Before the Big Bang, there was a mirror copy of the Universe

Like the reflection in the water of a mountain standing on the shore of a lake, our Universe may once have had a perfect mirror copy. This was the conclusion reached by scientists from Canada by extrapolating the laws of the Universe to periods of time both after and before the Big Bang.

Today physicists have a fairly detailed understanding of the structure of the Universe from the first few seconds after the Big Bang all the way up to the present. The basic physical laws have remained unchanged from that time to the present day. But experts have been debating for years what happened in that very first moment – when a tiny, infinitely dense blob of matter expanded rapidly – and these debates often involve the possibility that basic physical principles may have been violated in some way.

In a new study, scientists led by Latham Boyle of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, have proposed looking at this problem from a different angle, presenting a simple scenario according to which our Universe has always remained fundamentally symmetric.

By carrying out calculations, the researchers came to the conclusion that before the Big Bang, our Universe was a kind of “mirror reflection” of the modern world, where the time went in the opposite direction and matter was built of antimatter particles: for example, an atom of such matter was a nucleus of neutrons and negatively charged antiprotons, around which light positrons orbited.

All events in such an “anti-universe” developed in the opposite direction, for example, a broken egg in it turned into a whole, and then it was straight into the chicken, from which it was obtained in our world. According to the authors, this new hypothesis helps to solve a number of contradictions of modern cosmology, including the problem of dark matter.