For Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, the Big Bang ended on a summer day in 1999 in Cambridge, England. Sitting together at a conference they had organized, called “A School on Connecting Fundamental Physics and Cosmology,” the two physicists suddenly hit on the same idea. Maybe science was finally ready to tackle the mystery of what made the Big Bang go bang. And if so, then maybe science could also address one of the deepest questions of all: What came before the Big Bang?
Steinhardt and Turok — working closely with a few like-minded colleagues — have now developed these insights into a thorough alternative to the prevailing, Genesis-like view of cosmology. According to the Big Bang theory, the whole universe emerged during a single moment some 13.7 billion years ago. In the competing theory, our universe generates and regenerates itself in an endless cycle of creation. The latest version of the cyclic model even matches key pieces of observational evidence supporting the older view.
This is the most detailed challenge yet to the 40-year-old orthodoxy of the Big Bang. Some researchers go further and envision a type of infinite time that plays out not just in this universe but in a multiverse — a multitude of universes, each with its own laws of physics and its own life story. Still others seek to revise the very idea of time, rendering the concept of a “beginning” meaningless.
All of these cosmology heretics agree on one thing: The Big Bang no longer defines the limit of how far the human mind can explore.
