India-born physicists Abhay Ashtekar and Parampreet Singh of Pennsylvania State University (PSU) in the US, have attempted to answer just that in a landmark paper published in last week’s issue of the respected journal, Physical Review Letters.
The most commonly held belief, based on Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (GTR), is that the Big Bang resulted from a point of infinite density, called singularity. It is at singularity that space-time as we know it ends, and all known laws of physics break down. However, scientists point out that GTR need not hold true at or near the Big Bangand it is at this moment that quantum mechanics — the physics of the infinitesimally small — takes over.Ashtekar and Singh, along with their colleague Tomasz Pawlowski, have now proposed that there was indeed a classical universe even before the Big Bang. This pre-Big Bang universe was joined to our post-Big Bang universe by a ‘quantum’ bridge that lasted for a very short period of time.
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