"You find that it extrapolates, it extends - it analytically continues, physicists would say, to this double cone," he said, referring to the second universe extending away from the Big Bang in time Whereas observations go no further back than the CMB, normal cosmological models go a bit further back but still tend to come to a hard stop at the Big Bang. "It's a very special type of ultra-simple singularity, where you can follow the solution through the singularity." This vision of space-time still has a Big Bang hiding behind the CMB, he said.īut "it's much simpler than most of the singularities that arise in Einstein's theory of gravity," he said. What if we take those observations at face value?'" "You say 'Okay, we can't see all the way down to the Bang, but we can look darned close, and as close as we look things look super simple. "We were interested in exploring a simpler picture where you take the evidence more at face value," he said. Related: What's that? Your physics questions answered The tidy universe thought to have emerged from that brief mess is captured in the CMB. Its simple structure, according to ΛCDM, emerged after an intense flattening process that had wiped away that chaos by the end of the universe's first second. In ΛCDM cosmology, this first, momentary chapter in the universe's history is chaotic and difficult to understand.īut the CMB isn't that chaotic. We can't see what happened in that moment, hidden as it is below the CMB from our vantage point on the cone. The standard view, he said, is that the first tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang was more or less a "big mess" that current physics equations struggle to explain. Boyle's theory looks at the opaque wall the CMB forms across time and draws a different conclusion about what the CMB hides. Viewed in this way, the ΛCDM story ends with the universe coming together into a single point hidden behind the CMB. Here’s how Boyle’s team sees their theory: Imagine today's universe as a wide, flat circle, sitting on top of yesterday's slightly smaller circle, which sits on top of the yet-smaller circle of the day before that, Boyle said.
Related: Big Bang to present: Snapshots of our universe through timeīoyle and his colleagues' new universe unwinds the ΛCDM story further back in time, diving into the singularity at the beginning of time and coming out the other side. In addition, ΛCDM can't explain why matter exists at all, since it predicts that matter and antimatter would have formed at equal rates after the Big Bang, and annihilated each other, leaving nothing behind. "It works in many cases, but there are some somewhat disturbing lapses in the modeling."įor instance, measurements of expansion don't line up across time, so that measurements made of this expansion based on data from the early universe don’t jive with measurements using data from the modern universe. "ΛCDM is basically the only game in town," Learned said. This dark matter, the idea goes, accounts for the vast majority of the universe's mass. Second, an unseen dark matter gravitationally tugs on stuff in the universe, yet emits no light. Rewind that expansion far enough backward in time and the whole universe occupies a single point in space. ΛCDM explains the cosmos using two key ideas: An unknown dark energy causes the universe to expand.
#Looking back in time full#
"I think nobody else understands the full sweep of what they have composed," said John Learned, a University of Hawaii astrophysicist and the co-author of a second paper, which builds on Boyle's theory.īoyle's work is a kind of expansion pack meant to plug holes in the theory that tells the dominant origin story of the universe: Lambda-Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM).
It was published December 2018 in the journal Physical Review Letters (after an appearance on the arXiv server in March that year). The first paper, by Latham Boyle, a physicist at The Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada, and his colleagues, proposed a mirror universe - a reflection of our universe across time.
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