Hard to wrap my mind around this one. Anyone have any good analogies that fit?
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When you think of a bang you think of a dense cluster of matter and then all the chunks of matter flying away from their starting point. That is perfectly reasonable and makes complete sense in every single bang is like this in physical reality.
The Big bang had no bang. The name was a joke created by a man who hated the theory.
According to the standard model there was a time where how our universe had no volume and no matter. This cannot be proven because we can’t see that far back. The farthest back we can see is cosmic microwave background radiation. Everything else is modeled.
However, the background radiation itself gives you a good idea of what you are looking for. Before the cosmic microwave background radiation the entire universe was full of stuff and there was no point in the universe that was even remotely Empty. Energy was so packed together that it could not form stable atoms.
Picture an entire universe absolutely packed with a dense soup of energy. That is the Big bang theory at some point after the big bang moment.
Cosmic microwave background radiation happened when the density of all the stuff in the universe got sufficiently low so that if a stable atom formed it would not immediately be destroyed. The entire universe essentially went from ions to atoms and the photons that were still in transit. At that moment we’re not immediately reabsorbed by the ions and were therefore for allowed to continue to exist.
Those photons that existed right before the universe went transparent to photons, due to the universe being comprised of stable atoms rather than ions which absorb the photons immediately, are what we call cosmic microwave background radiation and this was the proof of the theory of the big bang.
So to answer your question, the reason you were having hard time picturing the big bang happening everywhere is because you were picturing a bang. Instead, picture the entire universe tightly packed with stuff and pictures of volume of the universe increasing over time without any change to the amount of stuff existing in the universe. That is the process of the expansion of the universe according to the Big bang theory.
According to the Big bang theory, the volume of the universe changes without real motion. So don’t picture a bang where anything moves instead. The mechanism of the big bang is that increase in volume. This is called metric expansion of space.
Another way to picture it which is much easier is to imagine the entire universe is the size it is now. Instead of metric expansion of space, we will have metric contraction of matter.
Imagine at the moment of the big bang at the Planck’s constant is infinitely large and therefore all particles are infinitely large. Now. Imagine all the particles in the universe shrinking over time.
At the start of this process the entire universe would be absolutely packed with stuff because everything takes up all the space. Over time the particles take up less space and at some point there is enough space in the universe for stable atoms to exist. As time continues and particles drink the atoms condense into galaxies and stars and whatnot and we get to the point we are today.
I offer this mental picture only because the concept of the volume of the universe increasing over time is more difficult than the concept of matter and particles shrinking over time.
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