If energy cannot be created, how did the Big Bang start without energy?!?

Question

yea.. this question popped into my head a few days ago.. was just wondering.... becoming to think that the Big Bang didn't exist... God just created us without the Bang?

Answer 1

The big bang started off with a state of extremely high density and pressure.

The Big Bang was either was a natural occurrence or someone made it occur. I have not read any explanations of the Big Bang that postulate that someone made it happen. The Catholic Church accepted the Big Bang explanation in 1951.

Here is a great quote:

"According to the big bang theory, the universe began by expanding from an infinitesimal volume with extremely high density and temperature. The universe was initially significantly smaller than even a pore on your skin. With the big bang, the fabric of space itself began expanding like the surface of an inflating balloon – matter simply rode along the stretching space like dust on the balloon's surface. The big bang is not like an explosion of matter in otherwise empty space; rather, space itself began with the big bang and carried matter with it as it expanded. Physicists think that even time began with the big bang. Today, just about every scientist believes in the big bang model. The evidence is overwhelming enough that in 1951, the Catholic Church officially pronounced the big bang model to be in accordance with the Bible."

Answer 2

If energy cannot be created or destroyed then it makes no sense to ask where it came from - it must have already existed. I'm not sure I believe that though. While conservation of energy applies in our universe we cannot verify that it holds in whatever reality was like before the big bang. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it does. According to some scientists though, the total energy of our universe is zero, so there isn't really reason to ask such questions. See " A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing" by Lawrence M. Krauss.

Answer 3

I'm no astrophysicist... so take what I say (and what everyone else who isn't one says) with a grain of salt.

There wasn't a lack of energy before the big bang... energy and mass are equivalent, and at the time of the big bang all of the mass in the universe was concentrated at one point. To echo some of the above comments, what exactly caused all of the energy in the universe to be concentrated is, to the best of my knowledge, not conclusively known. String theorists hypothesize that extra-dimensional membranes collided with each other. The energy from this collision had to go somewhere and resulted in the energy we have in our galaxy.

But I would urge you not to just conclude God created us from nothing and that there was no big bang. Geniuses who study this stuff for a living, while not having all of the answers, have taken care of most of the easy questions such as the one you're asking, so I'm sure you can find it if you look hard enough. Plus, if God can just create a universe like ours from nothing, a universe run by natural processes, why couldn't he also create us from natural processes? The existence of God and the validity of the Big Bang are not mutually exclusive.

Answer 4

the big bang was a mass storage of energy held in something that was smaller then the size of a head of a pin.

Humans are the most simple minded things in the world or even the universe what we think is physically impossible could be possible in another demension, You just beleive that God created everyone and your letting what people around you say interfer with what is true and what isn't.

Answer 5

By making mass move at the speed of light squared.

To do this you need heavy elements (refined Uranium or Plutonium) in a vast quanity which then produces gamma radiation and starts splitting atoms by fission or fusing atoms together, which is what they think the bang was about

For that to happen you have to have a series of heavy and not quite so heavy elements and gamma radiation and other elements to make the fusion happen.

It is also possible the fusion happened through a process as yet unknown or not documented, such as the singularity compressing things so much that space between quarks essentially vanishes and since they are positive and negative in charge they being to generate a heat from the physical fusion, but we have no working model of this idea.

The only fusion model we have is the H Bomb.

Answer 6

Long answer short: matter cannot exist without energy, and energy cannot exist without matter. The "Big Bang" theory holds that enough matter coalesced into such a tight space that it attained "critical mass" and rebounded outward.

The best analogy I can describe would be: envision putting calm, serene people into a room. Keep adding people, more and more, packing them in tighter and tighter. Eventually, these nice people are going to lose their tempers and revolt, spilling outward forcibly against your efforts. Matter and energy, coexisting, behave much the same way: they occupy space conservatively (gravity) but without compromising their atomic structure. Supernovas, black holes and the Big Bang are examples of extreme physics, where matter and energy are brought to their limits.

Now, as to "God" ... Is it that God simply made matter and energy from nothingness? Or is it that God "engineered" natural events from existing matter and energy?

Answer 7

To a quantum physicist, "nothing" is just a balance of negative and positive energy/matter. The Big Bang was just the splitting of nothing into its negative and positive components. Our Universe is the positive energy/matter. Somewhere out there is a universe created from the negative energy/matter.
For more info, go to www.superstringtheory.com

Answer 8

these people are giving you long complex answers, so im going to give you a short one. EVERYTHING that is in the universe has always been in the universe. at the time of the bigbang everything was in just a smaller area. then the universe expanded and became as we see it now. as far as god goes, who knows for sure. but i like to look at it from this perspective. the universe is the way god created it, therefore why not study science and try to learn how god "thinks" good luck!!!!!!!

Answer 9

The Law of Conservation of Energy (or Mass-Energy) is a very old result, and our understanding of physics has grown a lot more complicated since it was formulated, especially in the past century or so.

Of course, I think that the Law was pretty much always thought to be true just for closed systems, that is, systems which are pretty much self-contained. If you're looking into a glass jar, you might observe the amount of energy changing inexplicably, but if you can trace that to, say, sunlight shining on the jar from outside, then you haven't violated conservation, because it's not a closed system. You could, similarly, argue that the energy that started the universe somehow came from somewhere outside the universe that we're a part of.

That's kind of a cop out, though. You're not proposing something about how the universe works, which you can go out and test. You're just saying that the energy came from "somewhere else". That's not really a scientific statement.

An interesting recent explanation I heard came from quantum mechanics. According to quantum mechanics, when you look at things on very, very small scales, (on the order of the size of a single atom, or smaller,) matter behaves very differently than we're used to it behaving: things can be in two places at once, or be in different places, depending on whether or not anyone is looking at them.

One result, which has actually been verified pretty well by some very clever experiments, is that particles can spontaneously pop into existence out of apparent nothingness. This only happens with very small, weak particles. They kind of fly under the radar of the universe's accounting; they're so small, their mass and energy are so close to zero, that it's effectively like they don't even exist. Pairs of them, consisting of one particle of regular matter and one particle of anti-matter, so they essentially cancel each other out, are just popping up, and usually annihilating each other quickly, all the time, and the universe barely notices.

There's also been an interesting cosmological result which has emerged in the past few years: astronomers observing distant supernovae, massive stellar explosions, have figured out that there's some kind of "dark energy", some kind of energy that we don't see directly, which seems to be pushing the universe outwards, and acting against the gravitational effects of the "dark matter", which cosmologists think is pulling the universe together.

These forces, the attractive force of the dark matter, and the repulsive force of the dark energy, seem to be very finely balanced. In fact, suspiciously finely balanced: they seem to describe a universe which is much more well balanced than we would usually expect to get from any random shakeout of matter and energy which would occur following a cosmically huge confluence of matter and energy like the big bang under normal physical conditions.

This peculiar balancing lends support to an alternate theory to the traditional Big Bang theory, called the Expansion Theory, which describes how a period of unusually fast, "supercharged" expansion following the Big Bang, could lead to a finely balanced observable universe. But it also raises a possibility: Could the universe be so finely balanced, because it started from, essentially, nothing?

It may be that we, somehow, are the result of something like one of those tiny particle-anti particle pairs, barely noticeable at all, annihilating one another. The big bang could be the singularity created by just such a collision, somewhere in a larger multiverse of which we are a part. That would explain why we're so finely balanced: because we started from zero, and we still add up to zero; if you add everything up, it all balances and cancels out. In some sense, that's not exactly a testable scientific statement, either, but it is based on scientific understanding.

I owe this explanation to Professor Alex Filippenko of UC Berkeley, whose innovative observations of distant supernovae using the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), designed and built by him and him team at James Lick Observatory, figure largely in the Dark Energy discovery I mentioned. You can find his excellent Intro to General Astronomy class, Astro C10/L&S C70U, available both as podacsted audio and streaming video, at http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978334 (Any inaccuracies in my explanation of the theory are my own, not Alex's. I'm not a scientist, just a humble mathematician.)

Answer 10

No one knows why or what caused big bang. There are lot of things people don't know. Big bang is hypothesized to explain expansion of our universe, but no one have clues to what exactly caused big bang.