• Question: Where did the Big Bang come from? And if it was something exploding, where did the something come from?

    Asked by infintaneousdeath to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 12 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      You should watch out for responses from Tim and Venus about this – they are the real experts on this topic. My job is just to look at lotsalotsa little big bangs in the laboratory. 🙂
      But hey, here’s what I figure. If the Big Bang was really the beginning of our universe, then it would have start out from a state of pure energy. During the big Bang, part of that energy got converted into matter and antimatter. But there was no matter there to explode in the beginning. So your question would boil down to where that energy came from. Well, quantum theory tells us that you can “borrow” energy out of nothing for a short time. We see that all the time on small scales, so maybe the Big Bang was the same thing happening on a big scale?
      Alternatively, maybe the universe has always existed, blew up, contracted again, blew up again and so on. Then the Big Bang would be based on energy and matter that it inherited from the previous cycle. And if that’s the case, then maybe you can actually see some leftover structures from the previous universe cycle in the background radiation from the Big Bang, so we’ll continue to investigate that.
      No matter what you do, the question of the beginning is always the most difficult to answer. If the universe has been around for infinitely long (such as with the cyclic concept), then our brains have a problem because we simply can’t grasp infinities. We think there always must be something prior, some original cause, but actually that may not be how nature truly is. Some initial state may just be there without anything previously having caused it.
      Even if the universe has not been there for infinitely long, you may end up with a situation where our brains just go blank. In principle, if the Big Bang was really a proper one, with the universe starting out infinitely small (= a dot), then there was no time prior to the Big Bang. Both time and space started with the Bang. Can you imagine what it means that there was no time? I certainly can’t. But it does solve the problem of the “before” somewhat. 🙂

    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      Science tells us about the evolution of the universe from just after the Big Bang until now. We have no scientific theory that successfully explains the Big Bang itself, and no-one has any real idea about where or why the Big Bang came from.
      If the Big Bang came from something else, where did that something else come from?

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      That is one of the biggest unanswered question of all. We understand so much about just after the big bang even tiny fractions of a second after the big bang. But what caused it and what there was before it is not understand. There are some theories….here’s one..the universe goes through cycles of expansion and then contraction. So each big bang is preceded by a big crunch. Another more crazy one conjectures that a big bang occurs in the centre of a black hole in another universe. Basically this question is going to around for a very long time so why don’t you study science so that someone will pay you to think about it!

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      What you’re asking boils down to: what happened before the universe? That’s not really something humanity is capable of answering, yet. We live and operate within the universe’s physical laws, so trying to imagine what happened in an epoch before such laws existed is difficult, if not impossible.

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