke down screaming and crying. I tried to give her a hug, but she slapped me. I found out years later that the reason she flipped out, was because one of her childhood friends had been on that spaceship.
I ran home and in a fit of anger I shook the whole farm up like an etch a sketch.
Then I sat it upside down on my bookshelf, sat in the corner and cried.
I mention this, because this same teacher had taught me, that from the perspective of 4 dimensional spacetime, our universe looks a lot like an antfarm. But we aren't the ants...
We're the tunnels...
You might ask yourself why an elementary teacher would try to teach a child something like that? I really don't know. I wasn't exactly teacher's pet. In fact I was the most disruptive kid in school. I spent the bulk of elementary school gaining a great deal of expertise in the janitorial arts and sciences.
So the very few interactions I remember having with my teachers, are literally the very few interactions I actually had with my teachers. They always seemed to be trying to give me some sort of far out, way out of the way thought experiment to consider. In retrospect, I think it may have been their way of getting me to calm down in class and just veg to my own thoughts, as my mind tried to wrap itself around the infinite.
Why am I telling you this?
It's because, despite being a perfectly valid solution to Einstein's equations. Despite being supported by observations of things like the CMB.
I don't think I've ever bought into the creation ex-nihlo of the big bang!
Here's why...
It requires way too many mental gymnastics to rewind the universe to that single point wherein all things, that will ever be, are.
Furthermore, as I learned about things like the Schwarzschild Radius, I quickly came to realize that anything which posits putting everything in the whole universe, into a single point, cannot possibly be physical. We would immediately collapse into a blackhole. This also ignores the fact that there are fundamental limits on just how large a blackhole can get.
Thus the inflationary epoch was added to explain why we didn't immediately collapse.
Somehow, some way, there was a mysterious force which caused the universe to expand supraluminally (faster than light) to an exact size just beyond the Schwarzschild Radius.
Exactly enough to prevent collapse. Then suddenly it stopped and suddenly the laws of physics as we know them come into being. In the meantime all the matter and anti-matter annihilated eachother leaving a barely perceptible amount of matter as the winner.
We have a term for this expansion energy. It's a real thing. It's called Lambda or Dark energy. It was put into relativity by Einstein because the natural evolution of a relativistic spacetime is towards collapse. He put it in, because he believed the universe was static and unchanging.
While I don't claim to know everything. I do know that when a theory gets too complex, it's because the scientists have found religion and are now unable to look past it to other possibilities, including religion or spirituality.
When you merely accept what you've been told as fact, this is belief, i.e. religion. It is no longer science.
Science requires the bravery and the freedom to stand up and question everything everyone else knows to be true, including yourself.
I don't think that religion is bad per se. But religion and spirituality, should be used for asking the "Why" of a thing, while science should be used for asking the "How" of the thing. Two different tools for two different questions.
So here's the deal. I don't doubt that relativity is real. I don't doubt that lambda (aka Dark Energy) is real.
I'm even wiling to accept solutions that posit a big rip in our future. This matches observations and available data.
I'm no luddite, I just wonder...
What if the big rip was in the past already?
If so, then perhaps we don't really need a big bang?
The original source of the idea of an "inflationary epoch" was a Soviet scientist. I can no longer remember his name. I was about 4 or 5 when he published his paper and I don't know that it ever saw the light of day in the USA. I only know about it's existence from some heated debates on Usenet in the early 1990s.
He posited the existence of an eternally inflating hyperspace field. His explanation made sense to my mind at the time. Basically our universe came into existence as we dropped out of hyperspace from something moving faster than light. Faster than light, is also backwards in time, if Einstein is to be believed.
To his mind, what we see as the observable universe was actually the result of some section of this field "tunneling down" to a lower energy state. This lower energy state would also change the arrow of time and if electron/positron time reversal symmetry is true, then the matter/antimatter annihilation epoch would literally be these particles meeting themselves in a complex, self intersecting worldline.
This was posited by Feynman & Wheeler as an explanation for spontaneous positron / electron annihilation and Nambu expanded upon, when he said.
"the eventual creation and annihilation of any pairs that may occur now and then is no creation or annihilation, but only a change of direction of moving particles, from past to future, or from future to past."
If this is so, isn't that absolutely fascinating???
To my mind, that would mean that our universe is the result of a quantum tunneling event.
The original theory was widely discredited because it posited an unknown energy entering the universe from a time reversed symmetric field, under folding and collapse. At this time, lambda energy was unknown.
Yet to my mind, Lambda Energy aka Dark Energy would be this hyperspace field continuing to tunnel down into our universe.
We all know that a vacuum crisis event would spread outward in a sphere at the speed of light. This might also be possible if space and time are the same thing, just different folds of a single evolving field.
If true, then the CMB is merely the result of our universe initially dropping out of hyperspace.
Meaning we were already far larger than the radius needed to prevent collapse,at the T=0 point in our thermodynamic worldline.
This would make the CMB similar to the leading energy edge of an Alcubierre metric coming out of hyperspace as well.
That leading edge is expected to be an extremely energetic event that would destroy any star system we managed to arrive at.
It would look like an intense GRB event from far off. Far back in time, is also far back in space.
What's really neat about this explanation is that the CMB event, literally would be baby pictures from the first moments of the universe and what we envision as a "big bang" is no longer ex-nihlo. In fact it doesn't exist.
The universe has a source. That source would be the eternally stretching, hyperspace field.
Yet that isn't completely satisfying. You're left wondering, where this field came from?
To my mind, the answer is obvious. At some point, the vacuum energy density of our Universe becomes supraluminal. We call it the big rip.
Yes it would require time to effectively build enough energy to flip into a different direction. But Quaternary return has been posited for a very long time. It's mechanism has never been specified, but I really don't see any reason why it would be impossible.
A recent paper explains something very interesting goes on inside of blackholes. It posits that thermodynamic time runs separate from mathematical time and can run backwards. If this is a valid solution to the internals of a blackhole and blackholes are fundamentally just solutions to Einstein's equations and our Universe too is fundamentally solvable by Einstein's equations. Then doesn't this make a bit more sense than a big bang? While also being much,much simpler?
What we view as time's arrow is merely the result of thermodynamic time progressing towards entropy. But there are two degrees of freedom in thermodynamic time, just not for the ants per se.
I don't know the answer to be perfectly honest. I can visualize this, because my grade school teacher taught me to view the ants as just an unbelievably huge number of atoms, all working to build something in their own little universe. That something was a tunnel and the tunnel was basically me.
Their entire universe destroyed, with down turned up and up turned down. For their part, many of the ants survived and immediately got back to work. It was only a few months before everything returned to normal. The tunnels were a little different, but basically the same, as was I.
So from the perspective of any little kid who might be looking in at our little universe, sitting on the bookshelf in the corner of the room.
I wonder if we're the ants, the tunnels or
Something else entirely...