what questions still remain about the Big Bang?
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Big Bang is a proven fact... nothing remains unsolved!\n\nBig Bang is that event in the history of the whole cosmos that without the big bang... the existence of the present cosmos would never have been possible.\n\nA cosmos without a Cosmos... it is only for an umpteenth moment of a second... the time between the dissolution of the Cosmos (called Pralaya in Hinduism) and the start of a fresh Cosmos with the big bang that there exists nothing but an absolute blank.\n\nI get a lot of queries as to why the Cosmos was created by Almighty God in the first place. What was the need to do that? If we define God then the things would become pretty clear.\n\n\nWhat is the Definition God? The sum total of all purified Souls Atmans in the whole of Cosmos at a given moment of time is what we know as Almighty God. These purified souls... the size of half a thumb as defined in the sacred Bhagvad Gita (the doctrine put forward by Lord Krishna at the time of Mahabharata, the war of dharma) unable to contain themselves explode with the big bang.\n\nThis conceptualizes the start of the Cosmos with a big bang. The explosion (the big bang itself) is so massive that all Souls Atmans spread out with unbelievable speeds in all directions. In the process on their way they collect impurities.\n\n\nAs the prime property of any soul atman is to remain in pure pristine form... it again starts on its journey of purification. This leads to the journey by a soul atman through a chain of manifestations (a total of 8.4 million manifestations in total)... the beginning of a cosmic life cycle. A total earthly journey of about 96.4 million years... a long journey indeed!\n\nThe sooner the big bang occurs... starts the journey of every soul atman to come back to its pristine pure form. As any planet like Mother Earth is found conducive for germination of any form of life... the Souls Atmans have their day.\n\nTo purify them... every soul atman needs a body to work out its karma. And what is karma? As defined in the Hindu sacred Scriptures and the Bhagvad Gita, karma is the process by which every soul atman is able to cleanse itself of the impurities contained within.\n\n\nSimilarly as the metal within an ore cannot separate itself on its own and requires the requisite mining machinery and the process... likewise every soul atman on its cosmic journey requires a body to work out its karma (i.e. remove the dross from within).\n\nThis is how the need for creating a Cosmos arises. The big bang is not a controlled feature. It happens on its own. The moment the dissolution of the Cosmos occurs (called Pralaya in Hinduism)... the combined power of all the souls (the size of half a thumb) unable to control it explodes with a big bang... the start of a new journey... a new Cosmos!\n\nWhatever logistics the various group of scientists put forward as to how the Cosmos was created... some accept and some do not accept the theory of the big bang... the facts and the truth remains the same. It is only through the process of the big bang and only the big bang that formation of any new Cosmos takes place.\n\n\nReduced to the basic building block of the whole Cosmos... the whole world nay the whole Cosmos is but a cluster of atoms and molecules. It is pure energy all around surrounded by ether... the black and the empty portion of the Cosmos.\n\nBhagvad Gita explains in minute details the complete formation of the Cosmos from the beginning to the end. Nothing is hidden... it is only when things are perceived from the angle of absolute faith... the inner meaning of the concepts explained in Bhagvad Gita become clear.\n\nBhagavad Gita is beyond the capture of the senses and the mind. The prime reason why majority of the scientists around the world have failed to learn of the wisdom contained in the Bhagvad Gita. It is not purely logistics but also the element of faith which is essential for learning what Bhagvad Gita has to impart to the humanity.\n\n\nOne single document Bhagavad
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Wow, what great questions.  Just so you know, we don't know the answer to what was before the big bang.  One idea is that our universe expands, then contracts on itself, over billions of years, and the whole big bang repeats over.  In other words countless universes preceded our own.
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The universe contains all the matter and energy that was ever in it.\n\nSo, going from the Big Bang Hypotheisi, it is reasonable to assume that there was a flash of light (energy, which must remain within the universe) at the time of the explosion.\n\nGiven that light travels at a constant speed, and the universe is about 15 billion years old, the universe is an every expanding sphere of space, 30 billion light-years across.\n\nWhilst it may not go on forever, you'll never reach the outer  boundary!
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Is the Big Bang Theory still as widely accepted in the scientific world? Or is it losing ground to other theories?\n\nThe Big Bang Theory indicates that we live in an ever-expanding universe, moving away from every other universe on the fabric of space-time.  Although some scientists are careful to point out that “Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbor, is actually moving toward us, not away. Such exceptions arise because Hubble's law describes only the average behavior of galaxies (Scientific American March 2005).”\n\nBelief in One Theory\n\nSo many take the position that “my idea is all correct and your idea is all wrong.”  These ideas can be labeled as theories, doctrines, or whatever; they challenge us to examine our ideas and the views of others.  If we are insecure, we prefer to dismiss the viewpoints of others rather than examine our own.  However, if we are emotionally mature, we tend to be willing to review our own position and seek the merit in the perspective of others.  Such emotional maturity was once defined as “I am what I am, nothing better, nothing worse, and I find it good.”  This non-competitive stance is essential for open-minded pursuit of truth and knowledge.\n\nAny one who knows about blueprints, mechanical drafting, or architecture understands that it takes at least 3 different viewpoints to be able to accurately understand and recreate anything.  The most commonly used are the top, side, and front views.  For example, a table from the top view is a long and wide rectangle.  From the front view it is narrow and long.   From the side view it is narrow and short.  It is fruitless to argue that any one of these perspectives is false.\n\nIn layman’s terms, we might say that the sky is blue.  Someone else that it is orange.  In comprehensive reality, we can admit that it is sometimes blue and sometimes orange; indeed, sometimes it can be both at the same time.\n\nScientists may argue that light consists of waves, not particles.  Other scientists might insist that light is made of particles, not waves.  However, many modern scientists are beginning to embrace the necessity of models that include both these concepts.  Moreover, the characteristics of something do not have to be restricted to only 2 or 3 substantiated theories or viewpoints; a deep understanding of things may involve a panoramic examination of multiple views, like a spinning and swerving car in a television commercial.\n\nWith that foundation, let us examine the Big Bang Theory, in relation to other current theories of cosmology.  Let me point out the relative merits of each position briefly and how they could possibly harmonize.\n\nBig Bang\n\nThe Big Bang Theory remains the dominant scientific theory about the origin of the universe.  The red shift of light from distant nebulas proves that everything is moving away from a starting point, an expanding universe.  The fact that there is a relationship between these celestial objects speed and their distance reinforces their common origin.  If true, there should be cosmic background radiation, and there is.  Physics tends to support the details of the theory including the cooling that may have lead to the sequential creation of matter and antimatter particles, including quarks, protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos and photons.  Similarly, the relative properties of the basic elements tend to support their sequential development, including deuterium (heavy hydrogen), tritium and helium.  The ratio of one helium atom for every ten or eleven atoms of hydrogen is a constant in the universe today.\n\nUnresolved problems with this theory are the age of the universe and the basis on a “singularity” (an event which defies current rules of physics).   Also, while the Big Bang Theory defines an event of creation, it does not define what caused it to happen.\n\nThe Big Crunch\n\nIf the total gravitational force of all matter is high enough, it would slow the expansion of the
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First of all, the Big Bang theory does not address how the universe actually got started. It describes how the universe has been since that point. And it is remarkably well established for times after about 1 millisecond after things got started. The universe is expanding and went through a period of very fast expansion early on. The temperature has been decreasing since the start which was about 13.7 billion years ago.\n\nHow things actually got started is *much* more specualtive. There are two main ways that people approach this, but I want to emphasize that neither is actually part of the Big Bang theory and that both are *very* specualtive. We simply don't have the data to figure out what happened before that first millisecond or so.\n\nThe first approach is to point out that time itself is part of the fabric of the universe. It is not something idependent. Part of the nature of the Big Bang in general relativity is that it is a 'singularity'. An analagous thing would be to look at the north pole. This is a singularity in the coordinate system of latitude and longitude. You can't go 'north of the north pole'. In a very similar way, the time coordinate cannot be extended (in this approach) past the Big Bang. This means there is no 'before the Big Bang'. Time simply doesn't make sense at that point.\n\nThe other main approach is to say that the singularity predicted by general relativity doesn't happen because of smoothing out by quantum effects. This *could* allow the time coordinate to extend past the Big Bang (but it doesn't have to). In this scenario, the Big Bang was a quantum fluctuation that 'got out of hand' and underwent exponential growth becoming the universe. The beginning was random since such quantum events are random (this is known and established). However, there would be physical laws describing the probabilities of such things happening. In this approach, there can be multiple universes that don't interact and that have various physical properties different than our own.\n\nI hope this helps!
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err the big bang was not really a a collision of matter. All mass and energy in the universe existed at a sigularity, or a dimensionless point. The Big Bang simply expanded and inflated it.
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The Big Bang \n\nAbout fifty years ago, American astronomers studying the galactic star clusters, stumbled on evidence that the entire Universe is blowing up before our eyes. According to their observations, all the galaxies in the Universe are moving away from us and from one another at very high speeds, and the most distant are receding at the extraordinary speed of hundreds of millions of miles an hour.\n\nFirst there was nothing and it blew up and then there was everything and scientists have calculated that it all happened in 1043 of a second. [The] echo of that explosion can still be heard bouncing around in space. Scientists claim that in the big bang all of the fundamental particles necessary for life were formed. All of the complexity we see around us is the result of this massive explosion.\n\n"The new finding hit the scientific world like a thunderclap." It meant that the idea of an ultimate beginning was no longer merely religious dogma. Science itself now indicated that the universe burst into existence at a particular time in the remote past.\n\nIn 1992 measurements by the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and by the Hubble Space Telescope seemed to confirm beyond any reasonable doubt that the Big Bang cosmology is indeed correct. George Smoot, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Principle Investigator of the COBE team which made the discovery, said regarding these new observations, "What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe . . . It's like looking at God."\n\nWorking backwards, the evidence implies that there was a time when the universe was infinitesimally small. The evidence from general relativity also indicates that it was not merely a case of the matter in the universe being concentrated at a particular location, but that space itself was this tiny. At a sudden instant in time all of the energy and mass in the universe was located at this infinitesimally small point and exploded. The currently observed outbound motion of the galaxies from each other is a continuing effect of that explosion.\n\n"The scientific community is prepared to consider the idea that God created the universe is a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last 100 years," Frederic B. Burnham, science historian, declared.\n\nHowever, some die-hard secularists propose that the universe goes through endless cycles of expansions and collapses. Hence, eternity becomes nothing more than an eternal succession of big bangs followed by big crunches followed by big bangs followed by big crunches over and over again and again forever.\n\nBut this violates the second law of thermodynamics, the law of decay, that implies that the universe is in a process of gradual disintegration - running down, like a wound-up clock. And if it is running down, then there must have been a time when it was wound up. Once the big bang takes place and the universe begins its expansion, entropy starts to increase. From this point on it will never be able to go back to its original state.\n\nWhat's more, the first law of thermodynamics (the conservation of matter) implies that matter cannot just pop into existence or create itself. And therefore, if the universe had a beginning, then something external to the universe must have caused it to come into existence - something, or Someone, transcendent to the natural world.\n\nThe facts clearly indicate that the universe is not eternal, and it cannot originate itself The implication is that the universe began at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy. Science has begun to sound eerily like Genesis 1: "And God said, 'Let there be light"' (1:3).\n\nThe evidence requires that we believe God formed the universe at His command, pointing to the importance of taking God at His word literally - from the beginning both of time and the Bible. Second, there is such a striking parallel between the Hebrews 1
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Big Bang is the only acceptable theory for now.\nSteady State isn't really accepted anymore.\n\nBig Crunch is a variation of the Big Bang theory that is becoming less and less accepted.\n\nFrom what we've gathered there's not enough matter in the universe to bring it back together (the Big Crunch) so therefore it will keep expanding forever.
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Current theory places the Big Bang at 13.7 billion years in the past, with a possible error of 100 million years.  This is based on the Hubble Constant, studies of formation of galaxies, distribution of quasars, all sorts of arcane things in astronomy.   Telescopes can pick up things dating from 300,000 years after the Big Bang, but theory suggests space would be opaque to visible light earlier than that.
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The Big Bang theory is a scientific theory in cosmology, initially suggested by Georges Lemaitre. It is essentially the most widely accepted theory about the universe's origin. \n\nThe idea is that the universe was created sometime between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago (current estimate ~13.5 billion) from a cosmic explosion that hurled matter in all directions. Before that point all matter was concentrated at an infinitessimal point, known as a singularity. \n\nThe idea was most strongly propounded after the astronomer Edwin Hubble (after whom the famous telescope is named) found in 1929 that distant galaxies in every direction are going away from us with speeds proportional to their distance, suggesting at some point they were all at a single point. The theory also predicted the existence of a cosmic background radiation (the glow left over from the explosion itself). and received widespread acceptance when this radiation was actually discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in the 1960s.
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Hi bornsmartgal\n\nOther possible explanations for the observations which support big bang theory are numerous.  They tend to focus on trying to explain the redshift observations, and they include tired light, strange compton scattering, large hydrogen clouds, etc.  The thing is that no single explanation (other than big bang theory) explains *all* the observations.  For example very few of them explain the time dilation of distant supernovas.  There's also the Tolman surface brightness test which distinguishes between big bang models and other models by a factor of z^4 (this is a nice test because it gives a very large discrepancy).  Only an expanding universe passes the test.\n\n\nHope this helps!\nThe Chicken
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The scientific theory is that the Universe started as a fluctuation of the vacuum. Such vacuum fluctuations make appear a small amount of energy, for a small time. \n\nNot so the Big Bang. That was a HUGE fluctuation. So big that a lot of energy came to appearance in the form of mass, elementary particles. These particles started expanding, before the vacuum could reclaim the energy.\n\nAnd it is still expanding today. 14 billion years later.\n\nNow for some speculation. Is our Universe the only one? Maybe not. The Big Bang was one big fluctuation, maybe other smaller or bigger, take place all the time.\nBut most of these fluctuations will produce Universes in which conditions are just not suitable for life.\nThe Universe we observe is by necessity one in which the conditions are just right for us to have evolved into Homo Sapiens capable of asking questions.
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They believe that matter and energy were created during the Big Bang, however, that raises for a lot more questions, the most obvious one being:\n\nHow can matter and energy be created?
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You have to think back and ask the correct questions to answer this one. The theory of the "Big Bang" is incorrect. First Question: "Where did the matter come from for the "Big Bang"? Answer: "From somewhere else". Keep asking the question of "Where did something come from"? and you have to arrive at the fact that at some point, there was absolutely nothing.\n\nThis is a very hard concept to understand and think about because you always want to think in terms of a "void" if you try to think of nothing, but you have to realize that "a void" is "something" so you have to think of "nothing", "nada", "zip".\n\nThen you can arrive to the conclusion that...\n\n"It is the propensity for NOTHING to create SOMETHING".\n\nThe very first thing nothing would create is energy, something that would keep manifesting itself and propegate. That is what you would call "Life". Some refer it to "God" but it still all the same thing and exists everywhere in the universe.\n\nThis "Energy" would eventually become so extreme that it would create the "void", then the energy would transform into matter and gravity and begin to fill the void.\n\nThese three forces are the basis for all the laws of our current "Universe" and have dictated it's behavior ever since.\n\nThe universe if far older then the 13 billion years old we now can detect, it is constantly changing, expanding, and filling the ever greater void it creates as the energy, matter and gravity continues to be created.\n\nTo answer your question, you are sitting on it, it does not sit on anything.\n\nWhen your coporal body can no longer contain the energy that created you, as in all "living" things, your energy will again become part of this universe, no matter how trivial that energy may be, it is still a part of the entire energy that was and is still being created at this time.
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This is probably more a philosophical question than scientific one, as it is (currently) impossible to prove.  The answer, then, is a matter of faith.  If you are religious, and believe in an eternal God, then there has always been something, but not the present universe (which, by definition, would have to exists "in" God, as that being is without boundaries and could not be contained).\n\nIf you are not religion-bound, then you can argue either point.  The Big Bang theory only speaks about what happened after the inception of the universe, not what was present before.
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The Big Bang Model is a broadly accepted theory for the origin and evolution of our universe. It postulates that 12 to 14 billion years ago, the portion of the universe we can see today was only a few millimeters across. It has since expanded from this hot dense state into the vast and much cooler cosmos we currently inhabit. We can see remnants of this hot dense matter as the now very cold cosmic microwave background radiation which still pervades the universe and is visible to microwave detectors as a uniform glow across the entire sky.\n\nFurther readings:\n    * Peebles, P.J.E., Schramm, D.N., Turner, E.L. & R.G. Kron 1991, "The Case for the Relativistic Hot Big Bang Cosmology", Nature, 352, 769 - 776.\n    * Peebles, P.J.E., Schramm, D.N., Turner, E.L. & R.G. Kron 1994, "The Evolution of the Universe'', Scientific American, 271, 29 - 33.\n    * Will, Clifford, "Was Einstein Right?"
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The last response made a good point.  Science only seeks to answer certain questions.  What exists "outside" the universe? What existed before the Big Bang?  These are questions that scientists currently are not seeking.  That question is left up to the philosophers for now.  \n\nThe questions really point to a better understand of the universe and whether that question is important, relevant or even consistent with our present knowledge of the universe.  \n\nAstronomers and physicists find the surface of an expanding balloon a good analogy for the nature of our universe.  The surface, just surface mind you, of that balloon has no center or edge to it.  Just like how we understand the universe.  The surface material of the balloon would be what we call space-time.  \n\nWhat is outside the surface of the balloon?  Well there is no balloon material outside so it is not space as we know it but one perspective says it is a future balloon surface.  Just like inside the balloon was once a past balloon surface.  \n\nThe universe could have a similar analogy.