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Iván Agulló (Elche, 1980) Cosmologist, was the first Spaniard to receive the first prize from the Gravity Research Foundation. And in 2017 he won it again. Professor at the University of Louisiana, he has just published "Beyond the Big Bang" (Debate).

An existential doubt, does the universe exist forever or did it have a beginning? It's the million dollar question, one of the big questions cosmology has on the table, so it's not clear if the universe started with the Big Bang? For some reason in society, the message has spread that scientists are certain that the universe began almost 14,000 million years ago in the so-called Big Bang. And anything farter from the reality. The theory that says that is Einstein's general relativity, which is already 100 years old and continues to amaze us. But we can not trust it when applying it to those remote moments, so we do not know if time and space were generated at that moment? No, we do not. We have different proposals and theories, but there is no experimental confirmation. A few hundred years ago it was believed that the world ended beyond the coasts of Finisterre, that beyond it was only the whole abyss. The scientists of the Big Bang that the space and the time were dedicated to study and to make measurements to know if the earth ended there, the scientists of today we also do it. And I hope that the answer is similar to what they got, that there is a universe beyond the Big Bang in the same way that there is land beyond Finisterre. Are you inclined to think that the universe may have existed forever? an option that seems quite plausible to me. In fact, the idea that the universe has a beginning in time seems to me somewhat esoteric. It may be, but if I had to choose it seems to me more reasonable that the universe does not have an origin in time. Reading your book I have learned that the Big Bang, which we have always translated as "the great explosion", was not actually an explosion. That's right: it was neither 'big', big, nor was there an explosion, no 'bang'. The name of "Big Bang" is somewhat unfortunate, because it leads one to think that this was an explosion that occurred at some point in space and from which all matter was generated. And it is not like that. If the Big Bang happened, it really is a phenomenon that does not happen anywhere in the universe, it happens in the entire universe simultaneously and from there, at that moment, space would have been generated. I think there was even a contest to change its name to the Big Bang, right? Many scientists and Carl Sagan, the great popularizer, thought that Big Bang was a name that led to misinterpretation. Sky & Telescope magazine ran a contest to find a new name, and they received thousands of proposals. But they felt that none was better than Big Bang. I think the closest one was "cosmogenesis", which I think is a more appropriate name because it did not give the impression of being an explosion, but since the word Genesis is somewhat associated with religion, they discarded it and left the name Big Bang. What scares you the most: the coronavirus or a comet colliding with the Earth? Evidently the coronavirus. The probability that a comet will collide with the Earth is tiny compared to the fact that humanity does not know how to manage this pandemic well.

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