What happened before the beginning?

 Written in 2016

About a century ago, Astronomer Edwin Hubble turned his telescope towards the deep space only to end up in breaking one more conviction of human race. This time it was a conviction even Einstein had, that is the universe was thought to be stationary. What Hubble saw was that the universe was expanding. All the celestial objects were moving away from each other.

Then a curious idea came. If the expansion speed is reversed in opposite direction in to compression, then things would come closer and closer together, eventually to a point. This compression calculation told that it was some 14 billion years ago, things meet at a point. Then the expansion started with the big bang. Georges Lemaitre says, "the universe must have had a day without an yesterday".

But is that all? Everything started from big bang, but what caused the bang?

This quest was not on for quite a few decades after accepting the big bang. In fact surprisingly, even many scientists were happy with a beginning with an unknown cause.

Astronomer Carl Sagan says "In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed? Cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries with the questions that were once treated only in religion and myth". These words, though profound, were told in a time when science was not active in finding the reason for big bang.

Now science has started to face the question. A whole research facility works on only to find out what happened before the big bang, in Perimeter Institute, Canada. Many interesting approaches are rigorously pursued. One researcher's idea is that matter and anti matter can come spontaneously from vacuum and recombine. This quantum fluctuation could have triggered big bang. Another one proposes that the universe came through big bang which started from a black hole in another universe which in turn came from another black hole. Another one thinks that this universe got naturally selected from a bunch of universes like the Darwinian evolution of life. More and more fascinating approaches pop up but nothing is proven yet.

Whatever may be the truth, are we going to stop? Any cause of big bang must be an effect of another cause and so on. Doesn't it? Our humble curiosity is going to float in this infinite regression!