An excerpt from Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins

Battle of the Big Bang offers a radical rethink of how our universe began. Astrophysicist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper explore theories—from black holes birthing universes to the end of cosmic singularities—in a sweeping narrative that challenges the Big Bang orthodoxy.

In Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins, astrophysicist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper dive deep into one of science’s most profound mysteries: how did our universe begin? Challenging the standard Big Bang narrative, Afshordi and Halper explore bold new ideas—from bouncing universes and time loops to multiverse theories and cosmic holograms—offering a thrilling portrait of scientific discovery at the edge of human knowledge.

Afshordi, based at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, brings fresh insights from his research into the nature of spacetime. Halper, a Youtuber and science communicator with a deep passion for the philosophy and frontiers of science, draws on original conversations with figures like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth to illuminate the stakes of these cosmic debates.

Astrophysicist Niayesh Afshordi

Science communicator Phil Halper

In this excerpt from Battle of the Big Bang, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press on May 29th, 2025, Afshordi and Halper invite readers into the heart of a scientific revolution—a story of rivalries, revelations, and the eternal human quest to understand our place in the cosmos.

From Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins

On a boat from India to Britain, a young student named Subrahmanyan “Chandra” Chandrasekhar, whom we met earlier, began to apply the principles of relativity to the fate of stars. He then discovered something very surprising: any cold object bound by gravity and made of matter must be less massive than a maximum limit, or otherwise its particles would have to fly faster than the speed of light. This upper bound is known as the Chandrasekhar limit. If the core of a star runs out of fuel to burn, it starts to cool down, but if its mass exceeds Chandra’s limit, then it has no choice but to succumb to gravitational pull and collapse into who-knows-what. 

Chandra came from a family of intellectuals. His mother had translated famous European novels into Tamil. The year he arrived in Cambridge for graduate studies, his uncle, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, became the first Indian person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. It was not surprising then that Arthur Eddington, who had gained fame as the man who had proved Einstein right, took an interest in Chandra’s work. He sat on Chandra’s PhD oral defense, but it soon degenerated into a farce as Eddington and Fowler (Chandra’s supervisor) spent most of the defense arguing with each other.

These fights continue today when scientists meet who have strong (but conflicting) convictions and who enjoy an audience. By 1935, Chandra presented his findings to the Royal Astronomical Society, but Eddington launched an ambush, rubbishing the young Indian’s conclusions in a surprise follow-up talk, saying, “I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!” At a subsequent meeting, Chandra recalled that Eddington made his work “into a joke. I sent a note to Russell [Henry Norris Russell, who was presiding], telling him I would wish to reply. Russell sent back a note saying, ‘I prefer that you didn’t.’ And so, I had no chance even to reply; and accept the pitiful glances of the audience.” 

Four years later, Robert Oppenheimer (the father of the atom bomb) and his student Hartland Snyder further developed the theory of gravitational collapse and showed that a star with a sufficiently large mass that had run out of nuclear fuel would implode in on itself, not just becoming dark, but compressing to infinite density, pressure, curvature, and temperature: a singularity (in the Oscar- winning movie Oppenheimer, he proudly hands out copies of this article to his students).

As we saw in chapter 1, these early singularity theorems assumed the star was perfectly symmetrical, so the results were not taken seriously. It would not be until the 1960s that Roger Penrose would prove that the unrealistic assumption of perfect symmetry didn’t matter; the center of dark stars represented a singularity where physics as we know it would eventually come to an end. 

This discovery was both profoundly puzzling and incredibly exciting. As John Wheeler said, “No field is more pregnant with the future than gravitational collapse, no more revolutionary views of man in the universe has one ever been driven to consider seriously than those that come out of pondering the paradox of collapse, the greatest crisis of physics of all time.”

At a conference in 1967, Wheeler asked the audience for a catchier term than gravitationally completely collapsed object and someone shouted, “How about black hole?” The name stuck. Michell’s work had long been forgotten, but ironically, it was the subject of his original research on binary stars that finally confirmed that black holes were real. Astronomers observed stars orbiting around invisible companions with enormous masses, which in retrospect, were sure signs of black holes. 

Less than half a century later, my colleagues combined radio dishes across the globe to make an Earth-sized telescope that would yield images of the silhouettes of monster black holes at centers of galaxies. But the fact of black holes’ existence could not answer the mystery of what lay at their center. Penrose had developed powerful proofs that a singularity must form within a black hole. But any proof is only as good as its assumptions and I am not alone (arguably, not even in the minority) in wondering if one of those assumptions might be relaxed, revealing something even stranger hiding in the darkness. 

Both a black hole and the Big Bang have singularities, according to general relativity and to the Penrose-Hawking theorems. For the brave cosmologists who explore the frontiers of knowledge, this fact is a clue, a subtle suggestion from nature that these two mysteries of physics may be different sides of the same coin. If the singularity is to be resolved at the Big Bang, then it should also be resolved in a black hole, perhaps implying that these hitherto-thought-of cosmic destroyers have a motherly side to them, giving birth to new universes. 

In 1972, Raj Pathria (an Urdu poet and physics professor who used to sit a couple of doors down from my office) and I. J. Good (a mathematician who had worked with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park in the cracking of the German Enigma codes) both speculated that black holes might generate new regions of space. Good was trying to find a way to reconcile the steady-state model with the Big Bang and imagined that the continual creation of matter in the former model could be realized if black holes gave birth to new universes. He didn’t only work on black-hole singularities; he imagined artificial intelligences so advanced that they make ever-improving versions of themselves, leaving humanity in the dust. Ironically, this idea has become known as the technological singularity (perhaps the rise of large language models, made famous by ChatGPT, is a sign of that vision becoming reality). 

Pathria also questioned whether the universe was unique, reasoning that if our cosmos were birthed from a black hole, others would surely be created. As we saw in the case of inflation, it seems hard for Western scientists to develop ideas without finding that a Russian beat them to it. 

Sure enough, as early as the 1960s, Igor Novikov also proposed that black holes birthed new universes, a spark of an idea that was later developed in the 1980s by inflationary pioneer Slava Mukhanov and colleagues. The basic hypothesis was that the singularity would be replaced with a bounce, but as matter cannot escape a black hole, it must create a new space-time region. 

Quantum gravity pioneer Bryce Dewitt was fascinated by these proposals and encouraged his associate Lee Smolin to pursue the idea, saying, “This is something I think about a lot. See if you can do something with it.” What Smolin would do was not simply create a model of a black-hole Genesis but also challenge what would soon become the new orthodoxy of the multiverse and anthropic reasoning.

Reprinted with permission from Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins by Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper. All rights reserved.