• Question: Why did the big bang happen?

    Asked by laurensugden to Ceri, Arttu on 16 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Ceri Brenner

      Ceri Brenner answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      i think that’s what particle physicists and astrophysicists are still trying to work out

    • Photo: Arttu Rajantie

      Arttu Rajantie answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      I suppose mean why the universe began. We don’t really know (yet), but there are some theories. One of them, which Stephen Hawking explains in his “A Brief History of Time” is that the universe began as a quantum mechanical tunneling event which rounded off the initial singularity. Others think that the universe has actually existed forever. What we see around us may be only a small bubble in an infinite eternal universe and similar bubbles would be constantly popping up. Alternatively our universe may have been going through repeating cycles of big bangs and big crunches.

      At the moment we cannot be sure if any of them is correct. With our observations we can only really see what happened after the initial moment, but we are getting closer and closer to it. When we understand these early times better, we will hopefully be able to test our theories.

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