SINGULARITY AND THE BIG BANG THEORY.

Our Universe began about 13.7 billion years ago as per the Big Bang theory which is accepted by a very large majority of astronomers and cosmologists.

A solid proof for this is the Microwave Background radiation coming in to us from all sides of the Universe. As far as our sightings and measurements go, no object in the universe is older than 13.7 billion years. This indirectly indicates that this may indeed be the age of the Universe.

Traditional Big Bang Theory says that the Universe began with a ‘Singularity” or a single point, which is a point of infinite density and temperature. At this point physical rules known to us do not operate and it is beyond conventional physics. So at the point of explosion or the Big Bang we cannot even postulate the parameters that existed.

Cosmologists suspect that the forces that rule the Universe today—Gravity, Electromagnetism and the Nuclear were unified into a singular force at the time of the Big Bang. Incidentally when Albert Einstein died he was working on the Unified field theory that puts all the 3 forces into one.

Scientists have picked up the story of the Universe at 10 raised to the power of -36 seconds after the Big Bang. At that point scientists believe that the Universe underwent an extremely brief and dramatic period of expansion, expanding faster than the speed of light.

This rapidly expanding Universe had very less matter, but it had huge amounts of dark energy. As per cosmologists it is the dark energy that is driving the current expansion of the Universe which is actually accelerating.

The sudden inflation has cooled down the superhot Universe, but when dark energy got converted into ordinary matter and energy the Universe heated up again.  

Just after inflation the Universe was filled with hot and dense Plasma. But by the time of 10 raised to the power of minus 6 seconds from Big Bang it has cooled down enough to allow protons and neutrons to form.

In the first 3 minutes after the Big Bang the protons and neutrons fused together and formed a positive Deuterium ion and the Deuterium ion  in turned joined up to form the positive Helium ion. But these are just positively charged ions without any interaction with the electrons. It took 380,000 years after Big Bang for electrons to combine with the positive ions and form atoms.

The first stars started shining only 300 million years after the Big Bang. Over time stars gravitated together to form galaxies and planets coalesced around some of the newly forming stars.  

All this is fine, but how did that singularity which led to the Big Bang come into being? For that we have no answers at all. Time itself started with the Big Bang, so before that there was nothing called time. In fact what is time? It is nothing but duration between 2 events. At the time of singularity there was nothing else but that itself, so there is no question of time either. Time only started with the Big Bang.

In this context I am reminded of the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rigveda. I give below two verses from the Sukta.

Then there was neither death nor immortality
nor was there then the torch of night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.

At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.
All this was only unillumined cosmic water.
That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
arose at last, born of the power of heat.

You can judge the similarities of the Sukta and Singularity. Of course this does not mean that the Vedas knew about singularity, but it certainly shows its advanced thought. Other things were also mentioned in the Sukta which is highly skeptical, but I have given here the only 2 verses that are relevant to my point.

Another thing, we know about the singularity from which our Universe evolved, but can we assert that more such singularities did not exist in dimensions unknown to us and there may be other Universes as well where our physical laws do not hold? We cannot say anything on that, and there is no way of ascertaining that ever, because we have no means of detecting the other dimensions, and all our instruments come to naught in discovering them.