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For what feels like centuries (even though it’s actually been just under a century), The Big Bang Theory has pretty much become the go-to for how the universe started — as accepted by Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and pretty much every other cosmologist/theoretical physicist who ever lived (with the famous exception of Albert Einstein).
This week, however, physicists at the University of Melbourne have proposed a brand new theory: that the universe exploded/expanded not from one tiny and extremely compressed, infinitesimal point — but rather from a hot steamy liquid bath of formless energy, which gradually crystallized and formed the 4-dimensional universe our pale blue dot currently inhabits. According to Space.com, ‘think of it as analogous to ice’ or “A Big Chill.”
James Quach published his and fellow teammates’ findings in the scientific journal Physical Review D, stating specifically that the Universe was presumably never that tiny — it was a ‘rolling’ and formless soup of super-powerful energy, which over about a few hundred million years or so eventually gave way to matter, (relatively) stable star formation, and an apparently boundless existence. What Quach and co. actually propose is that The Big Bang may have occurred in between formation states. So in other words: there was a big explosion, but it was a phase change, and not created simply out of nothing.
Says Quach, via DailyGalaxy:
“Think of the early universe as being like a liquid. Then as the universe cools, it ‘crystallizes’ into the three spatial and one- time dimension that we see today. Theorized this way, as the Universe cools, we would expect that cracks should form, similar to the way cracks are formed when water freezes into ice.”
Co-scientist Andrew Greentree believes these defects should shed light on the more definitive origins of the Universe:
“Light and other particles would bend or reflect off such defects, and therefore in theory we should be able to detect these effects.”
These specific effects could be verified more through the use of powerful telescopes.
In the meantime, it’s worth noting that, according to Isaac Asimov’s Beginnings:The Story of Origins, Hawking himself has said The Big Bang could indeed have come from ‘nothing’, or the vacuum that primal, pre-sub-atomic particles inhabited. Incidentally, this doesn’t clarify Einstein’s own belief that the universe is neither expanding nor contracting. It does seem to clarify that no one really knows what the hell is going on with anything out there.
So I guess what I mean by all this is that I was semi-uncertain before, but I was in a state of semi-uncertainty with which I was perfectly content. I don’t know what you guys are doing tonight, but I’m going to go eat my arms off. Starting at the shoulder joints. Maybe I’ll just go with the nuttiest idea, like how the Universe is just one big hologram. Works for me…
Jeff Nau – who has written 1264 posts on The Jace Hall Show.
Jeff Nau is a main contributor to the Jace Hall Show covering pop culture and music trends in the nerd community. He has contributed to San Diego City Beat, 944, and Ill Literature, amongst others, and spends his spare time working as an artist and photographer.

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