Once Upon a Time, the Universe Was Really Weird

Today, looking out across a seemingly boundless cosmos filled with an unimaginable variety of exotic objects, it's easy to forget that the Universe we currently admire is the product of a violent event that occurred 13.75 billion years ago.

As we know, the leading theory for universal birth is the Big Bang, where everything came from nothing, in a single energetic burst of inexplicable creation. So, if we turn back the clock back 13.75 billion years, what would we see?

My instinct would be to say "energy, the Universe was filled with pure, violent energy," but according to some mind-bending work by Jonas Mureika from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Calif., and Dejan Stojkovic from SUNY at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York, the answer may be a little more complicated than that. In fact, it may be so weird that we can't even imagine what it would have been like.

According to an interview with PhysOrg.com, Mureika and Stojkovic have calculated that the early universe didn't only possess a hot, energetic primordial state of matter, but it also had a primordial state of dimensions.

If they're correct, the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that make the four-dimensional spacetime we live in today isn't how it's always been -- the Universe may have existed in a lower dimensional state in the past. ...

via Once Upon a Time, the Universe Was Really Weird : Discovery News.