Non-scientific
versions of the answer have invoked many gods and have been the basis of all
religions and most philosophy since the beginning of recorded time. Now a team
of mathematicians from Canada and Egypt have used cutting edge scientific
theory and a mind-boggling set of equations to work out what preceded the
universe in which we live.
In
(very) simple terms they applied the theories of the very small – the world of
quantum mechanics – to the whole universe - explained by general theory of
relativity, and discovered the universe basically goes through four different
phases. More importantly they discovered what came before this universe was.. Another
universe or more accurately another ‘cosmological phase’.
Despite
being infinite in size our universe is cyclical and has always existed in one
of four stages. The universe is expanding, and the expansion is speeding up,
but the team believes that certain modification motivated by quantum mechanics
will ultimately halt the expansion and pull the whole lot back to a near
infinite point – at which stage the universe will start expanding again.
The
paper, called ''Non-singular and Cyclic Universe from the Modified GUP'',
written by Maha Salah, Fayçal Hammad, Mir Faizal, Ahmed Farag Ali, is super
complex but Prof. Mir Faizal outlined the main points of this paper.
According
to him they have incorporated quantum mechanical effects in cosmology using an
approach called the modified GUP.
This
approach changes the equation for cosmology
in a very interesting way. It predicts four distinct phases for our
universe - the present phase of the universe being just one of those phases.
There
is a phase before the big bang in this cosmological model, and it is possible
to know about that phase of the universe by studying the physics of present
phase of our universe.