• Question: what created the big bang?

    Asked by hand520woos on 13 Mar 2025. This question was also asked by mass520tuff.
    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 13 Mar 2025:

      Your question implies that there was something before the Big Bang but the Big Bang started time rolling and so there was no before. The Big Bang simply happened.

    • Photo: Andrew McDowall

      Andrew McDowall answered on 13 Mar 2025:

      There are a number of ideas, but testing them are tricky when you and everything you can see and measure inside the thing that was created.

      Some like the idea of a bouncing universe, that eventually gravity will overcome the expansion of the unverse and that everthing will collapse back into a singularlity, the “Big Crunch”. This creates the conditions for the next Big Bang, and so the universe bounces. It’s not a very satisfying answer, very “turtles all the way down”, since it doesn’t answer how the first one started. It’s also far from certain that there’ll be a Big Crunch, the universe appears almost perfectly balanced between eventual collapse and permanent expansion and the idea needs gavity to win in the end.

      Others have theorised that the Big Bang is acutally a Big Splat, that two massive 4-D “branes” collided creating a universe on each brane, then recoilled. The universe we see is the result of the energy of that collision. Testing the idea might be a bit of a challenge, it looks to work out mathematically, but we’ve not yet found a way to examine objects outside the universe. And it doesn’t answer why branes are wobbly, why two of them collided or how the branes formed in the first place. It answers one question and immediately forms many other

      There are some tantalising ideas, but the short answer is, we don’t yet know. Perhaps you’ll be one that cracks it?

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