Did anything come before the Big Bang? Or was that event truly the beginning of everything? And if it was, then what was the spark that lit it? The Universe s2e11: Unexplained Mysteries
A few minutes were all Gamov needed. In that time all the hydrogen and almost all the helium was made. That’s about 98% of all the atoms in the universe today. Or as Gamov put it, our universe was cooked in less time than it takes to cook a dish of duck and roast potatoes. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Atom s1e2: The Key to the Cosmos, BBC 2008
Fred Hoyle soon became the most vocal of Gamov’s critics. Fred Hoyle hated the idea of the Big Bang with every fibre of his being. You see, as a committed atheist he objected to the theory because a single moment of creation to him smacked of a divine creator. ibid.
This giant piece of sadly rusting machinery is the Bell Labs horn antenna in New Jersey. It is in fact a radio telescope ... It was used in the 1960s to make one of the most important discoveries in the history of science. Two researchers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson ... [heard] a faint persistent hiss they couldn’t get rid of, and it was there in every direction the antenna pointed. There was only one viable explanation. The noise was the sound of radiation, the afterglow of Gamov’s Big Bang. Here at last was final proof that Gamov was right: the Big Bang had to have happened. ibid.
You can actually hear this radiation as a tiny fraction of the hiss on your radio or TV in between channels. ibid.
We are simply the debris of a huge annihilation of matter and anti-matter at the beginning of time. Jim Al-Khalili, Everything & Nothing: Nothing, BBC 2011
String theory has the potential to show that all of the wondrous happenings in the universe – from the frantic dance of subatomic quarks to the stately waltz of orbiting binary stars; from the primordial fireball of the big bang to the majestic swirl of heavenly galaxies – are reflections of one, grand physical principle, one master equation. Brian Greene
The astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the universe is not static; it's expanding due to the explosive force of the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago. Brian Greene, Beyond the Cosmos, National Geographic 2012
We really may be part of a multiverse ... The Generally accepted theory of the origin of our universe – the Big Bang. Professor Brian Greene, Beyond the Cosmos s1e4: Multiverse
Guth: Gravity can act in reverse. ibid.
Guth called this short burst of expansion inflation ... the powerful repulsive gravity of inflation was the bang in the Big Bang. ibid.
Eternal Inflation + Dark Energy + String Theory = We may live in a multiverse. ibid.
By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang. Carl Sagan, Cosmos, PBS 1980
Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery we know. That it happened is reasonably clear. All the matter and energy now in the universe was concentrated at extremely high density – a kind of cosmic egg, reminiscent of the creation myths of many cultures – perhaps into a mathematical point with no dimensions at all. It was not that all the matter and energy were squeezed into a minor corner of the present universe; rather, the universe, matter and energy and the space they fill, occupied a very small volume. There was not much room for events to happen in.
... The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then is now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colours of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated. As time passed, the fabric of space continued to expand, the radiation cooled and, in ordinary visible light, for the first time space became dark, as it is today. ibid. pp200-201
First of all, what do we really know about the Big Bang? Patrick Moore, The Sky At Night: Cooking the Elements, 1984
The Big Bang theory has had three main pillars for its support. And I think at the present time all those pillars – all three pillars – are in a somewhat shaky condition. Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, 1991
For every one billion particles of antimatter there were one billion and one particles of matter. And when the mutual annihilation was complete, one billionth remained – and that’s our present universe. Albert Einstein
The universe was an expanding structure – galaxies flying away from each other, flying away from each other ever more rapidly the further away they were. The implication of course of all this if you simply send time backwards everything is closer together in the past. So there’s the idea of something blowing up or flying apart. Professor Bob Dicke, interview BBC
If this radiation is present, will we be able to detect it? Professor Jim Peebles, interview BBC
The Big Bang is the origin of Space and the origin of Time itself. Professor Michio Kaku, author Physics of the Impossible, interview How the Universe Works
This is the Holy Grail of Physics. We want to know why it banged; we want to know what banged; we want to know what was there before the bang. ibid.
As a black hole collapses and matter falls into it perhaps the matter is blown out the other side in a white hole. Doesn’t that sound like the Big Bang? ibid.
The fundamental problem of cosmology is that the laws of physics as we know them break down at the instant of the Big Bang. Well, some people say, What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with having the laws of physics collapse? For a physicist this is a disaster! All our lives we’ve dedicated to the proposition that the universe obeys noble laws. Laws that can be written down in the language of mathematics. And here we have the centrepiece of the universe itself – a centrepiece – beyond physical law. Michio Kaku
The secret of creation, the secret of everything, is locked in that first second. Michio Kaku
The cosmic microwave background is the echo of creation itself. It’s the embers, the afterglow of the original shock-wave that created the universe. If we had microwave eyes, eyes that could see microwave radiation, then every night we would see the Big Bang coming out. Looking at the heavens, we would actually see an explosion … The discovery of the microwave background radiation ranks as one of the greatest discoveries in all of science. Michio Kaku
We were expecting to find a gas when we slammed gold nuclei into each other. The shock was it wasn’t a gas at all – it was a liquid ... like a soup. Michio Kaku
This is the greatest mystery in all of Science. What started creation itself? Big Bang theory has this tremendous hole in it. Michio Kaku
It all depends on how you define nothing. Michio Kaku
The Big Bang was unbelievably uniform. Professor Allan Guth
I came across this idea of inflation. The idea that Gravity under some circumstances can act repulsively. Allan Guth
This period of inflation could have been extraordinarily short. About a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. And that’s a decimal point followed by thirty-five zeros and a one. Alan Guth, MIT
In spite of the fact that we call it the Big Bang Theory, it really says absolutely nothing about the Big Bang. It doesn’t tell us what banged, why it banged, what caused it to bang. Alan Guth
We don’t exactly know when inflation happened – most likely it happened when Gravity had split off from the other three Forces, but at a time when the other three Forces were likely unified. Alan Guth
Inflation gets around this problem by essentially varying the expansion history of the universe. Alan Guth
Inflationary cosmology is a new twist on the big-bang theory. It doesn't in any way do away with the big-bang theory. It’s completely consistent with everything that's been talked about in terms of the big-bang model. What it does is change our conception of the history of the first small fraction of a second of the big bang. According to the new theory, the universe during this sliver of time underwent a period of inflation, a brief era of colossal expansion.
There are two key features that are different in inflationary cosmology from the standard big bang. One is that the inflationary model contains a mechanism by which essentially all the matter in the universe can be created during the brief period of inflation. In the standard big-bang model, by contrast, it was always necessary to assume that all the matter was there from the beginning, and there was no way to describe how it might be created. By the way, the inflationary production of matter is consistent with the principle of energy conservation, even though it can literally produce a universe from almost nothing. Energy is still conserved – this is all calculated in the context of standard classical general relativity. The unusual feature is that gravity plays a major role in the energy balance. It turns out that the energy of a gravitational field – any gravitational field – is negative. During inflation, as the universe gets bigger and bigger and more and more matter is created, the total energy of matter goes upward by an enormous amount. Meanwhile, however, the energy in gravity becomes more and more negative.