My first Magazine Sky & Telescope - 02.2019 | Page 6

SPECTRUM by Peter Tyson The Big Picture The Essential Guide to Astronomy Founded in 1941 by Charles A. Federer, Jr. and Helen Spence Federer YOU MIGHT WONDER WHY we’d devote our cover story to a question as esoteric as “What came before the Big Bang?” After all, Sky & Telescope is all about observing, and even with our most advanced instruments we can’t look back that far. And isn’t that question unanswerable? That is, don’t cosmologists think the Big Bang was the start of everything, even time? And if it’s unanswerable, is it science? Theory that isn’t empirically testable isn’t science. In short, why should we care? For good reasons. Theory and experimentation have always gone hand in hand. They feed each other — models inform observation, and vice versa. It’s true we can’t observe back to the beginning, but we’re peering ever closer all the time. That’s helping us constrain our view of the earliest periods of our cosmos, Editor in Chief Editorial Correspondence (including permissions, partnerships, and content licensing): Sky & Telescope, 90 Sherman St., Cambridge, MA 02140-3264, USA. Phone: [phone]. E-mail: [email protected]. Website: skyandtelescope.com. Unsolicited proposals, manuscripts, photographs, and electronic images are welcome, but a stamped, self-addressed envelope must be provided to guarantee their return; see our guidelines for contributors at skyandtelescope.com. 4 Advertising Information: Tim Allen 773-551-0397, Fax: [phone]. E-mail: [email protected] Web: skyandtelescope.com/advertising Customer Service: Magazine customer service and change-of-address notices: [email protected] Phone toll-free U.S. and Canada: 800-253-0245. Outside the U.S. and Canada: 386-597-4387. FE B RUA RY 2 019 • SK Y & TELESCOPE Senior Contributing Editors J. Kelly Beatty, Robert Naeye, Roger W. Sinnott Contributing Editors Howard Banich, Jim Bell, Trudy Bell, John E. Bortle, Greg Bryant, Thomas A. Dobbins, Alan Dyer, Tom Field, Tony Flanders, Ted Forte, Sue French, Steve Gottlieb, David Grinspoon, Shannon Hall, Ken Hewitt-White, Johnny Horne, Bob King, Emily Lakdawalla, Rod Mollise, James Mullaney, Donald W. Olson, Jerry Oltion, Joe Rao, Dean Regas, Fred Schaaf, Govert Schilling, William Sheehan, Mike Simmons, Mathew Wedel, Alan Whitman, Charles A. Wood Contributing Photographers P. K. Chen, Akira Fujii, Robert Gendler, Babak Tafreshi ART & DESIGN Art Director Terri Dubé Illustration Director Gregg Dinderman Illustrator Leah Tiscione ADVERTISING VP, Advertising Sales Kevin D. Smith Advertising Sales Director Tim Allen Advertising Coordinator Connie Kostrzewa which in turn aids theorists in refining their ideas and simulations of how our universe got jump-started in the first place and grew to its current state. Moreover, cosmologists are exploring the possibility that the Big Bang wasn’t the start of everything. Something — whatever it was — might have existed before the Big Bang and given rise to it. They’re also entertaining the notion that our universe, however it began, might not be the only one. Universes might burst into existence all the time, like popcorn kernels in a multiverse pot. Even as cosmologists vigorously debate our universe’s dawn, they hope to actually test their hypotheses empirically, even at such a great remove. Although it didn’t end up providing the evidence it sought, BICEP2 was one such attempt (S&T: May 2015, p. 12). Faye Flam describes another in her feature on page 16. Cosmologists do agree that about 13.8 billion years ago, our universe was inordinately smaller than it is now, possibly no bigger than an infinitesimal dot, as inflation theory has it. “As weird as it sounds,” writes Flam about inflation, “a submicroscopic patch of space became our vast observable universe.” You could look at it as somewhat akin to the way a single-celled organism in our planet’s distant past went on to become you countless generations and several billion years later. Some microscopic cell way back when is your great-to- the-nth-degree grandparent, just as some submicroscopic dot more than 13 bil- lion years ago might have been the progenitor of our 2-trillion-galaxy universe. As with the history of life, how can we hope to fully appreciate what we see overhead at night without contemplating its origins? All this is why we’re pleased to offer a story about what came before everything. Whatever it was. EDITORIAL Editor in Chief Peter Tyson Senior Editor Alan M. 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