Search results
Jan 6, 2022 · Exactly what existed before the birth of our own Universe remains a mystery, but that is not stopping some physicists from trying to figure it out.
Jan 2, 2017 · Now and only now do we get to the stunning public reveal. On January 1, 1925, Hubble remained in splendid isolation at Mount Wilson while Russell read his revolutionary paper about the existence of other galaxies to an enthusiastic crowd. Hubble shared the best-paper prize.
- 1 min
- Denise Chow,Scott Dutfield
- How it all started. The Big Bang was not an explosion in space, as the theory's name might suggest. Instead, it was the appearance of space everywhere in the universe, researchers have said.
- The universe's first growth spurt. When the universe was very young — something like a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second (whew!)
- Too hot to shine. Light chemical elements were created within the first three minutes of the universe's formation. As the universe expanded, temperatures cooled and protons and neutrons collided to make deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen.
- Let there be light. About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, matter cooled enough for electrons to combine with nuclei to form neutral atoms. This phase is known as "recombination," and the absorption of free electrons caused the universe to become transparent.
- The First Matter
- Cycles from Almost Nothing
- Experimental Evidence?
- An Ancient Myth
But before we get to that, let’s take a look at how “material” – physical matter – first came about. If we are aiming to explain the origins of stable matter made of atoms or molecules, there was certainly none of that around at the Big Bang– nor for hundreds of thousands of years afterwards. We do in fact have a pretty detailed understanding of ho...
To truly answer the question of how something could arise from nothing, we would need to explain the quantum state of the entire universe at the beginning of the Planck epoch. All attempts to do this remain highly speculative. Some of them appeal to supernatural forces like a designer. But other candidate explanations remain within the realm of phy...
Conformal cyclic cosmology offers some detailed, albeit speculative, answers to the question of where our Big Bang came from. But even if Penrose’s vision is vindicated by the future progress of cosmology, we might think that we still wouldn’t have answered a deeper philosophical question – a question about where physical reality itself came from. ...
For a philosopher of science, Penrose’s vision is fascinating. It opens up new possibilities for explaining the Big Bang, taking our explanations beyond ordinary cause and effect. It is therefore a great test case for exploring the different ways physics can explain our world. It deserves more attention from philosophers. For a lover of myth, Penro...
- 34 min
In a remarkable scientific leap, 20th century scientists were able to reconstruct the timeline for how our Universe went from a mostly uniform Universe, devoid of complex structure and...
Mar 15, 2022 · Our expanding universe: Age, history & other facts. The universe was born with the Big Bang as an unimaginably hot, dense point. When the universe was just 10 -34 of a second or so old — that...
People also ask
What is the history of the universe?
How did the universe evolve?
When did the universe come out of its Dark Ages?
How old is the universe?
What kind of universe did the Big Bang theory predict?
Is the universe expanding?
The Big Bang theory raises some important questions about the fundamental nature of the universe: Will the expansion of the universe, set in action by the Big Bang, continue forever? Or will gravity stop the expansion and eventually cause all the matter in the universe to contract in a Big Crunch?
