The strongest evidence for a Universe before the Big Bang
The strongest evidence for a Universe before the Big Bang
The hot Big Bang is often touted as the beginning of the Universe. But there's one piece of evidence we can't ignore that shows otherwise.
I think before the Big Bang, there was the Big Date, unless the Universe was a slut then.
Well, the Universe does have all of the STDs known to exist.
Was the bigthink article written by a chat bot? It is long and doesn't seem to say much. I didn't notice any mention of BICEP2 which would seem relevant to this type of article. But I didn't manage to do more than skim after the first few paragraphs.
Isn't it talking about it here?
As light travels through the Universe, it interacts with the matter within it, and with electrons in particular. (Remember, light is an electromagnetic wave!) If the light is polarized in a radially-symmetric fashion, that’s an example of an E-mode (electric) polarization; if the light is polarized in either a clockwise or counterclockwise fashion, that’s an example of a B-mode (magnetic) polarization. Detecting polarization, on its own, isn’t enough to show the existence of super-horizon fluctuations, however.
Also, it is long, yes, but it doesn't repeat itself like most Ai written articles. I'd say the author is just taking their time to spell the concept our in detail. Could have been said quicker and more efficient, I'll agree on that tough.
It does repeat stuff which is what triggered me. BICEP2 was a satellite experiment that for a while seemed to have detected an effect predicted by a similar theory advanced by Penrose, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology
It was written by Ethan Siegal, one of the most popular cosmologists. It's long and says a lot, but the key takeaway is that we know that the hot big bang was preceded and set up by a previous phase of the universe believed to be "cosmic inflation", which had an unknown length and could have lasted billions or trillions of years. BICEP2 is not necessary to prove cosmic inflation.
Usually inflation refers to a period after the big bang rather than before it. BICEP2 seemed to detect anisotropy in the CMB that pointed to something before the big bang, but that measurement turned out to be erroneous.
I hadn't heard of Ethan Siegel. If you're saying the article is legit then I'll give it another read. I stopped the first time because I got bot vibes from some wordings. Thanks.