The history of the universe is written by cosmologists. And one of these biggest question marks at the moment is what happened just after the Big Bang? Horizon: Whispers of Creation, BBC 1994
The idea is that at the beginning there was just a soup of mass and energy existing at a single point. Then sub-atomic particles separated out from the energy. There was now a universe with tiny irregularities of mass called quantum fluctuations. Scientists believe that somehow these fluctuations grew to become the ripples on the background radiation. And it was those ripples that allowed gravity to get to work to form the galaxies. ibid.
Within a fraction of a second of the Big Bang physicists believe the absolute symmetry of the universe was shattered by a tiny fluctuation. The Forces split apart. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, The Hunt for the Higgs: A Horizon Special, BBC 2012
This is the story of how the Big Bang evolved from a left-field proposition to an excepted explanation of how the universe began. Lost Horizons: The Big Bang, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, BBC 2013
For generations scientists, particularly physicists like me, have tried to understand how the world around us came into being. ibid.
At the centre of this debate were two opposing theories: the first is that the universe has always been around ... the brainchild of Fred Hoyle ... Professor Hoyle passionately disagreed with the second idea – that the universe somehow was created out of nothing in an almighty explosion. ibid.
Professor Hoyle called his own idea the Steady State model. And at the time many cosmologists preferred it to its rival. ibid.
In 1949 he [Hoyle] coined the term Big Bang. ibid.
The Doppler Shift also applies to light: by measuring changes in the wavelength of light emitted from galaxies Hubble was able to figure out that galaxies were flying away from each other. And receding galaxies could mean only one thing – the universe was expanding. ibid.
Galaxies it seemed could not have formed from ordinary matter alone. Normal matter just wasn’t made of the right stuff to clump together and produce galaxies quickly enough after the Big Bang. Another strange type of material must have been at work as well. But unfortunately it didn’t seem to shine like normal matter. Which meant nobody was able to see it. So imaginatively it was called Dark Matter. In short to explain how galaxies came about scientists had to call on a new type of exotic material – dense enough to help galaxies form yet inconveniently invisible. ibid.
As for Dark Matter – it remains elusive. ibid.
But as soon as you delve deeper into the atom things get stranger. Hidden within the maze of mathematics were the descriptions of an array of sub-atomic particles no-one had ever seen before. ibid.
The Big Bang: the most violent explosion there has ever been brought everything into existence. This early universe was hot – so hot it contained only raging energy. After just one second some energy was transformed into the seeds of matter, and the universe filled with a dense fog. 400,000 years passed as the universe grew, and eventually the fog settled to form atoms. Horizon: Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong? BBC 2010
Big Bang theory says that the universe was created in an explosion. But an explosion would produce a universe that was lumpy and messy. With patches there were at vastly different temperatures from one area to another. The real universe is nothing like this. In all directions the temperature appears to be almost exactly the same. ibid.
Alan Guth, Professor of Particle Physics, and his creation was the Theory of Inflation ... Out of the blue our fledgling universe dramatically increased in size. Inflation says the universe started small, allowing the temperature to become the same everywhere. Then it an instant it underwent a massive expansion, but left everything perfectly smooth and uniform. ibid.
The explosion hasn’t stopped. The Big Bang is still banging. ibid.
Guth thinks our universe is part of a bigger structure; we’re in a small piece of it. A bubble created by Inflation. It could mean that Dark Flow is evidence our universe is not alone. ibid.
For thousands of years science has tried to understand the mysteries of the night sky. Horizon: What Happened Before the Big Bang? BBC 2010
The Big Bang is an elegant answer to the biggest question that science can ever ask. It’s a startling idea. It gives us a sense of origin. ibid.
The Big Bang doesn’t quite work. So much so that people are now starting to think the unthinkable ... It’s all effect and no cause. ibid.
The mathematical objection is that as the clock is wound back and Hubble’s zero hour is approached all the stuff of the universe is crammed into a smaller and smaller space. Eventually, that space will become infinitely small. And in mathematics invoking infinity is the same as giving up. Or cheating. ibid.
Dr [Laura] Mersini-Houghton’s idea was to manipulate the mechanics of that wave form with a branch of mathematics called String Theory. It seemed to provide an elegant solution as to why our universe emerged in the first place. ibid.
The Big Bang: a single moment of creation in which everything in the universe burst into existence. The Final Frontier: A Horizon Guide to the Universe, BBC 2012
What created the Big Bang? ibid.
Scientists in the United States say they have found the first direct evidence of what happened in the first moments of the universe. Horizon: The Hunt for Gravitational Waves, news report, BBC 2015
How the universe was born – this is the inside story of the greatest scientific quest of our time. ibid.
First predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago, they are invisible disturbances in the fabric of space and time itself. ibid.
The hot Big Bang model was about to get rewritten: Guth’s inflation. ibid.
How did inflation come to an end? ibid.
In the beginning – the universe was a bit of a let-down really. The real moment of creation came a hundred million years later – the Cosmic Dawn. It’s the moment the first stars were born. The moment that lit up the universe. Horizon: Cosmic Dawn: The Real Moment of Creation, BBC 2015
The Dark Ages are the last great frontier in our cosmic history. ibid.
Stefan’s [Keller] star ... from only the second generation of stars ever made. ibid.
Volker’s [Bromm] model has given us an image of these first stars. ibid.
Their huge size ... They burnt through their fuel incredibly quickly ... A hyper-nova: the biggest explosion ever in the universe. ibid.
Astrophysicists believe that Space and Time began 15 billion years ago in one shattering moment: the Big Bang. They are now uncovering the entire life story of the universe from its cataclysmic birth to its final extraordinary death. Unfolding Universe
When did the clocks start ticking? Twelve billion years ago there was absolutely nothing: no matter, no space, no time. We may never know how or why it happened, but a seething mass of energy smaller than an atom grew from nothing ... A giant fireball of unimaginable heat. Universe: Big Bang
Hidden in the interference of a badly tuned TV set is the energy signal left from the first second of the universe. The discovery of the Big Bang was one of the great scientific discoveries of all time even though it was an accident. This is the Horn Antenna at the Bell Research Labs in New Jersey. Its unusual funnel shape was designed to collect faint radio waves from early communications satellites. It was being used for an entirely different experiment when it detected something truly remarkable: a discovery that would win two American scientists the Nobel Prize. In 1964 Bob Wilson and his colleague Arno Penzias ... had no idea where the signal was coming from ... What Wilson and Penzias had stumbled across was a background of microwave radiation, a faint afterglow of the battle that defeated anti-matter twelve billion years before. ibid.
Some 13.7 billion years ago a mysterious event thrust the universe into motion in a Big Bang. The Universe s1e14: Beyond the Big Bang, History 2007
Acceptance and understanding are two different things. ibid.
So it was ironic that an early champion of an objective scientific theory of the origin of the universe was an ordained Catholic Priest. And what a strange twist that his science-based solution was to appear so religious. That the universe didn’t always exist. But there was once an ‘In the beginning’. Belgian Father George Lemaître argued that the universe was born ... Lemaître said the universe isn’t static but is actually expanding ... If the universe was expanding, Lemaître reasoned, it was smaller yesterday than it is today, therefore it must have once been unimaginably small. Lemaître believed that the universe began with what he dubbed as a primeval atom, an infinitely dense cosmic egg that had at some time in the past exploded. ibid.
In 1925 in the mountains above Los Angeles astronomer Edwin Hubble saw something in his telescope that destroyed Einstein’s cosmological constant. ibid.
‘Dickie had this idea of looking for the radiation.’ ibid.
This mysterious radiation was coming from everywhere … Penzias & Wilson and the Princeton team published their findings. ibid.
The Big Bang singularity gave rise to the entire universe, which includes Space, Time and all the matter that fills it. A similar type of singularity is a white hole – a theoretic object that arises in Einstein’s theory of Gravity. It’s essentially a black hole in reverse. A point of singularity where matter is ejected. Consequently, some scientists have wondered if the universe could have been created from a white hole. The Universe s2e2: Cosmic Holes
Physicists speculate that if nature uses white holes then they could have been an important element in the earliest stages in the universe. Perhaps even in the formation of the universe itself. ibid.