A question about the Big Bang.?

Question

If everything in the cosmos started with this thing, then what can we think about what was it like before the explosion? In terms of time, place etc.

Answer 1

In the big bang theory it is suggested that the entire universe was inside one dot and the pressure inside it was so great the it caused an explosion and that everything formed from that. We say that nothing happened before that because we can't track back that far. If there really was a big bang then we can go back to a millisecond before it.

Answer 2

THE BIG BANG:

No one can possibly know what it was like before the 'Big Bang', but we do know that all of the matter in the Universe was all compressed and squashed together into one single point, called a 'singularity' (a central point of matter which is infinitely hot and infinitely small).

All this matter eventually got too hot and just exploded.
This cataclysmic explosion caused all the matter (matter is a posh word for things that we can touch and feel) to blow outwards and so the Universe started to expand.Some scientists think that the entire explosion only lasted for thirty minutes, but a lot of scientists agree that it is still happening. Buddhists chant 'Om' because it is the sound that the Big Bang made, and some scientists claim to have recorded the Big Bang on special equipment, but it is a sound so low that humans wouldn't be able to hear it.

People ask what the Universe is expanding into. Technically, it is impossible for the Universe to expand into anything, because the Universe is everything.

Scientists know that the Universe is expanding, because of 'red shift'. Light travels in waves; and when the waves get shorter, they go more blue. When they get longer, they go more red. The waves of light from distant galaxies are getting redder (hence the name 'red shift'), so the waves are getting longer. If the waves are getting longer, than that means that the light from them galaxies is getting longer, so the galaxies are moving away from us. All galaxies do this.

Scientists used this evidence to come up with the Big Bang theory.

Furthermore, there are three possible endings to the Universe:
1)Equilibrium - the Universe will carry on expanding, and evntually slow down, and stop. Then nothing will happen and all the galaxies will die and get reborn forever.
2) The Big Crunch - the Universe will expand for a while longer, then the gravitational pull of the whole Universe will drag everything back in, and start back to the 'singularity' that it used to be. Then it will explode again, suggesting that it caries on exploding, expanding, shrinking, exploding ...etc
3) The Big Chill - the Universe will carry on expanding, but there will not be enough matter in the Universe to drag it all back to the 'singularity' again, so it will carry on expanding forever. All the galaxies will become massively bigger, everything will move away from everything else, galaxies will not be able to be reformed, clouds of dust will roam the Universe while planets will be unlikely to form moons, or orbit a sun. Life will be extremely unlikely.

None of us will be around when this happens though (thank god).

Answer 3

There was no explosion, there was a rapid expansion. Nobody can tell you what was there before the event, but I will give you my thoughts, for what they are worth. There are particles called, "Virtual Particles." They appear from nothing and they annihilate each other in a burst of energy called a gamma ray. If there was nothing before the big bang why can't we assume that these virtual particles could have appeared in enormous numbers? Suppose this did happen and something triggered them to annihilate each other at the same time and all of this energy was focused into one point that appeared as the singularity of the big bang. Just an idea.

Answer 4

The 'Big Bang' theory is just that... A theory.
The vast majority of the scientific community subscribes to this theory, though, because it answers most of the questions we have developed about the cosmos during our short stay here on this little rock.
It fills in most of the 'blanks'.
Time itself was created with the occurence of the Big Bang.

To ask what it was like previous to that time would be like asking, "How much does red weigh?"
Theoretically, there WAS no time before the Big Bang.
Kinda mind- numbing, I know, but I haven't been able to think of anything better than that particular theory, so I guess I'll settle for that...

Answer 5

No answer to your question, in spite of the nonsense some other responders are posting. Also, don't think of the Big Bang as an explosion because an explosion happens inside some 'thing' else, and there's not one single bit of evidence that any 'thing' existed before the Big Bang.

Answer 6

The answer in general relativity is, there was no time before the big bang. It is kind of like asking "what is north of the north pole?" The answer is "nothing." In the mathematical
solution of general
relativistic big bang models, the spacetime coordinate system behaves similarly to the latitude & longitude coordinates around the N pole. There simply is no point with time "before the big bang."

Similarly in the "Schwarzschild black hole" solution,
you might ask "what happens to me after I fall in to the black hole
and reach the center?" The answer again is "there is no after." To repeat a famous quote, I think by J.A.Wheeler, "Time stops. That is the lesson of the Schwarzschild black hole."

HOWEVER, general relativity is not the final theory of physics. The final physics is not yet known but will involve a unification of quantum and gravity physics. In quantum gravity theories currently under development, other stuff can happen. In classical (non-quantum) GR, the big bang and
the center of S.black holes both are a "singularity." In quantum gravity, it is presumed that there are no singularities, they somehow get "smoothed out." In that case, it might be possible to assign a meaning
to a time "before the big bang." However, time might
no longer behave like you think. Until we understand quantum gravity, we cannot say for sure.

Answer 7

Every thing that we see in the universe was in one point before the big bang. Time stood still before the big bang, atleast for all the creatures created after the big bang.
Where did the big bang take place? The answer is everywhere. Because all the space we see in the universe was created from that one point.

Answer 8

Once many years ago on the Johnny Carson show, when Johnny was doing a joke routine while pretending to be Carl Sagan, Johnny said of the Big Bang, "Did you know that the Big Bang was postponed for 2 whole days?" (pause for audience) "Because of the Big Headache."

OKay but seriously, the theory says that prior to the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe was compressed into one big lump.

Isn't it an interesting thought that perhaps someday all the matter in the universe will again gather into one lump, explode and start everything all over again.

Answer 9

Before the Big Bang, there was no space or time. We can't even think of it as a void because a void immplies that there is empty space and there wasn't even space to be empty. The original particle is all there was, there wasn't even space around it.

Answer 10

There are no well-developed ideas about "before the Big Bang". There are various speculative theories, but none have any real observational evidence.