Sky & Telescope - February 2019 - 4

SPECTRUM

by Peter Tyson

The Big Picture

The Essential Guide to Astronomy
Founded in 1941 by Charles A. Federer, Jr.
and Helen Spence Federer

YOU MIGHT WONDER WHY we'd devote our cover story to a question

as esoteric as "What came before the Big Bang?" After all, Sky &
Telescope is all about observing, and even with our most advanced
instruments we can't look back that far. And isn't that question
unanswerable? That is, don't cosmologists think the Big Bang
was the start of everything, even time? And if it's unanswerable, is it science?
Theory that isn't empirically testable isn't science.
In short, why should we care?
For good reasons. Theory and experimentation have always gone hand in
hand. They feed each other - models inform observation, and vice versa. It's
true we can't observe back to the beginning, but we're peering ever closer all the
time. That's helping us constrain our view of the earliest periods of our cosmos,

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PITRIS / ISTOCK / G E T T Y IM AG ES

which in turn aids theorists in reﬁning their ideas and simulations of how our
universe got jump-started in the ﬁrst place and grew to its current state.
Moreover, cosmologists are exploring the possibility that the Big Bang wasn't
the start of everything. Something - whatever it was - might have existed
before the Big Bang and given rise to it. They're also entertaining the notion
that our universe, however it began, might not be the only one. Universes might
burst into existence all the time, like popcorn kernels in a multiverse pot.
Even as cosmologists vigorously debate our universe's dawn, they hope to
actually test their hypotheses empirically, even at such a great remove. Although
it didn't end up providing the evidence it sought, BICEP2 was one such attempt
(S&T: May 2015, p. 12). Faye Flam describes another in her feature on page 16.
Cosmologists do agree that about 13.8 billion years ago, our universe was
inordinately smaller than it is now, possibly no bigger than an inﬁnitesimal dot,
as inﬂation theory has it. "As weird as it sounds," writes Flam about inﬂation,
"a submicroscopic patch of space became our vast observable universe."
You could look at it as somewhat akin to the way a single-celled organism
in our planet's distant past went on to become you countless generations and
several billion years later. Some microscopic cell way back when is your great-tothe-nth-degree grandparent, just as some submicroscopic dot more than 13 billion years ago might have been the progenitor of our 2-trillion-galaxy universe.
As with the history of life, how can we hope to fully appreciate what we see
overhead at night without contemplating its origins?
All this is why we're pleased to offer a story about what
came before everything. Whatever it was.

EDITORIAL
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Sky & Telescope - February 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky & Telescope - February 2019