Stephen Hawking simplified it for us already.
Go south, and keep going south on the globe. Keep going south. Eventually, you reach a point where you are as south as you can possibly be. There is nothing further south. But this is not the edge of the world. From this vantage point, nothing looks different. It is a smooth, curved surface, upon which there is no telling that you are at the southernmost point. There is nothing particularly remarkable about it. Yet this is the point at which “south” both begins and ends.
Time is like this- time is a component of our universe which is not just three dimensional, but also inclusive of the dimension of time.
At the beginning of our history, there was time and space, and immediately before that, there was nothing. But it is not a fixed point, nor is there a cliff that you can fall off of. It is a curvature in spacetime that is infinite. That means, like the globe, there is no edge. It curves back on itself. If you continue to go backwards in time from that point, you would eventually begin moving forward again, because both space and time are, at that point in our multi-dimensional existence, curved infinitely. There is no edge. There is no “second before the big bang”.
There is likely no actual “bang” either. Because time and space are warped so completely around this event, the rate of the flow of time is also altered, as it would be around a black hole or other immense gravitational field. Time itself is stretched to the point where it stops being a line and it becomes the curve, looping back unto itself.
What this means is that the “big bang” could have happened for, essentially, all eternity. At that point, time does not exist as it does now. It continues on and on, forever, like a line on a globe bending back into itself.
That is why any energy fluctuation whatsoever would be magnified by a factor of unimaginable proportions. The entire universe’s energy could have come simply from quantum fluctuation inside of an infinite spacetime curve. Because this energy in normal time seems infinitessimal by comparison to other forms of energy, that does not mean that it is small. It is more than zero, and given a literal eternity within which to exist, inside a pocket of space too small to measure, the power of that energy is multiplied out of scale.
The energy of a single candle is not very much. But the energy of a candle burning for all eternity is infinite. Now, imagine the candle occupies the space of the entire universe, and is burning forever. Suddenly the power of the candle is not just infinite, but all-encompassing. Such is the nature of energy at the quantum level, within a pocket of space and time that is infinitely curved. Where any energy fluctuation at all occurs for a period of time within a period of space that goes on and on forever… like a beam of light inside of a curved sphere, except no energy is lost reflecting back and forth, because time doesn’t exist and the laws of physics do not apply… and due to quantum fluctuation, the beam of light continues to actually gain energy, and become brighter and brighter.
Just like “south” on the globe does not have a defined edge, neither would the “early” universe. But we are thinking of the universe in a linear and three-dimensional way. A four-dimensional universe includes the past and the present. At some point in our four-dimensional spacetime, the “big bang” event occurred. But just like a point in spacetime that the Earth occupied last year, it did not cease to exist once the moment passed. The point is still there, we just no longer occupy that space. The furthest point backward in spacetime still exists, and it is still a curved surface with no defined edge, with the rest of history erupting forth from it.
We think of it like a “bang” that happened once and exploded outward, and then was silent, because we think of it along a linear timeline and in a three dimensional way. We no longer occupy the space, therefore it seemingly doesn’t exist, from our perspective. Spacetime where we are locally is not infintely curved, therefore the rest of the universe is just like that.
But this is not true. There are parts of spacetime in our “present” that are curved infinitely as well, and these points are called black holes. And time is warped and objects falling in will actually experience the combined energy of the entire rest of history falling towards the center before they could ever possibly reach the center. As you fall into the curvature, time warps and slows until it is nearly stopped. From that point in spacetime, you wait, and more light and energy falls into the singularity, as time continues along at its regularly scheduled pace just outside of it. And so the light and energy does not actually reach the center, at any point along the timeline within the singularity, because it continues on and on forever, like the smooth surface of a globe.
True, you continue to move “south”, but in this case, you can never, ever reach the exact center of “south”. Because it would take you an infinite amount of time to get there, because spacetime is infinitely warped.
It is the same as running a marathon, but every time you get close to the finish line, the track is stretched to become twice as long as before. It will take you more time to get half as far. You will move further and further, and it will take longer and longer, but you will never ever reach your destination, no matter how fast you move, or how long you journey.
These points of spacetime curvature are difficult for people to understand. But the edge of time is not a cliff, and the edge of space is not a cliff. There is nothing beyond it. It is curved and curved and curved, and like an ant inside of a balloon, looking for the edge of the balloon, the ant will wander forever and ever and ever looking for the edge. It continues on and on, even though it seems, from our perspective outside of the curvature, to be an infinitely small point in space and time. A hole that will crush us into tiny bits rapidly. But the truth is that it is a very slow thing… so slow that it will never ever finish happening.
Such a thing describes a point in spacetime that is curved and warped at a vastly different rate than the rest of the universe. Such a thing describes the inside of a black hole, and as scientists have calculated, what the budding universe was like. We escaped because of “inflation”, where space and time seemed to balloon to a point that it would otherwise be impossible for us to escape from. As if the black hole we fell into suddenly increased in size and reduced in density enough for light to escape. It stopped being a black hole, and the energy was released.
But a sudden bang at ridiculously small intervals of time, doesn’t make sense to us. From where did all that energy come from and why was it released so suddenly? We ask. Forgetting of course that, inside of that curved pocket, time was warped infinitely. If we had a frame of reference “inside” the Big Bang, much like a frame of reference of “at” the South Pole, things would not seem like a sudden burst of energy. It would seem like an eternally long process… we would think that the universe would never, ever balloon outward. It would seem virtually static in all directions, and nearly void of energy, because the rate of time would dramatically lessen the impact of that energy, like a candle that took a hundred trillion years to burn out, but produced the same amount of energy as an ordinary candle, the effect of that energy would be minimized to almost nothing.
So, there is no “point” where time begins.
The curvature of spacetime from whence the universe ballooned outward would not seem infinitely dense, nor would time feel infinitely short, nor would energy feel particularly energetic. It would be a dark place, where heat did not exist, where light did not exist, where time would have no meaning, because it would seem to go on and on without change, looping in on itself and continuing forever.
Hardly a dramatic explosion of intensity within a tiny space in a fraction of time. More like a silent, dark, curved mirror that goes on and on. From within the event, it would be difficult to tell anything is actually happening. There is no light, no heat, no stars, no matter, and nothing with which to measure distance. Just like from where you stand at the south pole, there is nothing to actually indicate that you are at the point of infinite “Southness”. It looks just like every other nearby point. You are at the “southern singularity”, and it curves back into itself, and returns northward in every direction. Yet it is entirely unremarkable from your perspective.
A child with a globe points to the south pole and thinks “that must be a special, weird place!” but it isn’t.
A person with a basic grasp of space and time thinks about time linearly and thinks the line goes back and back until a certain point, and that that point must have been amazing, fantastic, and special. But if someone were to occupy that point in spacetime, it would be so curved, it would look exactly like an empty, boring universe that goes on and on forever, because there is no ending “point”. Just the smooth curved surface.
The ant can walk right over the mouth of the balloon and it will look basically like the rest of the balloon, not knowing that this is the “point” at which the balloon was filled with air. Such is the nature of spacetime, as Stephen Hawking explains it. The big bang wasn’t much of a bang, so much as a period where inflation begins. And inflation, from within the event, would seem like a dramatically long, eternally boring thing.
It’s not sexy, like being crushed to an infinitely small size after being sucked in to a black hole mere moments after falling in, which is what our common misconception is. In reality, such a thing would take an extremely long amount of time from the perspective of someone within it. Rather than rapid, sexy smashing or rapid, sexy explosions, the actual warping of space and time creates pockets of bland, boring, never-endingness, where energy and time exert smaller and smaller influence until, like a candle burning for a trillion years, expending the same energy as a normal candle, it would seem like nothing is happening at all.
There is no “before” the Big Bang. Not from our frame of reference. There is no edge to the universe, even at points which curve infinitely. It just goes on and on, like a love song baby, on repea-pea-pea-pea-peat.
**Also, that song sucks and is unimaginative, dull, and repetitive. Much like the inside of an infinitely curved pocket of spacetime, where the laws of physics are as potent as how I feel after being subjected to Selena Gomez.
Ugh. Shrinkage.
**
