The Big Bang blew elements in all directions.  How to determine the start if some were directed away from us?
915186
Since the big bang was an explosion OF space rather than in space, your logic will not work.  Wherever you are in the Universe, everything is going away from you.
297935
Big Bang is a theory that tries to explain the formation of the universe, its galaxies, its stars and planets etc.\n\nIt says that the Universe was created by an explosion of a Primeval Atom thus causing it to expand and move away from each other. This was actually based on the Hubble Law which says that Galaxies around us are expanding at speeds directly proportional to their distance from Earth, based on the observation of Edwin Hubble, 1929.\n\nIts a huge topic with lots of technical arguments and counter arguments. Here is the link that will satisfy your quest on Big Bang, atleast for starters...\n\n.:Fishie:.
774298
Nowhere in the Big Bang theory it says that before it there was nothing. Basically because the big bang theory does not study what caused it and what was before it.\n\nSo your whole statement is wrong from its basis. The thermodynamic laws where not there before the big bang. Matter and energy and laws that govern it are for this universe we live in and experience daily and did not start to apply to only a few fractions of a second after the big bang. \n\nJust an addition for Mr Drummer boy below.\n\nWhen you start going back to far, things become fuzzy. The physical laws we’re all familiar with start to break down under such high energy densities. Really weird stuff starts to happen, like different fundamental forces ceasing to exist and merging with one another.\n\nThanks to work in particle accelerators, which can recreate such high energy densities for brief fractions of a second, we’re starting to get a feel for how physical laws operate under these conditions, and thus, are slowly working our way backwards. But there comes a point where we just don’t have a good enough handle on things to be able to say how things work back to pretty early (10-35 seconds), but things were happening so fast and furiously, there’s still a long ways to go before we can uncover what happened to cause the whole mess.\n\n\nWe only now start to see what was like in the very few fractions of the second after the big bang and there is plenty of evidence in the universe that something like that took place.\n\nOh by the way I cannot believe that you are a physics major and wrote to us that 10 to the minus 43 is .10000000000... which is obviously equal to 0.1 - 10 to the minus 43 is 0.000000000000000000000(42 zeros)1. If you got a physics major I am an astronaut.
580755
About the only thing I ever heard that made any sense was that there was another universe. The idea was that you have a big bang, which throws all the matter in the Universe outward from the center. After a while (a LONG while) gravity starts pulling these pieces closer together again and you get what's called the Big Crush, where the whole universe get's squidged up into a tiny, infinitely small point. The theory went on to say, that that spot would explode in a Big Bang and the whole thing would start all over again.
645859
No practical method has been found yet (unless I missed a memo somewhere), though it's still a very tantalizing possibility.  We'll have to be careful when the time comes near, however.  There's a chance that we could start a second Big Bang and pop another Universe into existence inside our own.  A rather significant environmental impact.\n\nMeanwhile, have a read of Arthur C. Clarke's novel "Songs of Distant Earth," where he talks about vacuum energy and such trivial concepts as stopping the expansion of the Universe.
502704
The universe is believed to have begun with the Big Bang. However the term 'begun' is a bit misleading since the Big Bang created time itself. Thus, if you think about it, the universe began with the Big Bang but, at the same time, it was always there since time itself only started then!\n\nIF the universe is on course to collapse in the Big Crunch presumably the argument will reverse and time will come to an end.
284884
Under the current Big Bang model the center of the universe is nowhere.  Ok. You don't like that, then how about the center of the universe is everywhere.\n\nThe Big Bang was not an explosion, the term "big bang" came from early opponents of the theory.  Basically it was the creation of space itself.  Subsequently that space has expanded, it is not expanding from somehwhere, it is expanding from everywhere.
1024461
The discovery of  the universe expansion(doppler red shifted spectrum lines) was the source of the Big Bang theory (i think)\n\nBTW: this is a SCIENCE thread, all you Jesus Freak back off!\nthe theory of the Big Bang is compatible with the concept of a god.\nwhat was there before the big bang ..let there be light....BANG.
694313
it's just the way we observe galaxies moving away from each other.  The further out from each other they are, the faster away from each other they move.\n\nFrom this and by analysing measures done on large numbers of galaxies, and then by taking these velocities and distances but plugging in older times in the data, it was found that, well, at some point back in time, all that stuff must have been concentrated at one point.\n\nAs the quality of experimental data improved, the Big Bang was the only theory that survived.\n\nBut in the early days, it was far from the only proposed model, so it is not at all, as you seem to believe, that physicists decided that you had to "build with explosions" ;-)\n\n\nhope this helps
395881
I hope that most of the previous answerers were joking. The Big-Bang theory is the best theory of the origin of the Universe that we have so far. It was formulated based on the expansion of the Universe, that we know because everywhere we look on the sky, on average, the galaxies are getting away from us, not because the "red radiation" but because of redshift, the light emitted by the galaxies is redshifted, which means that they are getting away form us (check at the Dopler effect to understand this), and the farther away the faster they are getting away, check: Hubble law. This means that the expansion is accelerated, then is natural to thing that going to the past the galaxies were closer together and there was a moment when they actually were in a single point of infinite density and energy, a singularity. The big bang states then that something caused this singularity to explode producing the accelerated Universe we see today with all the things inside. Now, Science can tell more or less how the Universe has evolved since a brief moment (less than one second) after big-bang until know, but it can not tell what happened at the "zero time" because general relativity breaks down in the singularity. Nobody know what triggered this big explosion.
621334
I am assuming you mean in "historical times" or otherwise it would have to be the "big bang" that supposedly created the known universe.\n\nThat aside, in 1908 (I think it was) in a remote area of Siberia called Tunguska, a huge meteor, comet, or something, alien craft for all anyone knows entered the atmosphere at such high speed it vaporized well above the ground like an "air burst" bomb.  It leveled hundreds of square miles of forest, set fires, killed all wildlife (and any nomads that may have been there) and was heard over most of the future Soviet Union and much of central Asia.  There are lots of old black and white photos taken by Russian exploration teams sent to find out what happened.  That one gets my vote. Search for "1908 Siberian meteor"
705974
We can see the cosmic background radiation. Contrary to what many would say this is not the big bang itself, but the moment the first atoms formed (when protons bonded with electrons) and photons of light could freely travel through space. This happend about 300,000 years AFTER the big bang. The universe was about the size of the Milky Way Galaxy at that time.\n\nWe cannot see before this moment in time. Before this, information in the form of photons could not propagate. The actual moment of the big bang will forever be beyond reach.
306643
THE "BIG BANG" is theroy that does not have to include "smoke".  The idea is that life may have started with "contact."   This could have been as small as two atoms that touched.  \nYour question assumes to many factors as facts for a complete answer.
571217
You misunderstand the Big Bang theory. The universe did not start from a big ball of matter. For the first 10-34 seconds we simply don't have the physcis figured out as to what happened. There are many conjectures, though.\n\nThe first difficulty is that General Relativity predicts something called a singularity at the Big Bang. A singularity is something like what you see at the north pole. There is no 'north of the north pole' simply because the coordinate system can't be extended that way. Under General Relativity, there is no 'before the Big Bang' because thw time coordinate cannot be extended past that point. Remember that time itself is part of the structure of the universe, so time began when the universe did (in this view).\n\nAnother view is obtained through quantum mechanics. We know that modern vacuums are never completely empty. They are a blur of particles apperaring and disappearing all the time. The state of having absolutely nothing is actually a very high energy state. When that state decayed into a lower energy state, that provided the energy that subsequently became the matter we see around us. In this scenario, the singularity predicted by relativity is blurred out by the quantum effects, but the net result is that all the matter literally came out of a vacuum. This is possible without violating conservation of energy because the vacuum state 'befroe the Big Bang' had a higher energy than all the matter we see around us.\n\nAnother possibility is a 'bouncing universe' where the universe goes through cycles of collapse and expansion. The collapse before the current cycle provided the energy for the current one. There are modifications to this where 'universes' bud off of the vacuums of other ones.\n\nAll of this is highly speculative. However, we do know that a Big Bang is how things got started about 13.7 billion years ago. We see the afterglow of the hot, dense time at the beginning all around us in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CBE).
667088
It comes from the Prime Mover. The one who started the first large bang. Some people label that first mover as God, Jehovah, or Allah.
580560
Probably like it started, with a BIG BANG.
835420
When the one location is definable as a mathimatical singularity you'd be surprised what can happen, it has been postulated that the "Big Bang" had more space dimensions then the present universe and if that's the case then it very easily could have been the origin of all matter. How many 2-D circles fit in a sphere? Infinitly many. Same idea.\n\nAnd the "Big Bang" wasn't a cherry-bomb-in-space. There was no space. Thanks to Relitivity we know that Space and Time are consequences of the existance of gravity and quantum mechanical forces which require matter and energy too exist. Trying to use conservation of mass to disprove Big Bang isn't valid, as there was no space or time before the Big Bang so there's nothing to compare it to.\n\nAs for whether or not there's evidence for the Big Bang, I beg to differ. The Cosmic Radiation Background is more then just proof, it's the proverbial smoking gun. I really hope this helps.