 |
Public domain image by geralt via Pixabay.
|
Various
hypotheses exist about the creation of the universe, one of the most
popular in science being the Big Bang Theory. However unlike the
creation of the world depicted in the Book of Genesis, there was no
"void". There was no space nor time either and the Big Bang didn't
happen "over there" at a point we could put a sign at today saying "This
is Where the Big Bang Occurred, 13.7 Billion Years Ago". In a sense, it
happened everywhere. There's much speculation and lots of hypotheses in
the world of physics about how exactly the event occurred, and even
complex physics can't totally explain it. Current thinking is that the
event occurred at a singularity or point in the mathematical sense, with
no dimension or at least it was extremely small, of the order of 10⁻³⁵
m. Everything in the current universe existed at that tiny point. Space
and time were also created when the Big Bang occurred, and space was, is
and will continue to be created as the universe expands (i.e. the
explosion didn't expand into a pre-existing enormous void, space is
"made" during the expansion). Also asking what happened before the Big
Bang is an invalid question because time only began when the event
occurred. There was no "before".
This episode of Big Picture Science from 2012 explores these concepts.
