How could the "Big Bang" have been possible?

Question

If the entire universe was contained in a tiny speck that expanded outward, how could there have been room for the speck to expand? I mean if there was once nothing but that speck, where did the space for the universe come from? If the speck was suspended in a vast area of empty space, then where did the empty space come from?

Answer 1

Actually no one knows the answer to that question. All we have are untestable hypotheses at this point.

I do hope you notice that those people who say "God did it" have not really explained anything. All they are saying is something happened and there must have been some original cause and they are throwing some magic into the picture because the world is incomprehensible to them and they think God does everything. That idea is no more informed than that of the primitve peoples of 10,000 years ago who thought the spirits of the world ran the world. All monotheism has done is to combine all the little spirits into one big spirit. Big deal. Spirits don't explain anything.

The only honest answer is to admit that we don't know. And that is by far the best answer because it leaves things open for being answered later on. Religion is unethical when it closes the mind to honest and intelligent answers.

Answer 2

The space was created by the expansion. The "speck" did not exist in empty space, because the space wasn't there. All space was included in the universe -- in the speck. As the speck became larger, space became larger along with it.

For an overworked visual analogy, suppose you live on a penny glued on a small balloon. There are other pennies glued on also, but you live on only one of them.

Now the balloon gets blown up, and the pennies become farther apart. Your universe is the surface of the balloon. The distance between all the pennies becomes larger and larger. Where did that increased distance come from? That's sort of the answer to your question.

Answer 3

The current accepted theory is tied with String theory.

The universe is finite and therefore has boundaries think of it as a microscopic organism with a membrane. Now there are trillions of universes some bigger and some smaller than ours. They are being created all the time.


You see when the universes are floating around they "bump" into each other. This "bump" against each other is like an explosion. Matter + explosion= Big Bang and there you go.

Some chaps from Princeton simulated this on there super computer and the explosion and matter and all of that actually do not contradict the current speed of expansion of our universe. So it's not dead yet.

Now the question becomes where did the other universes come from. And now you have a happy medium between science and spirituality much to the disdain of every scientist. Actually I believe that the "God theory" held by the ancients is just as plausible as this theory. So instead of it being that scientists did all the progressing forward and religion held them back it seems that religion made the jump quite early on and it took all the scientists a couple thousand years to catch up. either way its a leap of faith and one side's got a nice jacuzzi and some barbecue ;-).

Answer 4

Space was created as the particles expanded. Space is defined as an area between two points. If all matter was contained in one point, there was no space, but as soon as that little nugget broke, everything, Absolutely everything that is in existance today began to form. The empty space was simply formed as the particles moved away from one another leaving the voids inbetween.

Good question

cheers,

Answer 5

It was not necessary for there to be "room" for the singularity to expand: the singularity incorporated all of space at it existed at t=0, and there was no "outside" for it to expand into. Rather, it simply grew, sort of (but not exactly) like the universe is expanding now. The mind is not good at dealing with concepts such as this which are so alien to our common experience.

Answer 6

It's hard to grasp, but there wasn't "anything" outside of that "speck" (which is known as singularity). All that ever would be was inside that tiny ounce of matter.

Space was created by the sudden expansion, or the Big Bang.

Answer 7

Maybe the speck wasn't so tiny, there was nothing else to compare it to so it could have been bigger than the universe

Answer 8

Personally, I don't think that the Big Bang happened. I believe that God created the heavens and the earth in six days - and rested on the seventh. God created all of these - including what lives on the earth - and saw that it was good. Before Creation, there was just God. Don't believe me? Check out the first part of the Bible.

Hope this helps,
Robert

Answer 9

If you believe in God, why can't God have started it? The Genesis story could be our early intepretation of what God did. The reality could be that he started the big bang in a space that he created. Just a possibility.

Answer 10

That's why the Universe is expanding.