How do we know what happened during the first few seconds of the Big Bang?
In: Planetary Science
We don’t know, we don’t even know if there was in fact a Big Bang. But with what we know about Newtonian physics, relativity, and quantum physics, we can model what happened after the first few tiny fractions of a second and get to what we see in the universe now via computer simulations. However those first few Planck seconds there was too much heat and energy to accurately model that.
A golf ball hits you. You know the direction it comes from, the speed when it hits you and the Earth gravity, so you trace back from that direction. You can model that all the way back, but your model will break down when it has to phase through the Earth at velocity. If you see a person at the path, you might conjecture that they caused the golf ball to hit you, but your model cannot tell you how that happened if they thrown it or hit it with a golf club.
Latest Answers