Singularity
First Moment in Time
Horizon – Before the Big Bang
Professor Lee Smolin
Down the corridor from Param Singh is the office of Lee Smolin. But Professor Smolin rarely uses it. He’s more usually to be found doing his thinking elsewhere. For him, the very idea of “everything from nothing” – the so-called “singularity” – points to a lack of understanding.
Lee Smolin “I strongly, strongly believe that there was a period before the big bang that the singularity was eliminated. To me, the singularity
is not an indication that there was a first moment of time – it’s an indication that general relativity is an incomplete theory. It’s general
relativity shouting at us, screaming at us, “I am not the end.” There is more to understand.”
In his bid to further his own understanding of the cosmology, Professor Smolin has cast his scientific net wide. And, though he shares a lot of ground with Param Singh, and even Andrei Linde, his interpretation of what happened before the big bang owes more to Charles Darwin than to Albert Einstein.
Lee Smolin “the idea works by analogy to know how biology works. It says that the universe has an ancestor, which is another universe. How is the universe born from the ancestor? According to this hypothesis, universe was born inside of a black hole. A black hole is a star which collapses, where everything becomes infinite and time stops. There is a bounce inside of every black hole. The material contracts and contracts and contracts again and then begins to expand again. And that is the big bang which initiates a new region of the universe.”
