• Question: What triggered the big bang because if there was nothing there before, how could there be anything there to trigger it?

    Asked by anon-106860 to Adrian, Gaia, Jim, Scott, Vicky on 8 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by _xxemsxx_.
    • Photo: Scott Lawrie

      Scott Lawrie answered on 8 Mar 2016:

      Good question, Ki. This one always gives people headaches so bear with me 🙂

      The Big Bang started everything: space, time, matter and energy. There literally was nothing before it: not even time. It wasn’t like empty space was just ticking along minding its own business and then suddenly BANG! No. There literally was no time. Nothing was there and there was no time for that nothing to do anything in.

      We often think of the Big Bang as the North Pole of the Earth. Wherever you are on the planet you can go North. This is the same as saying wherever you are in the universe, you can always go back in time. But what happens when you get to the North Pole? There is no further north to go! The same thing happens at the Big Bang: you can go back in time, but at the point of the Big Bang there is no more time to go back into!

      I hope that helps 😎

    • Photo: Adrian Buzatu

      Adrian Buzatu answered on 8 Mar 2016:

      As we are inside a system (the Universe), it may be impossible to know what happened outside the system. There are hints from string theory there may exist many universes and a collision between them would produce a new Universe, hence a new Big Bang. We may never be able to test this hypothesis experimentally, though. Before Big Bang there was no time, no space, no matter. There was just energy and the laws of physics. So we may never happen what triggered the Big Bang.

    • Photo: Jim Barrett

      Jim Barrett answered on 8 Mar 2016:

      This is a very difficult question to answer, and some of the best scientists in the world haven’t been able to crack it.

      I’m personally uncomfortable with the idea that something came from nothing (you are too by the sound of it), so I like to think that the universe was born out of an old universe collapsing.

      Trouble is, the laws of physics forbid us ever actually knowing for sure…

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