In the 1970s the Big Bang theory was coming to dominate how cosmologists saw our universe. This scientific model that our universe had been very, very tiny and extremely dense and existed at a single point of time and space and then began expanding was becoming the accepted scientific truth, even though there were still some serious problems with it.
But what caused the creation of our universe? What came before the Big Bang? Here science was quiet, assuming this was beyond its powers of hypothesis and theory and observation and experimentation. It was a mystery and one definitely outside the purview of science, almost a question only religion dare ask or answer. One could ponder and speculate, but it was deemed impossible to have a scientific theory about what was reality pre-Big Bang and still call yourself a scientist.
And so in the early 1970s it was also still accepted and assumed that science could not answer the question why is there something rather than nothing.
Yet, one man thought he knew why there was something rather than nothing, and he believed this idea that he had about how our universe came into being could be argued as a scientific theory.
In December of 1973, the prestigious British scientific journal Nature published a two-page article titled, “Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?” by the 33-year-old American physicist Edward P. Tryon of Hunter College of the City University of New York.1
It was a bold theory, maybe even too daring. For what he was saying no one had ever said.2 And what he was saying was quite easy for any physicist to understand, and yet still nearly impossible for any physicist to believe or accept.
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