If the universe may have never begun - theory approaches esotericism

Place: Benugo coffee.

There was no beginning, may be. Perhaps our Universe has always existed. The new theory of quantum gravity reveals how that could work.

Bruno Bento, a physicis, studies the nature of time at the University of Liverpool in the UK. In his work, he employed a new theory of quantum gravity, called causal set theory, in which space and time are broken down into discrete chunks of space-time. At some level, there's a fundamental unit of space-time, according to this theory.

Bento and his collaborators used this causal-set approach to explore the beginning of the Universe. They found that it's possible that the Universe had no beginning – that it has always existed into the infinite past and only recently evolved into what we call the Big Bang.

While General relativity, on the other hand, is the most powerful and complete description of gravity ever devised, Quantum gravity is perhaps the most frustrating problem facing modern physics. They have two extraordinarily effective theories of the Universe: quantum physics and general relativity.

Quantum physics has produced a successful description of three of the four fundamental forces of nature - electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force - down to microscopic scales.