Why Our Universe Doesn’t Have a Birthday
The main elements of the Big Bang model are “easily listed,” says Jim Peebles, the Albert Einstein Professor Emeritus of Science at Princeton. The model holds that the large-scale structure of the cosmos is expanding faster and faster and that, on average, the universe looks close to the same no matter where you look. The Big Bang model assumes that conventional physics—including Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity—is more or less correct.
With this model, if you rewind the tape of out of our cosmological theories because there’s no way to measure them. But the question of what, if anything, preceded the Big Bang is still a fascinating one—and to some scientists, it’s theoretically unavoidable.
