Question: What are your thoughts on the Big Bang, because they say there was nothing before the big bang, but there must be something to start the big bang, what do you think?

Kristian Harder answered on 12 Nov 2013:

Ok, I admit it. I don’t like the idea that something came from nothing either. But I think it would be wrong to insist that something must have been there. This is our experience in daily life, but our experience in daily life has been completely misleading so often alread. Look at the weirdness of quantum physics, for example. Nobody would have expected something like that from a lifetime of experience. Or the strange effects that relativity has, where time proceeds at different pace for different people if they move at very different speeds. This is all fact, and yet our daily experience would have made us believe that this would be absolutely impossible! So, let’s be open to the idea that maybe our daily experience is wrong when it comes to thinking about how the entire universe started.
Relativity already gives us a hint. The Big Bang didn’t only create the space we live in, it also started time. At least in the regular plain Big Bang theory that I know of (ask Venus for more details 😉 ), there was no “before”. In that sense there wasn’t even “nothing” to turn into “something”. It is next to impossible for us to think of a state without time, but mathematically you could describe it. Basically, if time started with the Big Bang, the universe has always been there. Except not for very long.
But I am getting myself confused now. 😀
Just to avoid the question of the beginning, people thought of other options, such as a Universe that exists in cycles: Bang, expand, slow down, contract, big crunch together, bang again, repeat. That would address the question of the “before” by saying there was no before, and the universe has always existed.
Or there are the quantum foam people who say that maybe universes keep popping up all over the place and all the time, in some kind of a spacetime foam. This foam would then be where the original energy comes from to create a universe. And where does the foam come from? Well, it has always been there, that’s just how it is. Simples! 😉
So, you see, there is no good answer. This is one of the most difficult questions for science to address, and we have a long way to go until (if ever!) we really understand the process of creating a universe.