Planck Era

Before a time classified as a Planck time, 10-43 seconds, all of the four fundamental forces are presumed to have been unified into one force.

At a time 10(-36) second ( that is  a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second!) after the Big Bang, a spectacular change in the size of the universe occurs. This is the Inflationary Era when the strong nuclear force becomes distinguishable from the weak and electromagnetic forces. The temperature is an incredable 10 thousand trillion trillion degrees and the density of matter has sored to nearly 10(75) gm/cm3. This number is so enormous  even our analogies are almost beyond comprehension. At these densities, the entire Milky Way galaxy could easily be stuffed into a volume no larger than a single hydrogen atom!

Between a billionth of a second and 10(-35) seconds is a No Man’s Land currently in accessible to our technology and requires instruments such as the CERN Large Hadron Collider scaled up to the size of our solar system or even larger!  This is also the domain of the so-called Particle Desert that I previously wrote about, and the landscape of the predictions made by supersymmetric string theory, for which there is as yet no evidence of their correctness despite decades of intense theoretical research.

The appearence and dissappearence of innumerable gravitons gives the geometry of space a very lumpy and dynamic appearance. The geometry of space twists and contorts so that far flung regions of space may suddenly find themselves connected by ‘wormholes’ and quantum black holes, which constantly appear and dissappear within 10(-43) seconds. The geometry of space at a given moment will have to be thought of as an average over all 3-dimensional space geometries that are possible.

What this means is that we may never be able to calculate with any certainty exactly what the history of the universe was like before 10(-43) seconds.  To probe the history of the universe then would be like trying to trace your ancestral roots if every human being on earth had a possibility of being one of your parents. Now try to trace your family tree back a few generations! An entirely new conception of what we mean by ‘a history for the universe’ will have to be developed. Even the concepts of space and time will have to be completely re-evaluated in the face of the quantum fluctuations of spacetime at the Planck Era!