I live in the UK , a program called Horizon : what happened before the big bang

This was a great program . It had 5 -6 different scientists discuss their thoughts on what happened.

Its probably on BBCi player if you fancy watching.

My favourite part was Michio Kaku trying to create nothing. Sounds weird but is very interesting . In the US they have built a massive vacuum room , but even when emptied of matter , it still has properties .

If anyone watched , then please comment

I found a link on youtube part 1/6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bGx3UB-Slg

Excellent program, right to the bleeding edge of cosmology.

It's funny about the vacuum. It's considered such a big deal that the aether was shown not to exist (because the speed of light did not depend on the speed of the observer), but what quantum field theory has given us is a vacuum that is seething with virtual particles, and it is fair to say that it is these that give it the properties we can measure for a vaccuum.

A good example is that the non-zero dielectric constant might be said to arise because an electric field is able to push positively charged virtual particles one way and negatively charged ones the other. Perhaps the main thing about the vacuum that is not like a normal substance is that it looks just the same regardless of what speed you go at: all real substances behave differently at different speeds, obviously (any swimmer can verify this for water, which resists more and more as you go faster).

Most intriguing in the program was the last idea from Mersini et al, about the possibility that some large features in our universe might arise from entanglement with other universes from the big bang.

It's also hard for us to grasp the concept of a true singularity as it existed at the time of the Big Bang.  It's not an intuitive thing.  There isn't any "dimensions" there to speak of, since a point includes only one dimension by definition.  So the Big Bang singularity would have included all of the observable mass of the universe in a single point.  This is not something that behaves in the way that we experience day-to-day reality.  The only real way to understand the singularity is through mathematics, which can model the early universe accurately, despite confounding our mundane senses.

I personally don't believe there are other universes besides ours.  I think they are merely artifacts of the modeling, and don't exist outside of the math required to simulate our current understanding of early physical laws.  Given enough time and research, I believe that physicists will one day have an elegant model of the universe that doesn't require exotic forms to explain its workings.

I believe most experts now believe there is no actual singularity, simply because the physics breaks down near this point.

I don't see the idea of universes other than ours as more radical than the idea of galaxies other than ours was at an earlier time. It's not really a more exotic theory, and it appears to be a consequence of the most appealing candidate for a unified theory of physics, M-theory.