Big Bang question

[philophysics3]

Is this a true statement regarding the Big Bang?

"The BB is not that matter and energy ’exploded’ It is that matter and energy came into existence, along with time and space."

I'm in the middle of a discussion, and someone said that, and it struck me as wrong, but I thought "what the **** do I know?" so I came here.

BTW, i'm not really knowledgeable about physics, but I love you guys and what you do. I'm so sorry the physicist always dies in the science fiction films!

[mathman]

The big bang theory is on pretty firm ground about what happened a small fraction of a second after it happened. The origin of the bb is still an open question.

[Chronos]

The statement is correct, no 'explosion'.

[paxfeline]

But to say that "matter and energy came into existence [with the Big Bang]"? That seems like an unsupportable claim to me, essentially because of the situation mathman described.

[Arch2008]

I think that most people simply get confused when they hear that the early universe experienced explosive, i.e. rapid or exponential, growth and then infer an actual explosion occurred. The phrase "Big Bang" also contributes to this confusion.

[philophysics3]

Ya, ignore the 'explosion' part. I understand that it wasn't a literal explosion.

I'm more wondering about time and space coming into existence with the big bang.

[Axuality]

I am confident that while some of the largest minds allow it as a possible reality that something could come from nothing (i.e. time and space could 'come into existence'), that that would involve us in definitions of the words 'something' and 'nothing' which would break down and actually point out the fallacy of believing that 'something can come from nothing'.

Not to become philosophical, but as many of us on this forum know, physics becomes math in the final analysis, yet math is not the final frontier.

Entertain for a moment that science is not the explanation of things, it is the description of things. Only some nearly-unthought-of-yet philosophy can explain how and why the universe exists. Science/math can then learn to describe (and predict) everything else from there.

To say that the universe is, remands the discussion to an admittance that it has always been. Otherwise, the definitions of the words involved become folly.

[Chronos]

Something from nothing remains a viable explanation, semantics aside. The apparent fact the universe had a 'beginning' suggests an 'a priori' state. Whatever state that may have been is unknown. It might be more palatable to portray it as a universe from the 'unknown'. I agree with that characterization for now.

[Abbas Sherif]

The big bang theory is on pretty firm ground about what happened a small fraction of a second after it happened. The origin of the bb is still an open question. Hey there guys. Yeah I pretty agree with what you are saying mathman. tha was the planck's time 9 approximately 10^-43 seconds after the big bang. i think I will gpo with the creation of matter and energy. The energies were probably created from vacuum fluctuations. The energy density wich is a good source of matter gave rise to the particles. Infact, this is a very good time to postulate that all the forces existed as the same since the energy was large enough to keep the symmetry between the forces.

[herbert]

BTW, i'm not really knowledgeable about physics, but I love you guys and what you do. I'm so sorry the physicist always dies in the science fiction films!
Well, Laser physicists never die - they just become incoherent!

[Freeman Dyson]

I am kind of confused by this myself. A site called big bang theory.com says:

According to the many experts however, space didn't exist prior to the Big Bang. Back in the late '60s and early '70s, when men first walked upon the moon, "three British astrophysicists, Steven Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose turned their attention to the Theory of Relativity and its implications regarding our notions of time. In 1968 and 1970, they published papers in which they extended Einstein's Theory of General Relativity to include measurements of time and space.1, 2 According to their calculations, time and space had a finite beginning that corresponded to the origin of matter and energy."3 The singularity didn't appear in space; rather, space began inside of the singularity. Prior to the singularity, nothing existed, not space, time, matter, or energy - nothing.

http://www.big-bang-theory.com/

[doc.madani]

big bang wasnt an explosion, however it was the expansion of time and space into existance.