Cosmos from nothing? Questions at the edge of science
Freshman astronomy books typically include a timeline outlining the major events of the universe over the past 13.7 billion years, from the appearance of our universe to the present. Most timelines put a question mark at the very beginning to reflect the incomplete state of our knowledge about how the universe got started. We don’t know what lit the spark that launched the grand adventure of our universe, despite millennia of wondering and decades of intriguing progress.
Remarkably, we know a lot about what happened a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. We have robust theories that have been tested in laboratories like that of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where the early moments of the universe are simulated in high-energy experiments.
One thing we do know now about that mysterious beginning is that it proceeded according to a precise set of rules. We don’t know whether these rules preexist our universe. We just know that they are there “in the beginning” and that they constrain what can and cannot happen.
