The big bang: Was it a loud explosion or a silent flash?

Question

I am aware it's in the wrong section. I thought I click the right section.

Was there "space" before the bang?

Answer 1

Well, that would depend on your point of view. Since there was no universe in existence before time zero, you would have to be inside of the rapidly expanding newborn universe. Therefore, inside, there would've been extreme heat and pressures. My guess is that you wouldn't have noticed any sound as you were boiled away into your constituent atoms. So, I'm thinking a silent and dark time (as your eyes would've also been boiled off, so there would've been nothing to see with).

Answer 2

Actually, as a physics question, this is answerable. Since sound requires some medium for transmission, it's quite certain that the big bang was not 'loud' in any sense, but quite 'silent'.

As for whether it was an 'explosion' or a 'flash' ... you'd have to define what you mean by the difference between these two words.

Answer 3

The energy scale of the Big Bang is so enormous compared to everyday explosions there can be no comparison. And it wasn't a conventional explosion in any way at all. There wasn't even any ordinary matter created till well after the Big Bang. There wasn't even any space from which to observe it anyway.

Answer 4

Since the explosion as we know it happened in space and sinse space lacks a type of median to move the sound wave through like the air molecules on Earth, then it must be concluded there was no sound, as far as the light (flash) this might be aparent to the observer only in the imidiate visintiy, as if it happened within a large mass, the light might be absorbed into the mass as heat, thus greatly reducing the apperent light emisions.

Answer 5

Actually, a professor at the University of Washington has simulated something like this. He plugged some data from cosmic background radiation measurements into Mathematica, fiddled it around, and got a .wav file out, that is supposed to be the sound of the big bang. You can hear the file at the address given below.

His page addresses some of the statements that people have made regarding the lack of air-- meaning lack of sound-- at the bottom of the page.

Answer 6

There was no big bang.

If you look at things from that perspective, there was this atom that exploded to form all of what we have now. bull$&*#.
that's trying to answer the question "where did we come from?"

But where did that atom come from?
How did it get there?
And if there was nothing but that atom, from whence came the force that caused it to combust?"
if the universe was compressed to the size of an atom, the result would be a black hole, but there wouldn't be anything to suck into it. All the universe would be in there already.
Everything we know leads us to believe that there was an intelligent creator.

Have you ever taken microbiology?

Have you ever seen the complexity of things that we can't even see?

If you're trying to tell me that all that complexity came from an explosion, pardon me for laughing silently.

Have you ever taken astronomy?

Have you ever seen quasars that are supposedly billions of light years away?

If you're trying to tell me that all that came from an atom, pardon me again, I might just laugh aloud this time.

Answer 7

it was not an explosion, or there was no explosion that started the so called big bang theory of evolution, it was just an expansion of matter trough time and space.

Answer 8

Sound travels through a medium, there is nothing in space for sound to travel through so its a silent flash.

Answer 9

It depends if the sound detector (assuming it survived the conditions) was surrounded by matter or empty space. If it was surrounded by matter, it would detect a sound, since sound carries through matter. But if it was in empty space, it would not detect anything, sound can only travel through matter.

Answer 10

It would be silent because "in space, no body can hear you scream" (or hear the whole universe being created).