Is it unknown because it is unknowable? According to some astrophysicists, the question of what came before the Big Bang is a meaningless one: time began to flow at the moment the Big Bang occurred, and what came before is therefore unknowable. The physics of space and time thus comes up against a barrier in that first instant, when the universe was 10^-43 seconds old.

However, a few dinosaur bones are enough to permit us to reconstitute the whole skeleton, so we will attempt, on the basis of current knowledge in astrophysics, to imagine what came before the Big Bang.

Why, despite this temporal barrier, have the successes achieved in science not yet allowed us to access the pre-Big Bang domain? Because it is impossible to track back from the effect (the post-Big Bang universe) to the cause (the pre-Big Bang domain) if we do not know the precise nature of that effect.

This problem could be overcome if we assumed that the hypothesis described in the previous text is true – that is, that the entire created universe, including its matter and energy, is composed of a single set of three elementary components: the colour charges of quantum chromodynamics.

Nevertheless, the hypothesis that the universe as we now know it is composed of three colour charges would be highly improbable if it were not justified logically and confirmed geometrically.

The post-Big Bang universe

So is this a miracle? Will the veil soon be lifted on one of the last great secrets of the existing universe? Perhaps, because matter, antimatter, and the four fundamental forces – composed as they are of groupings of the same three elementary components, with each grouping being characterized by its ordering and direction of rotation (see previous text) – point in the direction of ultimate unification.

We can begin by saying that the elementary particles and antiparticles are organized into a single colour set:
- Within this set they break down into three families,
- Each family has two branches, and
- Each branch has eight elementary components
– and that this structure can be logically arranged (and this is the miracle) in a 48-box table whose 48 occupants derive from the six possible permutations of a single set of three components: a photon that acts as the creator of all the particles and antiparticles, and which will serve as our guide to tracking back from the post-Big Bang universe to what came before the Big Bang.

The existing matter in the universe – which comes, according to the table in which we have presented it, from permutation of the creator photon – is formed by the particles in the first line: quarks, antiquarks, electrons, and neutrinos.

The corresponding antimatter occupies the second line, but its rotation, which is in the reverse direction from that of matter, places it in anti-time – time's inverse – since it is oriented from the present toward the past, unlike matter, whose rotational direction orients it from the present toward the future.

It is its position in anti-time that makes antimatter invisible, but since it forms part of the universe in our table, it may be that its non-observable mass nevertheless forms part of the universe's so-called missing mass.

The next two lines of the table, comprising fossil particles, are constructed on the same basis as the first two, and the same applies to the last pair of lines.

From top to bottom of the table the masses of the particles and antiparticles rises substantially; are they all part of the mass of the universe?

As for the unification of the four fundamental forces, involving the interaction of electromagnetic forces, the weak and strong forces, and gravity, it is accomplished for the first two by the electro-weak force, and the strong force is well on the way to joining them in an electronuclear interaction.

Only gravity, which is described by the General Theory of Relativity and not by the Standard Model, remains on the sidelines instead of joining the Superforce envisaged by the «Theory of Everything» that would unify all four interactions.

Gravity is the phenomenon whereby two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses; it is therefore within that mass that we must seek its origin.

While the particles of matter have mass, the photon, when at rest, does not, and is therefore not sensitive to gravity. Why should this difference exist? It is because the three elementary components of matter are ordered, whereas the three elementary components of the photon are non-ordered.

«Non-ordered» means that the three components of the photon – the three colour charges, in this case, the red, yellow and blue of quantum chromodynamics – are merged together, resulting in a single, unified, white.

And since it is matter – the vehicle for mass – that is ordered, it is here where we must seek the origin of gravity. We will return to this topic in describing the pre-Big Bang domain.

To sum up so far, the universe as it now exists is a single construct made up – as it is often described – of building blocks (the particles) united by a cementing factor (the interactions). It can be seen as the sole survivor of the three families forming the complete set of elementary particles and antiparticles.

Before the Big Bang

To access the pre-Big Bang domain, we need the creator photon not only in the first line that forms the current universe but also in all the other lines of the table of the 48 elementary particles and antiparticles. In this respect, we assume that it is identical to a primordial photon of colossal energy that is the creator of the Big Bang and, by the same token, creator of this whole system of elementary particles and antiparticles.

According to this hypothesis, the primordial photon would be the astrophysicists' cosmic singularity.

As the presumed origin of the universe, this singularity is often compared with a mathematical point of infinite density and energy. In its solitude of first origins, it had no measurable dimension since no dimensional standard existed to which reference could be made. Since the coming into existence of the present universe, it appears minuscule, but prior to the Big Bang it was everything in relation to nothing and therefore necessarily had some internal activity capable of creating the universe we now know.

This is because, like all photons, the cosmic singularity must have contained quantum chromodynamics' three non-ordered colour charges, and, given its prime position, it must also have been the source of all the components of the future created universe, including, therefore, the ordered colour-charge triplets making up matter and antimatter.

In this respect, the cosmic singularity would have been – at one and the same time – non-ordered like the photon and ordered like matter and antimatter, a state of affairs that is, on the face of it, impossible.

Therefore, according to whether its three charges were ordered or non-ordered, the singularity must have had two distinct states (though the Big Bang has not yet occurred at this point), and, given the obvious impossibility of the simultaneous existence of those states, each of these states must have succeeded the other, producing a sort of cosmic pulse: an alternation of contractions and dilatations that can be visualized using the equilateral triangle representing group G3, which will symbolize the cosmic singularity in the present context.

When the triangle contracts, the three charges (red, yellow, and blue), arrayed at the three points of the triangle, where they are ordered, are projected inward to the centre, where they merge to produce non-ordered white, since the charges all occupy the same central point.

By analogy with the six permutations of group G3, the three charges can – prior to the Big Bang – be ordered in six distinct ways, these being the sources of the six charged leptons and antileptons. We will deal here only with the electron, since the other permutations occur successively in the same way.

By shifting from the points of the triangle to its centre, the three colour charges form a movement in three converging branches.

Their movement transforms the set of three ordered charges into a set of three non-ordered charges: an electron (see the previous text) has been converted into a photon.

When the triangle expands, the three colour charges move in the opposite direction, shifting from its centre – where they are non-ordered – in the form of a photon, out to its three points – where they are ordered – in the form of an electron. Energy has been transformed into matter by a process of «explosion», breaking apart the photon's merged colour charges.

These fundamental shifts form the foundations of quantum electrodynamics. However, they take on different forms in the pre- and post-Big Bang domains. Despite their relative simplicity, they make it possible to propose a hypothesis as to the basis of the wave-corpuscle duality and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Two quantum mysteries

Why should there be a wave-corpuscle duality? Why should Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle exist? These two questions are linked; to answer them here makes the proposed pre-Big Bang model highly plausible.

Since the work of L. de Broglie, it is thought that light behaves both as a wave and as a stream of corpuscles, a concept that applies equally to particles of matter, such as electrons, and to photons. The precise nature of this theoretical wave-corpuscle entity is yet to be established, although it has proved possible to represent its behaviour mathematically.

Since Heisenberg, we know that it is impossible to determine simultaneously the position in space and the velocity of any quantum object. Once again, while the uncertainty has been formalized in mathematical terms, this has made it no less mysterious.

In order to answer these two questions, we can start out from the hypothesis developed above, according to which the universe is composed of the three colour charges of quantum chromodynamics, ordered or non-ordered, which can be represented using group G3, and which, as we shall see, create movement by shifting between the non-ordered and ordered states.

However, this does mean that we need to change the language we use in order to translate everything into colour charges that are ordered – the electron – or non-ordered, because they have merged into the photon. These definitions are foreign to current physics, but they deserve a closer look if they make it possible for us to answer the questions under consideration, as we shall now endeavour to do.

The key to the argument here is quite straightforward: all the quantum objects we detail below are in fact the same object – the set of three colour charges – in different states and at different moments, whether the object in question is a photon, an electron, or the wave already mentioned.

We shall therefore speak not only in terms of a «wave state» but also of a «photon state» or of an «electron state» to designate the set of three colour charges in these different states.

We shall once again take as our guide the equilateral triangle representing group G3, which we have used to symbolize the source of the Big Bang: the cosmic singularity. We see it here in its elementary state, made up of a single set of the three colour charges – which is perhaps its primordial state, as we shall see later – and only those three charges, that is to say in their smallest possible quantities: their quantum.

In the triangle's photon state, the three charges, because they are non-ordered, merge into one at its centre. This is the triangle reduced to a mathematical point, like the astrophysicists' cosmic singularity.

In the electron state, the three colour charges – in this case ordered – form the three points of the triangle.

In the wave state, the three colour charges, detached from each other, shift between the photon state, at the centre of the triangle, and the electron state, at the points of the triangle. Their path can be visualized by colouring each of the triangle's bisecting lines yellow, red, or blue.

The movement of the wave state occurs in a mini-Big Bang or a mini-Crunch (a «Crunch» being the opposite of the Big Bang).

A mini-Big Bang detaches the three merged charges of the photon state from each other, causing them to promptly cease to exist; the three charges then form the wave state.

When the wave state completes its movement from the centre of the triangle out to its points along the three lines bisecting the triangle, it ceases to exist and is transformed into an ordered electron state that is one of the six permutations of group G3 (see Figures). Since the triangle is formed from just three colours, the six permutations necessarily succeed each other at the triangle's three points, but all occur according to the process just described.

The mini-Big Bang converts the photon state into the electron state – in other words, energy into matter.

However, the photon state, because it comprises a single set of just three colour charges, therefore carries the smallest possible quantity of energy here: the action quantum , known as Planck's Constant, and, more precisely, represented here by a barred indicating that it is reduced to its elementary quantum, which enables all elementary dimensions to be defined.

This is so because Planck's quantum cannot travel any more than an elementary distance at any one time, taking an elementary time to do so, and moving at an elementary velocity, which is known since it is 300,000 km/second, and is represented by c. (It may be that we need to envisage the possibility of c² if, instead of three lines bisecting the triangle, we think in terms of the three areas of the triangle they delineate).

A mini-Crunch detaches the three ordered charges of the electron state from each other, at which time that state ceases to exist and its three charges form a wave state.

When the wave state completes its movement from the points of the triangle into its centre along the three lines bisecting the triangle, it ceases to exist according to a process that is the inverse of that applicable to the Big Bang, and is transformed into a non-ordered photon state in which its three colour charges are merged into one at the centre of the triangle. In the post-Big Bang domain, this process, although it differs somewhat, is of extreme importance, as we shall soon see.

The solution

We can now address the issues of wave-corpuscle duality and quantum uncertainty, because our knowledge of the anatomy of the photon and of its wave allows us to put forward a solution, without mathematical input and basing the argument on a new conception of the quantum universe as being composed exclusively of colour charges.

The argument above leads to the conclusion that wave-corpuscle duality and quantum uncertainty call for a single solution: the photon is not at one and the same time a wave and a corpuscle because what we have here are two states of the same object that succeed each other, alternating between rest and movement, just as a wave in the sea is not its own crest and trough at one and the same time but rather in succession.

Why should the corpuscle and wave states succeed each other? Because the corpuscle is a quantum object in which the three colour charges are merged, whereas the wave is the same object in which the colour charges are separate from each other.

In the first case, the entity is at rest and occupies a given location, and in the second it is moving and has a velocity. And it is obvious that it cannot be simultaneously at rest and moving, i.e. that it cannot have a velocity and a location in space at the same time. This is the case because the three colour charges that form it simply cannot be, at one and the same time, both merged into one and separated from each other.

This alternation between merged and separate charge states forms the discontinuous trajectory of the photon in the present universe, and yields the photon's statistically-based velocity of 300,000 km/second, a speed that cannot be exceeded since it is a function of the elementary distance travelled by the barred of Planck's Constant in its elementary form during the elementary time of the duration of the state in which its three colour charges are separate.

Gravity

In the previous text we linked Planck's Constant to the colour charges, representing it symbolically by the group {a,b,c}, whose letters relate to the colour charges, with commas indicating that the charges are separated, and braces (as opposed to brackets) signifying that they are not ordered. Although it is similar, this representation differs from that of the photon: {abc}, the letters still being contained between braces for the same reason but with a lack of commas, meaning that the charges are merged.

To use the terms defined above once again, the present trajectory of the photon is expressed by a repetition of the sequence: photon state, wave state, and photon state, or h .

Prior to the Big Bang, the sequence was photon state, wave state, electron state, wave state, and photon state. In both cases, Planck's Constant, , would be the mediator, the force transforming energy into matter: the wave state transforming non-ordered into ordered colour charges.

But what is the force that, in the triangle symbolizing the pre-Big Bang domain, performs the inverse operation, where the ordered state is converted to the non-ordered state? It is here that the gravity interaction steps into the breach.

The simplest way of imagining this is to picture a negative Planck's Constant, -, whose role is opposite to that of the photon. This would give us, before the Big Bang, the following sequence: photon state, wave state, electron state, wave state, and photon state, or e- -, although the second is suspect here, and - transfers negative energy to it: might this be a «black» photon, which, instead of going with the temporal flow, moves upstream in time? Should we call it a «graviton»?

Various attempts have already been made to detect a graviton that would function in a manner analogous to the photon. However, to succeed in this, it seems that we need to arrive at some kind of Standard Model-General Relativity synthesis.

We are at present thinking in terms of the Standard Model, but we will now transpose the photon and its symmetrical counterpart, the graviton, with their quanta and -, on to General Relativity's hypersphere, whose expansion is driven by time, which we shall begin by describing.

According to Einstein, gravity is a distortion of space-time, which he sees as a field characterized by «bumps and dents». The hypersphere of four-dimensional geometry enables us to visualize this concept: inside the sphere is the past, outside is the future, and between the two the present represents space, which can be regarded as the surface of the bubble of time.

Einstein's elementary «bump» is a localized projection of the present into the future via the elementary Planck's Constant, the barred , which distorts the layer of the present by forcing its photon forward into the future by the elementary unit of distance. In fact, this progression from present to future makes it the «pump» that blows up the balloon of time's hypersphere.

A «dent» is the symmetrical counterpart of a «bump», and the negative process is the same, being replaced by - and the photon by the graviton. This can be represented symbolically if we imagine a finger pressing on the flexible skin of a balloon, forming a «dent» that distorts the surrounding skin. If we place a marble near the edge, it will roll to the bottom of the dent.

In this way, the mass of a material object creates a depression in space-time and attracts toward it other masses in the direction present past. This would mean that the graviton generates a «dent» in the skin of the hypersphere whereas the photon acts in the present future direction, creating a raised segment that represents a symmetrically opposite «bump».

The translation of the phenomenon into the terms of the Standard Model is such that, in the case of the «bump», the present-photon – through the mediation of h (namely, the three colour charges moving in a direction opposite to that of h- ) – has travelled from the present toward the future, where, by its very presence, it creates a new present. It is in this way that the action quantum h expands the balloon of the hypersphere, whose temporal expansion it quantifies through its unitary progressions.

In the case of the «dent», present-matter – through h- (that is to say, its three colour charges moving in a direction opposite to that of h ) – has travelled from the present toward the past. This gives us a picture of the elementary gravitational interaction.

The innumerable unitary progressions of h quantify the hypersphere into successive, superimposed temporal layers rather similar to the way in which a tree trunk is quantified by its growth: the concentric rings of its cross-section enable us to determine its age by looking back in time.

The explosion

It is an essential fact that time was not created before the Big Bang, and hence there existed no future and no past for the evacuation of the quanta of photonic energy created in succession by the movements of the cosmic singularity; the latter therefore stored them within itself, as photons are able to do, until the number stored away in this manner reached a critical threshold that might have triggered the Big Bang.

This is so because the quantum – the barred symbol – is the elementary unit of the energy charge that photons can store in greater or lesser quantities. In the universe as it is now, according to the hypothesis entertained here, its existence is manifested in each movement of the three colour charges, in their so-called wave form, between one position of the photon and the next.

We have described two opposite movements in the cosmic singularity, one symbolized by h and the other by h- (which it has stored separately since – given that the positive and the negative mutually annihilate each other – it would scarcely have had time to be created before it exploded).

Theoretically, there should be one h or h- too many, according to whether the singularity, once created, began to contract or expand. At the instant of the Big Bang, the same very large number of h and h- –differing by just one unit– were ejected, serving to explain the creation of two apparently symmetrical universes, one positive and the other negative, one in matter and one in antimatter.

At its origins, the cosmic singularity in all likelihood contained a single energy quantum, probably an h.

This construct has a very basic logic to it: the photon and the three colour charges, in their multiple combinations, are one and the same reality. This is what, in all its straightforwardness, the cosmic singularity means, and what our quantum universe now manifests in all its complexity*.

But what is that reality?

The next chapter offers an answer to this question.

* Rather than a pyramid we have chosen the triangle as a model to represent the cosmic singularity here, since it is easier to interpret.

nota: the original text is in french