The big boil

• Autores: Jon Cartwright
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3169, 2018, págs. 30-33
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Although everyone has heard of the big bang, no one can say confidently what it was like. After all, recounting the beginning of time is about finding not just the right words, but the right physics -- and ever since the big bang entered the popular lexicon, that physics has been murky. Perhaps no longer, thanks to an unusual way of delving into our universe's backstory that has emerged over the past few years. In this view, the essence of space and time can exist beyond the confines of the cosmos, but in a state of roiling chaos we would not recognize. The big bang is not a hard-and-fast beginning, but a moment of profound transformation -- one quite different from anything most of us could have imagined. Though often misattributed to the US astronomer Edwin Hubble, the basic idea of the big bang dates back to the Belgian priest and astronomer Georges Lemaitre, who observed in the late 1920s that the universe is expanding. Still, evidence that space-time is fluid-like doesn't necessarily equal evidence for the big boil -- maybe space-time was only ever a fluid. To really nail that moment of creation, Daniele Oriti, a theorist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany must find a consistent mathematical description of the free atoms of space, existing before space-time as we know it. That is a mind-bending task, given that notions of time, space and geometry are hardwired into our brains