So the Big Bang didn't start it all?

[aldiboronti]

For years and years I’ve believed that in the standard model the Big Bang was the beginning of our universe and that before it was no space, no time, nothing. I guess I should have kept up with the cosmologists because now I’m seeing in multiple places that the consensus is that inflation preceded the Bang and instead of asking what banged I should be asking what inflated. Is that correct or is this all still up in the air?

[XT]

@aldiboronti

For years and years I’ve believed that in the standard model the Big Bang was the beginning of our universe and that before it was no space, no time, nothing. I guess I should have kept up with the cosmologists because now I’m seeing in multiple places that the consensus is that inflation preceded the Bang and instead of asking what banged I should be asking what inflated. Is that correct or is this all still up in the air?

Not sure what you are asking. There wasn’t actually a bang, no. I think for a while they have been saying that ‘the big bang’ was basically the rapid expansion (inflation) of spacetime from…something. A ‘singularity’ of nearly infinite density and heat. There are various theories or conjectures what caused it…the collision of two membrane universes, the splitting off of an ever expanding universe. No one really knows…which is what ‘singularity’ actually means.

From the Wiki article:

In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch lasted from 10−36 seconds after the conjectured Big Bang singularity to some time between 10−33 and 10−32 seconds after the singularity. Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but the expansion was no longer accelerating.[1]

Inflation theory was developed in the late 1970s and early 80s, with notable contributions by several theoretical physicists, including Alexei Starobinsky at Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Alan Guth at Cornell University, and Andrei Linde at Lebedev Physical Institute. Alexei Starobinsky, Alan Guth, and Andrei Linde won the 2014 Kavli Prize “for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation.”[2] It was developed further in the early 1980s. It explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Quantum fluctuations in the microscopic inflationary region, magnified to cosmic size, become the seeds for the growth of structure in the Universe (see galaxy formation and evolution and structure formation).[3] Many physicists also believe that inflation explains why the universe appears to be the same in all directions (isotropic), why the cosmic microwave background radiation is distributed evenly, why the universe is flat, and why no magnetic monopoles have been observed.

As you can see, this isn’t exactly new, and the theory has been expanded…there are various inflationary models.

[Chronos]

There’s a model that’s gaining some vogue now called “eternal inflation”, which might be what you’re referring to. The idea is that, before the start of our era, there was an infinite amount of time when the Universe was inflationary. Now, the inflationary state is unstable, and if you let it go on for very long, it’ll “fall” into the more stable state we have now. But the idea is, inflation also creates new space so quickly that, even if bubbles of non-inflationary space are always emerging, the Universe will still be mostly inflationary. What we think of as our universe, which is not currently inflating, would then be but one of many non-inflating bubbles, but the bubbles would be inconceivably far away from each other, so far (and constantly getting farther, at an exponential rate) that they could never conceivably interact with each other.

[pmwgreen]

Somewhat relevant …

Top cosmologist’s lonely battle against ‘Big Bang’ theory

Top cosmologist's lonely battle against 'Big Bang' theory

James Peebles won this year’s Nobel prize in physics for helping transform the field of cosmology into a respected science, but if there’s one term he hates to hear, it’s “Big Bang Theory.”

He agrees with the theory, (he helped develop it), he just hates calling it a “Big Bang”.