http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/980720/20bang.htm
Initial excerpt:
Cover Story 7/20/98
What came before creation?
New insights into the big bang point to other universes beyond our own
BY GREGG EASTERBROOK
For centuries, men and women have pondered how the stars were called forth.
The Roman poet Lucretius assumed the universe to be eternal: How could there
ever have been a condition without existence? Theology spoke of a discrete
beginning: the book of Genesis reflecting the ancient Hebrew view of six
days of cosmic toil; the fourth-century Christian thinker Augustine
supposing that time as well as space was created by God at the first moment;
the 12th-century Islamic rationalist al-Ghazali asserting that since an
infinite past seems incomprehensible, the universe must have begun at a
specific point.
But while thinkers have often engaged the question of whether the cosmos is
newly formed or unfathomably old, few have speculated on the head-spinning
topic of what might have come before creation. Copernicus, Newton, Einstein,
and others viewed the heavens as an immutable realm whose physical laws
could be discovered but about whose origin all clues had long since
vanished. Just as clergy may prefer to sidestep the issue of what caused
God, the issue of what caused the universe has often been one the science
world would rather skip.
Yet substance and light swirl around us: They must have arisen from some
source. Recently, aided by a bonanza of information from the Hubble Space
Telescope, prominent scientists have begun to explore what might have
preceded the current universe. Alan Guth, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, says that "the enigmas of creation are looking less
and less like mysteries we will never solve." The candidates for a genesis
mechanism include the bizarre innards of black holes; "inflation," a theory
of how existence could arise essentially from nothing; and a "Mother
Universe," a timeless dimension that has always existed and always will,
bearing daughter universes down an endless corridor of time.
....