Da Big Bada-Boom

[Eddie Gosik]

Please keep your answers to as simple as possible...I ain't no Quantum Physicist.
"science" tends to lean towards this "Big Bang" theory. Kinda understand it, and some of the proof. My question is...if everything started with this "Big Bang" (ever expanding outward, etc.)What the HELL was there BEFORE the "Bang"? What "caused" it? And whatever the heck was there to begin with...where did THAT come from? It just seems to me that I come across a lot of stuff to prove that it happened...just not WHY, and WHAT was there to begin with.

[Czarcasm]

There is an easy answer, but you ain't gonna like it.

We don't know. Yet.
Everything else is a WAG.

[Nickrz]

A "curious ether."

[David B]

FYI, there was a little discussion on this in Great Debates a few days ago: http://www.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum7/HTML/000234.html ("Beginning of everything").

[Imthecowgodmoo]

Of course, after the Big Bang comes the Gnab Gib! (everything being sucked back in) (ala Douglas Adams)


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"I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information."
-- Calvin and Hobbes
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[Babar714]

Just a theory, kinda Trekkish, but I like it. In a nutshell, blckholes and the like can be strong enough to rip a hole in the universe, bleeding into anther empty universe. So in that empty universe, there is nothing, then a hole in it is made, and matter comes pouring in in all directions, making what appears to be a big bang in that empty universe. Get it?

[bantmof]

if everything started with this "Big Bang" (ever expanding outward, etc.)What the HELL was there BEFORE the "Bang"?
"Before" the big bang is an undefined concept. Our universe's time started then.

Check out Ned Wright's Cosmology FAQ:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm

It says:
The standard Big Bang model is singular at the time of the Big Bang, t = 0. This means that one cannot even define time, since spacetime is singular. In some models like the chaotic or perpetual inflation favored by Linde, the Big Bang is just one of many inflating bubbles in a spacetime foam. But there is no possibility of getting information from outside our own one bubble.

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peas on earth

[jayron 32]

OK... I won't get specific with the math and everything, but I will answer these questions as truthfully as I can in laymans terms. Take it or leave it, but these answers are REALLY what most Big Bang physicists believe.


What the
HELL was there BEFORE the "Bang"?

Nothing. Time itself didn't even exist before the Big Bang. There is no before.

What "caused" it?

Nothing. Not only don't phyiscists who study these sorts of things care about causality, they maintain that at the level at which things like "Big Bangs" happen, there IS no causality. It's not that they don't know what caused it; they maintain that nothing caused it. It just happened. Lots of particle physics works this way. What causes a radioactive substance to emit a beta particle at a particular moment? Nothing. Not "we don't know" but literally nothing causes it.


And whatever the heck was there to begin
with...where did THAT come from?

Before the Big Bang, there was nothing. All known space existed in what could be termed a "singularity", everything is condensed into a single point of zero volume and zero dimensions, but even saying implies that we could somehow view this singularity from the outside, since we can't. Imagine everything in the universe, including not only the stuff in the universe but all the space that that stuff occupies, condensed into a single point with no inside and no outside and in which time does not pass. That is the closest approximation to what was "before" the Big Bang.


It just seems to me that I come across a lot of stuff to prove that it
happened...just not WHY, and WHAT was there to begin with.

Higher-level physicists are on the order of Maharaja WRT their outlook on the world, as well as their ability to convey their understanding about these things to the general public in a way that fits with our Newtonian paradigm. Our senses tell us that the world works in a certain way. Physicists tell you that everything you know is, on the sub-atomic level, completely wrong. There is a very fine line between philosophy and particle physics. Read about "Shrodinger's Cat" sometime and you'll get my drift.

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Jason R Remy

"No amount of legislation can solve America's problems."
-- Jimmy Carter (1980)

[Ike Witt]

Here is a better question...what is space expanding into? If you can answer that question, you can answer the question about what was there before the big bang.

[Satan]

While watching my scientific- and logic-minded father debating the merits of science vs. religious faith with my married-to-a-preacher sister, this topic came up in the guise of how she thought it wrong that they taught the Big Bang in schools.

His response was odd for him - He said that science does not have any theories as to what happened the split second before the Big Bang - does not know how it happened, does not know what happened before it - and that it's origin "may very well have been from God."

My head exploded hearing this one from this man...No pun intended...

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Brian O'Neill
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[bantmof]

Here is a better question...what is space expanding into?
Here's what Ned Wright has to say about it:
This question is based on the ever popular misconception that the Universe is some curved object embedded in a higher dimensional space, and that the Universe is expanding into this space. This misconception is probably fostered by the balloon analogy which shows a 2-D spherical model of the Universe expanding in a 3-D space. While it is possible to think of the Universe this way, it is not necessary, and there is nothing whatsoever that we have measured or can measure that will show us anything about the larger space. Everything that we measure is within the Universe, and we see no edge or boundary or center of expansion. Thus the Universe is not expanding into anything that we can see, and this is not a profitable thing to think about. ... remember that the balloon analogy is just a 2-D picture of a 3-D situation that is supposed to help you think about a curved 3-D space, but it does not mean that there is really a 4-D space that the Universe is expanding into.
Questions like "what's it expanding into" are very intuitive to ask because we're used to our human-scaled world behaving in certain ways and having certain properties. But these properties need not scale down to the subatomic world or up to the level of the universe.

My own opinion is that even if there was an answer to that question, it wouldn't really matter, because there's no casual connect between us and anything outside our universe (or even to a good bit of stuff inside it). It can have no effect on us, nor we on it, so it's a moot point anyway.
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peas on earth

[bantmof]

I said: "no casual connect "

Err... make that "no causal connection."

I don't go out of my way to look like a dumbass; it just happens :-)
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peas on earth

[AHunter3]

OK, here we go again... so, you wanna know what was BEFORE the big bang, huh?

Look over here for a moment...I've got a different universe, in which the Big Bang hasn't occurred yet, and there's nothing in it! (If you pay me a couple bucks, I'll let you look at it). What's that, you say? You say I'm just IMAGINING this empty universe? Well, I say you can't distinguish between a genuinely empty universe and an imaginary empty universe. Go ahead, try! Now let's move on to the question of how long my empty universe has been hanging around waiting for its Bang, shall we? Or do you now grasp the problem?



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[Pickman's Model]

.if everything started with this "Big Bang".... What "caused" it?

"Let there be light." (BANG!)

[Czarcasm]

What caused the Big Bang?
The REALLY big Party Favor!