What if the Big Bang wasn’t the explosion of space and time, but the moment reality began to commit to distinctions?
In our latest paper, Before the Big Bang: An Information-Theoretic Origin of the Universe, we explore a radically different starting point for cosmology—one where space and time are not fundamental ingredients, but emergent consequences of irreversible information being written into reality. Instead of beginning with spacetime and adding matter, dark matter, and dark energy to make the equations work, the TPB/BCB framework starts with something more primitive: distinguishability itself. From this single principle, familiar cosmic behaviour—expansion, redshift, the arrow of time—emerges naturally.
Crucially, this is not just a philosophical reinterpretation—it is a quantitative cosmological model.
The paper shows that an information-first universe reproduces the same precision observations that anchor modern cosmology, including baryon acoustic oscillations, Type Ia supernovae, and CMB distance-prior constraints. Using a single calibration function that tracks the “cost” of irreversible information, the model matches ΛCDM’s expansion history without requiring dark matter or dark energy as fundamental substances. These effects appear instead as different regimes of the same underlying process. Importantly, the framework is tightly constrained by principle, not tuned after the fact, and it specifies clear conditions under which it would fail.
This reframing also changes how we think about the Big Bang itself.
If time only exists once irreversible change begins, then describing the Big Bang as occurring at “t = 0” is a category error—it assumes the existence of time before time exists. In the TPB picture, the Big Bang is a phase transition: the onset of irreversible commitment in an otherwise reversible, pre-spacetime regime. Singularities dissolve not through mathematical tricks, but because the variables that would diverge—space, time, density—haven’t yet emerged. Whether this information-theoretic view ultimately replaces the standard model will depend on future tests of structure growth and gravitational lensing, but one thing is already clear: cosmology may be telling us less about what the universe is made of, and more about how reality chooses to become definite at all.