There are many scientific and non-scientific varieties of the answer about what came before Big Bang. Some say there was literally nothing and some say a black hole or a multiverse. But now a group of mathematicians from Canada and Egypt have analyzed some cutting edge scientific theory and a complex set of equations to find what preceded the universe in which we live. Their research paper has been published in Nature.

To explain it in simple and easily understandable terms; they applied the theories of the very small i.e. the world of quantum mechanics, to the entire universe – explained by general theory of relativity, and discovered the universe essentially goes through four different phases.

More importantly they discovered what came before this universe was.. Another universe or more accurately another ‘cosmological phase’.

Despite being infinite in size our universe is cyclical and has always existed in one of four stages.

The universe is expanding, and the expansion is speeding up, but the team believes that certain modification motivated by quantum mechanics will ultimately halt the expansion and pull the whole lot back to a near infinite point – at which stage the universe will start expanding again.

The paper, called ”Non-singular and Cyclic Universe from the Modified GUP”, written by Maha Salah, Fayçal Hammad, Mir Faizal, Ahmed Farag Ali, is super complex but Prof. Mir Faizal outlined the main points of this paper.

According to him they have incorporated quantum mechanical effects in cosmology using an approach called the modified GUP.

This approach changes the equation for cosmology in a very interesting way. It predicts four distinct phases for our universe – the present phase of the universe being just one of those phases.

There is a phase before the big bang in this cosmological model, and it is possible to know about that phase of the universe by studying the physics of present phase of our universe.

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