The Big Bang is a generally accepted theory that explains what happened at the beginning of the universe. While it is generally accepted, it is not at all understood because from what researchers can tell, all of our understanding of science breaks down in the moments after it occurred, leaving them unable to determine what caused it, and what, if anything, was there before it.

This can get even more complicated by the fact that time itself may not have existed, at least as we know it, at this earliest moment, which makes asking what happened ‘before’ the Big Bang something of a contradiction.

That being said, researchers are always trying to learn more about this critical event. A team based at the Foundational Questions Institute is doing just that. They are running advanced computer simulations in an attempt to solve Einstein’s equations numerically. This method has been used before back in the 1960-70s in order to come up with a theory as to how black holes merge and emit gravitational waves.

The solutions that were came up with then have since been proven correct when researchers were able to detect the gravitational waves. So, the team has conducted a study explaining their methods and what they hope to learn, which they published in the journal Living Reviews in Relativity. Co-author of the study, Professor Eugene Lim, from King’s College London talked about it with IFLScience, saying:

“I am most excited about using numerical relativity to explore how the Big Bang began, and how it can be used to solve some long-standing problems in string theories.”

Specifically, the team is looking at the fraction of a second after the Big Bang, which is called Cosmic Inflation, because it is when the entire universe expanded outward from the point of the singularity that started it all. This expansion occurred incredibly quickly, defying our understanding of physics. Lim explained why this is so important:

“Because inflation itself is not a full theory, but a theory that must be derived from something more fundamental (in technical terms, we call inflation an “effective theory”).”

Using numerical relativity may provide answers to long standing questions, but it won’t be easy. This type of effort requires extraordinary processing power that takes even modern computers a very long time. As computational advancements occur, however, supercomputers may be able to solve these problems in a realistic timeframe, giving scientists the information they need to take Big Bang cosmology research to the next level.

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