For example how did we know or come to assume that the Higgs field formed a trillionth of a second after it happened?
It all seems so specific and I think most topics in physics give unfulfilling answers and we’re just supposed to go with it. Thank you and sorry if I sound like an ignorant fool
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The reason it’s hard to give a fulfilling answer is because the current picture is based on decades of work and numerous sources of evidence. The basic idea of the Big Bang comes from observations that distant stars and galaxies are all moving away from us and each other. This led people to investigate, based on a mixture of theory and experiment, what a universe filled with extremely hot, dense matter would be like. The most important prediction was that there would be an intense burst of radiation at the point when the universe had expanded and therefore cooled enough that atoms could form. This was detected exactly as predicted, in the form of the cosmic microwave background, which has since been studied in great detail and essentially gives a snapshot of the universe at that point. Over time, more details have been added to the theory based on that and other sources of evidence, such as particle physics experiments and observations of the relative abundance of various isotopes and particles. I don’t know about the Higgs field in particular as I know very little about particle physics.
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