Researchers have a new theory about what caused the Big Bang that brought our universe into existence.
The Perimeter Institute researchers proposed the Big Bang was a three-dimensional "mirage" of a collapsing star in an unfamiliar universe.
"Cosmology's greatest challenge is understanding the big bang itself," wrote Perimeter Institute Associate Faculty member Niayesh Afshordi, Affiliate Faculty member and University of Waterloo professor Robert Mann, and PhD student Razieh Pourhasan.
Common theories suggest the Big Bang started off with a singularity, which is a "hot and dense" spacetime phenomenon in which the laws of physics are broken down.
"For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity," Afshordi says in an interview with Nature, the Perimeter Institute reported.
The researchers believe this theory is problematic because it would be unlikely our well-ordered universe would come out of something so chaotic. Instead they suggested our universe could be three-dimensional and "wrapping" around the event horizon of a four-dimensional black hole. In our universe black holes have two-dimensional event horizons; in a four-dimensional universe a black hole would have a three-dimensional event horizon.
In this new proposal our universe never existed in singularity, but rather came into being outside an event horizon. If this were true it would be a feature of a dead four-dimensional star. The theory is grounded in mathematical calculations and holography. The theory may seem "ridiculous," but it could be because we can only view the universe through a very narrow lens.
The researchers drew a parallel to Plato's allegory of the cave, in which prisoners spend their entire lives seeing nothing other than flickering lights.
"Their shackles have prevented them from perceiving the true world, a realm with one additional dimension," they wrote. "Plato's prisoners didn't understand the powers behind the sun, just as we don't understand the four-dimensional bulk universe. But at least they knew where to look for answers."
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