The hot Big Bang is often touted as the beginning of the Universe. But there is evidence that we cannot ignore and that proves the opposite.
The notion of the Big Bang dates back almost 100 years, when the first evidence of the expansion of the Universe appeared. If the Universe is expanding and cooling today, that implies a past that was smaller, denser, and hotter. In our imagination, we can extrapolate to arbitrarily small sizes, high densities and high temperatures: up to a singularity, where all the matter and energy in the Universe condensed into a single point. For many decades, these two notions of the Big Bang (the hot, dense state that describes the early Universe and the initial singularity) were inseparable.
But starting in the 1970s, scientists began to identify some enigmas around the Big Bang, observing several properties of the Universe that were not explainable within the context of these two notions simultaneously. When cosmic inflation was first proposed and developed in the early 1980s, it separated the two definitions of the Big Bang, proposing that the early, hot, dense state never reached these singular conditions, but rather was preceded by a new inflationary state. There really was a…
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