All About Space Magazine Issue 74 Edição anterior

BEFORE THE BIG BANG
"How can something come from nothing?” It is one of the most common and thorniest questions related to the Big Bang. The most accepted theory of our universe's beginnings has it starting as an infinitely small, infinitely dense point that expanded outwards and cooled to become the modern cosmos. But what was the cause of this event nearly fourteen billion-years ago? Even this is a question loaded with problems. If the Big Bang created time – as conventional thinking says – then you can't talk about ‘before’ or a prior cause, as those are notions that only make sense if time already existed. Sir Roger Penrose, long-time collaborator of Stephen Hawking, believes he has a way to banish these problems for good. What's more, astronomers might just have found evidence to confirm he's right.