Would the Big Bang Theory lead you to believe...?

Question

The matter that makes up every single one of us and every single thing we see or don't see, including all life, in the universe was at one time united as one object?

I think that's pretty amazing.. I get a really awesome feeling thinking about it.

If I wanted a huge summary (let alone an incomplete one) of the theory, I'd go to answers.com myself, Nomad.

Answer 1

as one object, i guess you could say that. but you have to realize that the big bang wasn't an explosion in space... it was space itself exploding, before the big bang there was nothing, now all of the space around us as well as the matter came out of the big bang. all of the matter was actually created shortly after the big bang in the recombination time.

it is pretty cool, that once all of these galaxies were all together.

Answer 2

Yes, and we still do not realize.
But perhaps someday we will---I was reading the "Dancing Wu
Li Masters" which compares Quantum Physics with Eastern Religion, they are quite similar. We are one force made up as "photons" or light particles.
How our minds create or "manage" matter is interesting---we must have conciousness in order to make particles behave-- I feel this is an answer to what we may be trying to understand in the universe.

Answer 3

The universe began when a single space-time pulse came into existence some time after time zero.
The pulse continued to grow and mature until it turned into the present universe and us.

Answer 4

Yeah. And because of that I'm beginning to think if the Big Bang Theory is true

Answer 5

Big bang theory
The theory that the universe began in a state of extremely high density and has been expanding since some particular instant that marked the origin of the universe. The big bang is the generally accepted cosmological theory; the incorporation of developments in elementary particle theory has led to the inflationary universe version. The predictions of the inflationary universe and older big bang theories are the same after the first 10−35 s. See also Inflationary universe cosmology.

Two observations are at the base of observational big bang cosmology. First, the universe is expanding uniformly, with objects at greater distances receding at a greater velocity. Second, the Earth is bathed in the cosmic background radiation, an isotropic glow of radiation that has the characteristics expected from the remnant of a hot primeval fireball.

Tracing the expansion of the universe back in time shows that the universe would have been compressed to infinite density approximately 8–16 × 109 years ago. In the big bang theory, the universe began at that time as a so-called big bang began the expansion. The big bang was the origin of space and time.

In 1917, Albert Einstein found a solution to his own set of equations from his general theory of relativity that predicted the nature of the universe. His universe, though, was unstable: it could only be expanding or contracting. This seemed unsatisfactory at the time, for the expansion had not yet been discovered, so Einstein arbitrarily introduced a special term—the cosmological constant—into his equations to make the universe static. The need for the cosmological constant seemed to disappear with Hubble's discovery of the expansion, though the cosmological constant has subsequently reappeared in some models.

Further solutions to Einstein's equations, worked out in the 1920s, are at the basis of the cosmological models that are now generally accepted. These solutions indicate that the original “cosmic egg” from which the universe was expanding was hot and dense. This is the origin of the current view that the universe was indeed very hot in its early stages.

Modern theoretical work has been able to trace the universe back to the first instants in time. In the big bang theory and in related theories that also propose a hot, dense early universe, the universe may have been filled in the earliest instants with exotic elementary particles of the types now being studied by physicists with large accelerators. Individual quarks may also have been present. By 1 microsecond after the universe's origin, the exotic particles and the quarks had been incorporated in other fundamental particles. See also Elementary particle; Quarks.

Work in the early 1980s incorporated the effect of elementary particles in cosmological models. The research seems to indicate that the universe underwent a period of extremely rapid expansion in which it inflated by a factor of billions in a very short time. This inflationary universe model provides an explanation for why the universe is so homogeneous: Before the expansion, regions that now seem too separated to have been in contact were close enough to interact. After the inflationary stage, the universe is in a hot stage and is still dense; the models match the big bang models thereafter.

In the inflationary universe models, the universe need not have arisen from a single big bang. Rather, matter could have appeared as fluctuations in the vacuum.

It is not definitely known why there is an apparent excess of matter over antimatter, though attempts in elementary particle physics to unify the electromagnetic, the weak, and the strong forces show promise in explaining the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry. The asymmetry seems to have arisen before the first millisecond. The asymmetry in the decay of certain mesons may provide a clue to resolving this question. See also Antimatter; Fundamental interactions.

By 5 s after the origin of the universe, the temperature had cooled to 109 K (2 × 109 °F), and only electrons, positrons, neutrinos, antineutrinos, and photons were important. A few protons and neutrons were mixed in, and they grew relatively more important as the temperature continued to drop. The universe was so dense that photons traveled only a short way before being reabsorbed. By the time 1 min had gone by, nuclei of the light elements had started to form.

After about a million years, when the universe cooled to 3000 K (5000°F) and the density dropped sufficiently, the protons and electrons suddenly combined to make hydrogen atoms, a process called recombination. Since hydrogen's spectrum absorbs preferentially at the wavelengths of sets of spectral lines rather than continuously across the spectrum, and since there were no longer free electrons to interact with photons, the universe became transparent at that instant. The average path traveled by a photon—its mean free path—became very large. The blackbody spectrum of the gas at the time of recombination was thus released and has been traveling through space ever since. As the universe expands, this spectrum retains its blackbody shape though its characteristic temperature drops. See also Blackbody; Heat radiation.

As the early universe cooled, the temperatures became sufficiently low for element formation to begin. By about 100 s, deuterium (comprising one proton plus one neutron) formed. When joined by another neutron to form tritium, the amalgam soon decayed to form an isotope of helium. Ordinary helium, with still another neutron, also resulted.

Big bang nucleosynthesis, although at first thought to be a method of forming all the elements, foundered for the heavy elements at mass numbers 5 and 8. Isotopes of these mass numbers are too unstable to form heavier elements quickly enough. The gap is bridged only in stars, through processes worked out in 1957. Thus the lightest elements were formed as a direct result of the big bang while the heavier elements as well as additional quantities of most of the lighter elements were formed later in stars or supernovae. See also Nucleosynthesis.

The two extreme possibilities for the future of the universe are that the universe will continue to expand forever, or that it will cease its expansion and begin to contract. It can be shown that the case where the universe will expand forever corresponds to an infinite universe. The term applied is the open universe. The case where the universe will begin to contract corresponds to a finite universe. The term applied is the closed universe. The inflationary universe scenario has the univere on the boundary between open and closed, as signified by the parameter Ω taking the value of 1. Such a universe will expand forever but at an ever-decreasing rate. See also Cosmology; Universe.

The inflationary universe model provides a natural explanation for the universe being on this dividing line. After expansion slows down at the close of the inflationary stage (thus causing a phase change, much like water boiling into steam), the universe necessarily approaches this line. Further work on inflationary scenarios is necessary to see whether certain problems, such as the inflationary model's predictions of the density fluctuations that lead to the coalescence of galaxies, can be accounted for