Can we please agree what we mean by “Big Bang”?

Can you answer the following question?

At the Big Bang the observable universe had the size of:

A) A point (no size).
B) A grapefruit.
C) 168 meters.

The right answer would be “all of the above.” And that’s not because I can’t tell a point from a grapefruit, it’s because physicists can’t agree what they mean by Big Bang!

For someone in quantum gravity, the Big Bang is the initial singularity that occurs in General Relativity when the current expansion of the universe is extrapolated back to the beginning of time. At the Big Bang, then, the universe had size zero and an infinite energy density. Nobody believes this to be a physically meaningful event. We interpret it as a mathematical artifact which merely signals the breakdown of General Relativity.

If you ask a particle physicist, they’ll therefore sensibly put the Big Bang at the time where the density of matter was at the Planck scale – about 80 orders of magnitude higher than the density of a neutron star. That’s where General Relativity breaks down; it doesn’t make sense to extrapolate back farther than this. At this Big Bang, space and time were subject to significant quantum fluctuations and it’s questionable that even speaking of size makes sense, since that would require a well-defined notion of distance.

Cosmologists tend to be even more conservative. The currently most widely used model for the evolution of the universe posits that briefly after the Planck epoch an exponential expansion, known as inflation, took place. At the end of inflation, so the assumption, the energy of the field which drives the exponential expansion is dumped into particles of the standard model. Cosmologists like to put the Big Bang at the end of inflation because inflation itself hasn’t been observationally confirmed. But they can’t agree how long inflation lasted, and so the estimates for the size of the universe range between a grapefruit and a football field.

Finally, if you ask someone in science communication, they’ll throw up their hands in despair and then explain that the Big Bang isn’t an event but a theory for the evolution of the universe. Wikipedia engages in the same obfuscation – if you look up “Big Bang” you get instead an explanation for “Big Bang theory,” leaving you to wonder what it’s a theory of.

I admit it’s not a problem that bugs physicists a lot because they don’t normally debate the meaning of words. They’ll write down whatever equations they use, and this prevents further verbal confusion. Of course the rest of the world should also work this way, by first writing down definitions before entering unnecessary arguments.

While I am waiting for mathematical enlightment to catch on, I find this state of affairs terribly annoying. I recently had an argument on twitter about whether or not the LHC “recreates the Big Bang,” as the popular press likes to claim. It doesn’t. But it’s hard to make a point if no two references agree on what the Big Bang is to begin with, not to mention that it was neither big nor did it bang. If biologists adopted physicists standards, they’d refer to infants as blastocysts, and if you complained about it they’d explain both are phases of pregnancy theory.

I find this nomenclature unfortunate because it raises the impression we understand far less about the early universe than we do. If physicists can’t agree whether the universe at the Big Bang had the size of the White House or of a point, would you give them 5 billion dollars to slam things into each other? Maybe they’ll accidentally open a portal to a parallel universe where the US Presidential candidates are Donald Duck and Brigitta MacBridge.

Historically, the term “Big Bang” was coined by Fred Hoyle, a staunch believer in steady state cosmology. He used the phrase to make fun of Lemaitre, who, in 1927, had found a solution to Einstein’s field equations according to which the universe wasn’t eternally constant in time. Lemaitre showed, for the first time, that matter caused space to expand, which implied that the universe must have had an initial moment from which it started expanding. They didn’t then worry about exactly when the Big Bang would have been – back then they worried whether cosmology was science at all.

But we’re not in the 1940s any more, and precise science deserves precise terminology. Maybe we should rename the different stages of the universe that into “Big Bang,” “Big Bing” and “Big Bong.” This idea has much potential by allowing further refinement to “Big Bång,” “Big Bîng” or “Big Böng.” I’m sure Hoyle would approve. Then he would laugh and quote Niels Bohr, “Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.”

You can count me to the Planck epoch camp.