Before the big bang?

Question

Was there an empty universe?

If their was just the singularity with all the matter in the present universe in it. Where did that matter come from?

And what existed before the singularity?

Answer 1

Good question: Like asking "If I'm at the North Pole, and I start walking in a northerly direction, where will I be heading?"

The answer to your question is therefore something a little less than 42.

Your question has actually been studied by leading cosmologists and quantum physicists, and I think String Theory allows some possible extra-dimensional entity that mathematically eliminates the necessity for there ever to have been a Singularity in the "first" place.

The point, though, is that the Big Bang defines not only the beginning of all the Matter and Energy and stuff our Universe is made of, but it also defines the beginning of Time itself... which means that saying "Before the Big Bang" makes about as much sense as saying "North of the North Pole".

Answer 2

There was nothing at all, lots and lots of nothing, which came together and exploded into lots and lots of everything, all rushing away from the point of explosion. Actually if this happened and the universe is moving as fast as we are told then there is not enough of it to explain the velocity..at least there was not until a brilliant mind realised that what is missing is "dark matter" which we can not see or measure, which is how we can be sure that it exists. All of which makes so much more sense than any other version of creation. Is your head hurting yet? If not then we can go on to discuss black holes which are sucking in all the matter around them..dark or otherwise and spewing it out again...well, somewhere not here or anywhere else we can point to or weigh or measure..and although they have been doing this since the beginning of time and we have no idea how many there are or how fast they are doing the work we do know precisely how much matter there should be and where we would find it if it wasn't dark....Alright; the really important thing to do is to believe everything scientists tell us because they have already told us that they are always right.

Answer 3

At present there is no answer to how matter was created, because of the fact that physics dictates that all matter and energy (including dark matter), cannot be created or destroyed, only changed. Because of this, no one can explain where everything came from, but there is one hypothesis that says that the big bang we all know and love was not the first big bang, but one of an infinite number of previous big bangs in which the matter exploded away from the one point in space, and then eventually all matter once again condensed until the next big bang (we don't know what would cause it, nor if some matter might be from before our big bang). Unfortunately, this still doesn't explain where everything came from in the first place. Go get a doctorate in physics and figure it out for us :)

Answer 4

there was no universe before the big bang, partly because there was no before. according to the most popular recent theories before the big bang there was no space or time (they are the same). so the question is impossible to answer because there was no before. and if there had been a before there would have been no space, nothing at all, the sort of nothing that our simple minds cannot even begin to comprehend.

and as for how it got there is a subject of much debate. 2 big theories stick out in my mind.

theory 1: string theory/m-theory. the theory that our 4 dimensional universe (3 spatial and 1 time) is just a part of a much bigger network of very very tiny 11 dimensional membranes that our universe is packed full of. think of it as filling up the entire universe completely with string. and the theory says that any time any of them collide with eachother a massive amount of energy is given off and another universe is created and instantly splits off from out own. now with the universe packed full of these "strings" you can imagine how many times they would collide at any given moment much less in the 13.7 billion years this universe has been around and even before it started in some other universe somewhere. so there is an infinite number of universes, but each of them completely independant from the others.

theory 2: im not quite sure of the name, but it basically says that universes form from black holes. at the center of a black hole is a singularity, much like the big bang. so the idea says that when a black hole is formed the singularity sort of pinches off from the rest of it kind of like a drop if water and the space starts to expand along with the matter form the black hole.

remember, those are both theories, not proven and highly controversial, yet popular (idk about the second one anymore, but its still quite interesting)

Answer 5

There are two families of hypotheses as to what could have been (because our understanding of physics cannot apply before the Planck time -- which came 'after' the beginning, we cannot talk about theories yet):

1. There was no 'before'. Time itself is the result of the presence of matter/energy. No matter/energy, then no time, then no 'before'. Fluctuations of the vacuum that give rise to short-lived 'virtual' particle-pairs (e.g., electron and positron) are very common. The smaller the particles being formed, the higher the probability that it occurs.
You could get proton and anti-proton with much less probability (more mass). The probability of creating an entire universe out of nothing is extremely small, but it is not zero. And you only need it to happen once.

2. (From m-theories, the collection of string and superstring theories): a bigger Universe exists and has many more dimensions than what we perceive. Sub-spaces called " 'branes " (from the word membrane, a 2-D sub-space in a 3-D space) exist and move inside the much bigger Universe (with 7 to 11 dimensions, depending on the theory you select).

It is possible that the energy that resulted in the observed expansion of our 3-D universe comes from the collision of two such 'branes, about 14 billion years ago.

Answer 6

The big bang was a quantum change of state from singularity to a sea of photons having a Planck energy distribution corresponding to a very high blackbody temperature. This event was the first to occur in our universe, and accordingly the Big Bang was also the beginning of time. Since the word "before" implies a priority in the sense of time, there was no before with respect to the Big Bang.

However, the energy that produced that sea of photons originated as a statistically anomalous aggregation of vacuum energy in a spacetime region apart from our universe. The aggregation was large and dense enough to create an event horizon around itself, and it fell into a black hole of its own making. Thus was our universe born from a parent region from which it is now isolate.

After the Big Bang, the photons that had an energy above about 1 MeV began forming quarks and anti-quarks, and leptons and their antiparticles. The quarks joined in couplets to form mesons and in triplets to create hadrons (including protons and neutrons). Since then energy, especially as matter, has been trying to see just how complex it can form itself up, generating new and higher properties from the associations and statistical envelopes of simpler and earlier properties. That's where stars, and life, and intelligence, and philosophy have all come from.

Existence exists (when it doesn't have any special reason to do anything else) as energy in random distribution and in random flux. Universes build on that default character of existence with ordering mechanisms, such as forces and thermodynamic arrows of time. The default character of existence (randomness) forms a stage, while everything else in a universe can be compared with the actors that play their roles on it.

Answer 7

This is a question which even a person with a Doctorate degree in astrophysics won't be able to answer.

At present we can describe the what happened from 10^(-47) seconds after big bang till now because before 10^(-47) the four fundamental forces were unified. To explain this quantum mechanics has to be unified with general relativity

Stephen Hawking once said. " What was their before the big bang. If god created the universe during big bang what was he doing before it. Perhaps he was creating hell for people who ask such questions."

There are still some wacky ideas which have no scientific basic but still are fascinating because at this point that's the best we can do.

Answer 8

Please look up "alternative Big Bang" in the search bar and you will find this answer:

An alternate theory behind the cause of the Big Bang:
There is speculation that the Big Bang is not unique at all, in that, first, you must realise the possibility that a multitude of other universes exist, other than our own.
The idea is that, like waves, the edges of two universes collided along the wave edge. That collision is precisely where the Big Bang was produced, sparking off another universe, or wave.
In other words, imagine a pond and having a dozen tiny pebbles hitting the surface. Each pebble creates a ripple or wave. When two waves make contact there is energy at that contact point. That energy at the contact point is the Big Bang as we know it. Our universe, then, is expanding out into "un-rippled water," so to speak, until the edge of our universe makes contact with the edge of another universe, creating another Big Bang event.
Our universe will never collapse back in on itself, as had been suggested. Instead, our universe will eventually accelerate faster and faster until the atoms and molecules dissipate so thinly that the energy inside them will no longer sustain itself. Each atom will burn out, just as stars burn out, except in a very thinned out universe. However, anti-matter and dark matter will always be there. Until there is another collision with the edge of another universe there will not be another Big Bang until then, and the process starts over again and again.
Keep in mind of the size of these events:
The edges of two universes colliding, which produces the point or location of a Big Bang, which in turn expands as another universe is HUGE compared with the Big Bang event, itself. The two universes that collided to create our own universe are by far larger than our own universe currently is. We are a relatively young wave that continues to expand until it meets another wave.

Answer 9

that's a major point of the big bang,

the theory defines everything starting from a single point, and nothing can be determined to prior to that, That's not to say nothing existed prior, just that its existence cannont be compared to after the start of the expansion of the universe.

how all the matter got to one point, is undetermined, but we know that the universe is expanding from a single point in space hence a big explosion sending flac in every direction.

I imagine the universe is cyclical, black holes swallowing galaxies, black holes evenutally swallowing other black holes, until there is one, and then yet another big bang, ...

Answer 10

There are afew answers to this, here are the ones I like best:

a) the most common one, Nothing! no time, no space no universe or anything to worry about.

b) A previous universe that had the Big Crunch as an end, so as soon as everything was one again it reset itself into a brand new universe etc.

But your own best guess its just as good as any of these as its all the same to me.