The big bang poses a big question: if it was indeed the cataclysm that blasted our universe into existence 13.7 billion years ago, what sparked it?
Three researchers at Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario explored a new idea about what might have come before the big bang in a Scientific American cover story called The Black Hole at the Beginning of Time. What we perceive as the big bang, they propose, could be the three-dimensional “mirage” of a collapsing star in a universe profoundly different than our own. In this model, our universe may be the three-dimensional “wrapping” around a four-dimensional black hole’s event horizon.
It’s a counter-intuitive suggestion, but the authors suggest that our intuitions may not be suited to grasping higher-dimensional realities, just as the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of The Cave only perceived the world as flickering two-dimensional shadows.
