The Big Bang ... It’s the best theory yet of what happened at the beginning of Time. But a new generation of scientists are daring to contemplate what was once thought impossible: are we wrong about the Big Bang? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s1e4: What Happened Before the Beginning? Science 2010
What happened before the universe began? ibid.
Forty years after two radio astronomers first heard a faint whisper from our own cosmic birth ... the WMAP image only describes a miniscule variation in temperature. ibid.
In 2001 two of the leading cosmologists in the world published a paper suggesting an even more radical approach ... Our universe may not be the only one. ibid.
String Theory was developed in the last thirty-five years. ibid.
The incredibly strange world of eleven-dimensional space. ibid.
Out of string theory comes M theory. ibid.
In our picture there was a universe before the Big Bang, very much like our universe today: a low density of matter and some stuff called dark energy. If you postulate a universe like this, but the dark energy within is actually unstable, then the decay of this dark energy drives the two branes together. These two branes clash and then, having filled with radiation, separate and expand to form galaxies and stars.
Then the dark energy takes over again. It’s the energy of attraction between the two branes: It pulls them back together. You have bang followed by bang followed by bang. You have no beginning of time. It’s always been there. Neil Turok
It may be that we live in an endless universe, both in space and in time. And there’ve been Bangs in the past, and there will be Bangs in the future. Neil Turok
My main interest is the problem of the singularity. If we can’t understand what happened at the singularity we came out of, then we don’t seem to have any understanding of the laws of particle physics. I’d be very happy just to understand the last singularity and leave the other ones to future generations. Neil Turok
If the universe sprung into existence and then expanded exponentially, you get gravitational waves travelling through space-time. These would fill the universe, a pattern of echoes of the inflation itself. Neil Turok
The first, and main, problem is the very existence of the big bang. Andrei Linde
One may wonder, What came before? If space-time did not exist then, how could everything appear from nothing? ... Explaining this initial singularity – where and when it all began – still remains the most intractable problem of modern cosmology. Andrei Linde
120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. Sam Harris, The End of Faith
String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string. Edward Witten
Most of what Einstein said and did has no direct impact on what anybody reads in the Bible. Special relativity, his work in quantum mechanics, nobody even knows or cares. Where Einstein really affects the Bible is the fact that general relativity is the organizing principle for the Big Bang. Neil deGrasse Tyson
For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up, the Universe will end in ice. Saul Perlmutter
A universe that came from nothing in the big bang will disappear into nothing at the big crunch. Its glorious few zillion years of existence not even a memory. Paul Davies
Where did all the matter and radiation in the universe come from in the first place? Recent intriguing theoretical research by physicists such as Steven Weinberg of Harvard and Ya B Zel’dovich in Moscow suggest that the universe began as a perfect vacuum and that all the particles of the material world were created from the expansion of space ...
Think about the universe immediately after the Big Bang. Space is violently expanding with explosive vigor. Yet, as we have seen, all space is seething with virtual pairs of particles and antiparticles. Normally, a particle and anti-particle have no trouble getting back together in a time interval ... short enough so that the conservation of mass is satisfied under the uncertainty principle. During the Big Bang, however, space was expanding so fast that particles were rapidly pulled away from their corresponding antiparticles. Deprived of the opportunity to recombine, these virtual particles had to become real particles in the real world. Where did the energy come from to achieve this materialization?
Recall that the Big Bang was like the center of a black hole. A vast supply of gravitational energy was therefore associated with the intense gravity of this cosmic singularity. This resource provided ample energy to completely fill the universe with all conceivable kinds of particles and antiparticles. Thus, immediately after the Planck time, the universe was flooded with particles and antiparticles created by the violent expansion of space. William J Kaufmann, Universe pp529-532
All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. Its lies try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior. Paul Broun, cited Los Angeles Times 7th October 2012
If the expansion of the space of the universe is uniform in all directions, an observer located in anyone of the galaxies will see all other galaxies running away from him at velocities proportional to their distances from the observer. George Gamow
It’s becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics. Martin Rees, cited Wolpert & Richards, A Passion for Science, 1988
The detection of gravitational waves by the BICEP2 experiment at the South Pole supports the cosmic inflation theory of how the universe came to be. The discovery, made in part by Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo, supports the theoretical work of Stanford’s Andrei Linde ...
Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of today's best telescopes. All this, of course, has just been theory.
Researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration today announced the first direct evidence supporting this theory, known as ‘cosmic inflation’. Their data also represent the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the ‘first tremors of the Big Bang’. Finally, the data confirm a deep connection between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity ...
Gravitational waves squeeze space as they travel, and this squeezing produces a distinct pattern. Stanford online report 17th March 2014, ‘New Evidence From Space Supports Stanford Physicist’s Theory of How Universe Began’
The primordial atom burst. Sending out its radiation. Setting everything in motion. One particle collides with another. Gasses expand. Planets contract. And before you know it we’ve got star-ships and holodecks and chicken soup. In fact you can’t help but have star-ships and holodecks and chicken soup because it was all determined twenty billion years ago. Star Trek: Voyager: Latent Image s5e11, Doctor to Janeway
This primeval atom then exploded. This explosion, or disintegration, was the first event in the history of the universe. Professor Bernard Lovell, Reith Lecture BBC 1958
Mathematics had laid out the history of the universe, and LeMaitre traces it backwards in his mind’s eye. The Entire History of the Universe e1: What Was the Big Bang? 2021
How did the universe begin? What was the trigger for its incredible expansion? And could our simple matter-brains ever even comprehend the real truth? ibid.
The Big Bang theory is now the accepted model for the cosmos - a picture of expansion over some 13.8 billion years. ibid.
What was there before? What is the universe expanding into? And why did it start at all? ibid.
Modern cosmologists have probed further and further back through our universe’s long history to try to understand the behaviour of matter, energy and space/time itself during these earliest moments. The Entire History of the Universe e2: What Was the Universe Like Immediately After the Big Bang
A lot can happen in one second. But is it enough time to build a universe? The Entire History of the Universe e12: Was Our Current Universe Inevitable at One Second Old?
It certainly began, but the nature of that beginning is still a matter of debate. ibid.
A single second has passed: the cosmos is filled with matter. The raw building blocks of everything we see today. ibid.