shrox wrote:
Would you say the moment before the Cosmological Big Bang that laid out the tangible universe was probably a Bose-Einstein condensate of near infinite mass? Most likely composed of hydrogen?
Yes, I believe the universe as we observe it.
I think this probably has to do the Eternal inflation model first proposed by Alex Vilenkin and Andre Linde. It's an extension of the Big Bang model where universes are born via other Big Bangs all the time via a mechanism called called bubble nucleation. Basically, the idea is that on the Planck scale, space-time isn't smooth but chaotic, broiling in what we would call the quantum foam. In this quantum foam, occasionally bubbles of space-time spontaneously appear, where sometimes they are unstable and disappear as soon as they appear but other times they inflate to become new universes. If this is how our universe started then there wouldn't be a "before" the Big Bang per se, since time is local for each universe and that's when time started. However, it's possible that our universe started as a quantum bubble within pre-existing universe.
You might find the following video interesting:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x2tn6ZQEHg[/youtube]
05 Jan 2013, 5:39 pm
