If energy cannot be created or destroyed, how did the Big Bang occur? (Obviously on the grounds that it did)!?

Answer 1

There are several possible explanations:

(1) The conservation of energy is NOT an absolute law. At the quantum level, energy are constantly being created and destroyed. So it may be that at the moment of the Big Bang, a quantum singularity appeared out of nothing and was inflated through some mechanism (aka phase transition) into the macroscopic sized Universe we know today.

(2) The Big Bang is not THE creation event of the Universe, but a transition point from singularity to inflationary expansion. Currently, this is not the preferred explanation among physicists.

(3) We lived within a Multiverse, where the Universe we know is just a tiny bubble within an ocean of Universes. The energy that created the Big Bang singularity came from outside the Universe, and energy conservation only occurs in the context of the entire Multiverse.

Answer 2

Well, obviously the energy had to come from somewhere which was not the Big Bang. Which is not contested by physics. We are hard at work to find mechanisms which could have released it (think "phase transition").

But it is, as far as we can tell, it is also not contested by nature that the big bang forms an event horizon behind which we might not be able to see much, if anything at all... though luck!

And all of this is only absolute if one religiously believes in energy conservation. Which physicists do not. We keep testing it experimentally as we go. That is has not failed us so far is no assurance that it is universally valid. So we don't take it for granted.

The question is easy. But the answers are a lot more complicated than most people think.

If they are too complicated for you, please feel free to replace them with "goddidit", the one answer which ALWAYS works, no matter what you ask and which does not tell you the least thing about anything.

:-)

Answer 3

The Big Bang theory allows scientists to understand what happened in the universe all the way back to when the universe was about 10^{-35} seconds old. At no time in that time frame was energy ever created or destroyed.

The energy in the universe has always been here; it's just that "always" doesn't extend infinitely far back.

Add to that the observation that the total energy in the universe is extraordinarily close to zero anyway. So close that it may in fact be zero.

Answer 4

It is a great puzzle.

I have a feeling that our concept of energy conservation may need some adjustment at the sort of extreme conditions that the Big Bang involved.

I don't think answers that duck the question are satisfactory. And I don't understand enough about the string theory sorts of ideas to comment intelligently.

You have a great question, though.

Answer 5

Energy prior to the BB was funneled into our universe by the BB. Consider two parallel universes, separated in space and time by one Planck length and one Planck time. These two parallel universes breach that separation momentarily and collide.

In colliding their respective momenta are altered and, as we all know, dp/dt = F and Fs = E. That is, the change in momenta dp over Planck time dt created the force F that acted over the Planck distance s to give us the energy E in our universe...and the other one as well.

SciFi? Yes, but this is also a hypothesis based in string/M theory on how the BB might have come about. [See source.]

So some of the energy packed in the two (or more) parallel universes was converted into the BB energy that formed our universe. Nothing was created and nothing destroyed...just conversion...on a really BIG scale.

Answer 6

There was immense energy condensed into one tiny point. Now that energy is just spreading. If you are asking how that immense energy got there in the first place, the answer is that no one knows.

Answer 7

law of energy conservation doesn't apply to big bang since the system is still not stable.

Answer 8

Nobody can answer this question, this law came into existence after the singularity formed.

Answer 9

It can't. It makes no sense. Nothing exploded, and became everything.

Using the laws that WE know of, the big bang theory is absurd at the most basic level.

I heard the theory started as a joke...