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Chaos

The stage is white, infinite. Everywhere, there is nothing but an implacable clarity, the light of an incandescent universe, the chaos of a matter that as yet has neither meaning nor name. ...

But What Was There "Before"?

DS: An explosion of light back in the furthest reaches of time is where our story begins, the origin of the universe, which science has been focusing on and speculating about over the past several years. Before we can consider that phenomenon, however, we have to stop and ask ourselves this naive question: what was there before?

HR: When you bring up the subject of the beginning of the universe, you inevitably come up against a problem of vocabulary. For us, the word "origin" relates to an event that can be situated in time. Our personal "origin," for example, is the moment when our parents conceived us. That origin has both a "before" and an "after." We can date it, note it down specifically in the context of our personal story. And we are willing to accept the fact that the world existed before we came into it.

But here we're talking about the origin of origins, the very first ...

And therein lies the great difference. The origin to which we're referring, the beginning of the beginning, cannot be thought of as an event comparable to any other. We find ourselves in the same situation as the early Christians, who kept asking what God was doing before He created the world. The popular response in those days was: "He was busy preparing hell for all the people who ask that question!" Saint Augustine did not agree. He clearly saw the inherent difficulty in such a question, which presupposed that time existed before the Creation. His answer was that Creation was not only the beginning of matter but also the beginning of time. That point of view is very close to what science is saying today. Space, matter, energy, and time are all inextricably intertwined, indissoluble. In our cosmologies, they appear together. If there is an origin of the universe, then that is also when time began. Therefore, there is no "before."

"If there is an origin of the universe," you say. Which implies that there's some doubt about it.

The major discovery of the twentieth century is that the universe is neither immutable nor eternal, as most scientists believed in the past. Today we are convinced of that notion: the universe has a history, it has constantly, endlessly evolved, become rarefied, grown cooler, become more structured. Both our observations and our theories allow us to go back in time and reconstruct the story of how the universe has evolved. Those observations and theories confirm that this evolution has been going on for a very, very long time: somewhere between fourteen and fifteen billion years, according to the best estimates. We now have at our disposal a sufficient number of scientific elements to describe what the universe was like at that time: it was completely disorganized; there were no galaxies or stars, no molecules or atoms or even the nuclei of atoms. It was nothing more than a kind of thick puree, a formless, pasty soup, with temperatures in the billions and billions of degrees.

And nothing before?

We don't have any knowledge of what preceded that event, not even the faintest clue that would enable us to delve deeper into the past. All the observations, all the data gathered by astrophysicists stop at that same frontier. Does that mean that the universe "began" fifteen billion years ago? Does it mean that the Big Bang is really the origin of the origin? We have no idea.

And yet that is what students are being taught in school today: the universe began with a Big Bang roughly fifteen billion years ago. And that, in fact, is what scientists have been telling us over and over again for many years now.

We probably didn't express ourselves clearly enough, and we've been misunderstood. We could speak about a beginning, a veritable first moment, if we were sure that there was nothing before. The fact is, at those high temperatures, our notions of time, space, energy, of temperature itself, no longer apply. Our laws no longer function; we are completely stripped bare.

When you say that, aren't you — scientists in general — begging the question, copping out? When we tell a story, there's always a beginning. Since our subject here is the "story" of the universe, it's not all that unreasonable for us to go looking for the point when it all began.

Of course, in the human context, all stories do have a beginning. But we have to beware of extrapolations. We can say the same thing about Voltaire's clock: the very existence of the clock, he maintained, proved the existence of a clock maker. Does this reasoning, however unassailable at our level, the human scale, really apply to the "clock" of the universe? I'm far from sure that it does. What we have to consider is whether or not our logic, as Heidegger said, is the supreme instance, if the assertions and arguments that are valid here on Earth can be fairly applied to the universe in its entirety. The only real question is that of our existence, that of reality, of our consciousness: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Leibniz asked. But that is a purely philosophical question, which science is incapable of answering.

The Horizon of Our Knowledge

To get around this brainteaser, could we therefore define the Big Bang as the beginning of space and time?

Let's rather define it as the moment when these notions became usable. In reality, the Big Bang is our horizon in time and in space. If we assume that that is the point zero of our story, it's for the sake of convenience; it's because we have nothing better to go on. We're like the early explorers facing the vast ocean: we can't see whether there's anything beyond the distant horizon.

If I understand correctly, the Big Bang is in fact a manner of designating not actually the limit of the world but the limit of our knowledge.

Precisely. But be careful: having said that, we cannot therefore go on to conclude that the universe does not have an origin. Once again, we simply don't know. But for the sake of argument, and to simplify the question, let us assume that our adventure began fifteen billion years ago, in this infinite and unformed chaos that will slowly structure itself. That, in any case, is the beginning of our story of the world such as science can reconstitute it today.

Specialists can make do with an abstraction to portray the Big Bang. But we laymen need a metaphor. We've often heard it described as a ball of concentrated matter that exploded in an enormous burst of light and filled the entire space.

Because some scientists describe it that way does not mean it's right. That explanation would presuppose the existence of two spaces: one filled with matter and light that...