The Universe had a face before the big-bang ?

"How was your face before your parents were born ?"

Transposed in the world of cosmology, would not this koan be close to the following question:
"What was our universe before the big-bang ?"

That can depend in fact on which universe we are talking about or on which parents we are considering. Ourselves, we are actually living in a real universe made of space-time, a universe with four dimensions, and we cannot imagine another one, in the same way as our collective memory can only go back to few generations. However, the history of our humankind is infinitely more ancient, would it not be the same thing concerning the universe in which we are living, the universe before the big-bang. It is a paradox to realise that this question, inherent to the intuition of mankind, only recently reached the scientific world.

From few months, a new hypothesis was put forward, based on the super-string theory which is at the time the only global theory of physics, bringing together quantum physics and Einstein's general relativity.

Instead of having the big-bang as a unique instant from which everything appeared, it would only be a step in the evolution of a universe infinitely more immense, a space-time bubble which would have inflated in a chaotic region of an immense pre-historical universe, cold and empty from any matter, inhabited only by waves carrying energy. Similar space-time bubbles could be innumerable, having given birth to a multitude of universes different from ours. They are generated by an accumulation, a local superposition of the gravitational waves inhabiting this vacuity. At the place of this concentration, the space-time condenses itself, in fact it collapses in the same way as a black hole, so most of the bubbles are too tiny and disappear immediately. Our real universe could come from one of these microscopic space-time bubbles. For that, its size had to be at least a hundredth of a billionth of a millimetre; it should then also have grown extremely rapidly to the diameter of an hair, relieving an intense heat during its inflation. The temperature must have reached a number of degrees equal to 10 followed by 31 zeroes. This bubble containing an enormous energy - matter and energy are equivalent by the equation E=mc2 - filled itself up with all kinds of particles, that was the big-bang. Our real universe will then go through the inexorable expansion which will bring it to the world that we know today.

Already ancient buddhism was talking about multiple universes, appearing and disappearing during innumerable kalpas like space-time bubbles. Ourselves, we will only be able to know for ever our own bubble, which does not exclude that it could be other universes outside ours, separated by infinite distances, having other dimensions, constituted by another matter, in which our physical laws do not exist and in which we would die. It all depends from the original size of the space-time bubble which sprung out from the vacuity. So humankind can only know or apprehend the universe in which it is living, which generated its own atoms and its own cells, as the ones of its brain for example. That does not stop it to be able to suspect that its real universe is not unique, although it is for our mankind. The other universes are for ever unknown, in this sense for ourselves our universe is unique.

When we talk about the universe, we should really know if we are talking about our own universe or about the whole of all these non connected universes in the middle of the infinity of the vacuity, about all these bubbles characterised by different physical laws, by different space-time dimensions. Given these considerations, it is obvious that mankind must start to perceive an infinity much more immense than it was considering before. One says that the universe of zen is infinite. This infinity was suspected from the most ancient times; this perception is born centuries ago from the generalised intuition of the world of Buddha. In our time, this perception starts to be supported by new global theories unifying the quantum world, the world of the infinitely small, and the cosmological world, the one of the infinitely big.

It seems also that our face, well before our parents were born or before humankind, is coming from really far away …