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“in the beginning there was nothing, whichexploded” that’s how the great terry pratchett describedthe beginning of the universe; the legendary big bang. the majority of modern physics comesfrom the understanding that everything started out as one tiny tiny point that blew up, expandedand created all of the wonderful things around you like galaxies, stars, planets and baconsandwiches. as a planet, we’re pretty set on this conceptbut that’s not to say it’s the only possibility that’s been suggested. obviously you havethe many religious creation stories but even within the scientific community, a few otheroptions have been suggested. so if you’ve ever wondered whether our universe is actuallyall a cat’s dream, a marble in the hand

of a giant alien or a simulation that hassome worrying coding errors, well then here are some alternative and entirely possibletheories to the big bang. our first idea was born out of string theoryand popularised by steinhardt and turok, who sound like a german techno duo.string theory is basically an attempt to connect the ideas of general relativity with the bizarreand confusing world of quantum mechanics. the idea is that there are many more dimensionsthan the ones we can observe and that something that might look like a point from our perspective,is actually joint a part of a long string, like you are looking at a bit of spaghettidead on and mistaking it for a tiny speck. steinhardt and turok proposed an idea calledthe incredible bulk. it’s not been entirely

rejected by the physics community, but possiblebecause they are afraid of making the incredible bulk angry, you wouldn’t like it when it’sangry. it suggests that rather than there being one big bang, our observable universeis like a sheet of paper drifting in a multi-dimensional soup. theorists call these sheets branes,short for membrane. occasionally our brane collides with another brane and there is abig release of energy. there is an endless cycle of collisions and expanding branes.mmm brane soup. sean carrol has been obsessed with time sincehe was young, probably as a way to explain why he was always late for dinner. his troublewith the big bang was not that it came at the beginning of time but that time itselfhas a beginning and end; why does time only

move in one direction?well what if there were multiple universes and in some of them, time runs backwards?in the multiverse theory, a universe can spring up from the random fluctuations in dark energy,which appears throughout what we think of as empty space. dark energy is like glitter,it gets bloody everywhere. sometimes the universes wouldn’t really get going and they’d collapseinto a black hole. but occasionally one takes off and expands rapidly. it keeps expandingforever and eventually becomes so thinned out that it is now the empty space where anotheruniverse can form. one of the confusing things about the universeis that it looks basically the same in all directions, no matter where you’re lookingfrom. since we know the universe is expanding,

we tend to think of it as a balloon but formost of us, this give the idea of a centre and an edge, which is not really the case.fred hoyle tried to explain this similarity of all parts of the universe with an ideacalled steady state. if you want to keep the density of stuff the same in an expandingspace, surely you need to keep adding things. it’s like a house party, if people keeparriving, you’re going to need to keep adding booze, otherwise everyone will either startgetting bored or possibly drinking all your perfume and cleaning products and that won’tend well. in order to keep the density up, matter wouldneed to be spontaneously created. and before you start picturing random bubbles of hydrogenappearing all around you, the amount suggested

was about one atom a year within each cubickilometre, so no need to squeeze up just yet. speaking of running out of space, in christoffwetterich’s theory, we are all heading towards a big game of galactic sardines, since ratherthan expanding, the walls are actually closing in. he called it the cold bang.one of the big observable factors for why we believe the universe is expanding is thedoppler effect, or red shift. we noticed that very distant galaxies seemed to be redderthan closer ones, and this was true whichever way we looked. so unless we were surroundedby a gigantic red light district, there must be some reason for this. and there is. ifan object is giving out a wave, like light or sound, then its movement affects how you,the observer receives that wave. if it’s

moving towards you, then the waves are pushedtogether at a higher frequency. if the object is moving away, then they are stretched out.you can hear this effect with a police siren, the pattern repeats quicker as the siren comesnear, and then seems to slow down as it moves off into the distance, unless you’re beingarrested, in which case you’ll only get the first part.so, if the universe is expanding, then light from distant objects is being stretched sincethey are moving away, so it has a longer wavelength, making it redder.wetterich countered this by saying that as the universe closes in, the light would beaffected by the greater mass of the universe. the benefit of his theory is that ait voidsthe need for everything starting from a singularity.

the problem with it is that there is goingto be much less space on the beach in a few trillion years. another factor of existence that is difficultto explain is why everywhere is a relatively even temperature. sure, it may not feel likethat on earth where you can get brain freeze from ice cream before burning your mouth onapple pie. but on a general level, like if you cut the universe up into cubic light years,they are all roughly the same temperature. the reason this is strange is that 14 billionyears may seem like a long time for us but on a cosmic scale, the universe is still atoddler, wetting the bed and drawing all over the walls in crayon.the big bang was astonishingly hot so you’d

expect there to be more hot pockets, and i’mnot talking about that snack that sort of resembles food. some theorist have wonderedif maybe there is some unknown energy that caused an expansion faster than the speedof light, which would explain how the temperature evened out so quickly.niayesh afshordi and his team came up with the idea that perhaps our 3d universe wasnot only in a 4d bulk universe but one that created 4d stars. and if you have 4d stars,these can collapse into 4d black holes so perhaps we are like sheet of paper, wrappedaround the event horizon of one of these black holes, sucking up the enormous energy thatwould be surrounding us. thanks to the work of great minds all overthe world, we are learning more and more about

what is out there and how it began; from thequantum madness of the large hadron collider to the gravitational waves of dancing blackholes found by the advanced ligo project. but perhaps the true origins of the universeare something we will never be able to prove and maybe we don’t really want to know.i mean, how would you feel if you knew that we were just a tiny, insignificant planet,in one of many tiny insignificant universes? or if the big bang was just the sneeze ofsome 8 dimensional cat… actually i’m pretty fine with that last one.

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