How did the big bang start from nothing?
In: Physics
It depends on your belief system.
As someone else mentioned, the big bang was so violent that it likely destroyed any evidence that caused it.
Others believe God said “Let there be light” and BANG! There was light! If there was nothing before, trying to minimize God’s existence minimizes the power that goes along with Divine Power.
And still others believe God and Science can coexist.
Like they said, nobody really knows. But there is room in Einsteins equations for something to spring from nothing. Personally though I think that it was a black hole that got so big it exploded, much like a supernova. Just a theory.
We don’t know.
In fact, it’s not really confirmed that the big bang happened. The only evidence is that it appears everything is moving away from a focal point over a similar timeline. There are other origin theories aswell. The problem is, we can only see so much at a time, and what we see has taken a long time to reach us. The further away we look, the further back in time we are looking.
We do not know. There are some theories how how the big bang happened but there is no way to confirm or deny those theories yet. It is not like we can observe things that happened before time. So we might never know.
We have no evidence that the BB started from nothing. We also have no evidence that the BB started from some physics experiment gone wrong. The whole point of our theories on space and time is that our theories all start at a single point which we call the BB. We have no evidence to support any theories beyond or before that point. Our very definition of “before” and “beyond” do not extend past that point. There is no scientific evidence yet collected that extends beyond those definitions, and this question can never be answered with physics as presently defined.
Nothing says it did come from nothing. The crazy thing is that we know the bang happened. There’s irrefutable evidence of that. The problem is it was such a violent event that it destroyed any evidence about what actually banged or why it banged. That said, I will give you one hypothesis that has been discussed. Virtual particles. They are particles that pop into and out of existence all the time in the vacuum. It is thought that a virtual particle so massive sprung into existence that it exploded into the universe we see today. It is incredibly unlikely that a particle like this could ever exist, but …it only had to happen once.
There is a half-answer to your question.
As long as everything is sum-0, there is technically no reason you can’t get “something” from “nothing,” just as if x=0, x can also equal -1+1.
I put those words in quotations because the concept of nothing is debatable. Physics says even empty space, completely devoid of matter and photons, has energy. It’s actually ripe with virtual particles – the quantum version of a -1+1.
Some hypotheses suggest a phase change could have caused a massive production of particles and energy that still sum to 0 total energy.
The big bang model basically just says that the universe has been continually expanding for a long time, and that a long time ago (around 14 billion years ago) the entire universe was full of hot, dense matter. We know a huge amount about what has happened since, but we don’t really know what happened before this point because the early universe was so hot that presumably all kinds of weird processes would have been going on that we have no way of knowing about. One of the reasons why people build particle accelerators (though certainly not the only one or even the main one) is to create conditions that are a bit like the early universe, to study how it would have worked.
Anything you might hear about what happened before the big bang – for example that it originated out of nothingness, or that there was another universe beforehand, or that there was no time before the big bang – is just speculation at this point.
Well, likely the universe (or our universe) didn’t come from nothing. I offer here, a fairly shared, idea on how our (and likely other) universe began. The big bang or start of our universe may have began from cosmic strings with negative mass via a wormhole, which may allow for virtual particles to effectively begin a ‘big bang’ event, or the creation of a universe.
A rare event, as our understanding goes, but with the age of a say superverse and some near infinite possibilities, one may deduce we’re not alone. Or, we’re not the only universe that exists. This of course is purely hypothetical, as we hardly understand our own universe, but we shouldn’t be so, hmm, egocentric about the plausibility of multiverses. This of course is outside your question.
So in summary, as far as our physics can explain but unfortunately far outside of ELI5, we very much didn’t start from nothing, and most likely we (as a universe) aren’t alone.
A thought for the day: is another entity in another universe asking the same question as you?
Basically, nothing split in half. Nothing contains everything required to create anything. Mind trip!
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