How did the big bang start from nothing?
In: Physics
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.
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