Ghost of a flea: Beyond the Big Crunch

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April 11, 2008

Beyond the Big Crunch

Notions of a "quantum bounce" suggest our universe may have its twin on the far side of the Big Bang. Until Alejandro Corichi from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Parampreet Singh from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario revealed their simplified* Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) theory, "no observations of our current universe could have lead to any understanding of the state of the pre-bounce universe, as nothing was preserved across the bounce."**

Their work is to appear in a forthcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.***

“The significance of this concept is that it answers what happened to the universe before the Big Bang,” Singh told PhysOrg.com. “It has remained a mystery, for models that could resolve the Big Bang singularity, whether it is a quantum foam or a classical space-time on the other side. For instance, if it were a quantum foam, we could not speak about a space-time, a notion of time, etc. Our study shows that the universe on the other side is very classical as ours.”

* This word "simplified". I do not think it means what they think it means.
** Excepting Galan of Taa, sole survivor of the Big Crunch.
*** "Moving physics forward" and, in this case, backward.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at April 11, 2008 07:01 AM