• Question: If the big bang started the universe, what started the big bang?

    Asked by desorgherm to Christina, Colin, Jess, Samaneh, Steve on 18 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by sherlock22.
    • Photo: Christina Pagel

      Christina Pagel answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      wow – that’s a deep question…
      and i don’t think you’ll like the answer… but the current thinking is that everything we know started with the big bang – and that’s not just atoms, starts etc but also the laws of physics themselves *including* time. So time isn’t something that exists outside our universe and just measures how long things take but it’s a fundamental *part* of our universe and other universes (if they exist) might have a ‘time’ that behaves very differently… what this means is that since time is part of our universe it didn’t exist before the big bang, and so asking what caused the big bang isn’t a question we can ask because “cause” and “effect” belong to our universe…

      i know that’s not very satisfying but the interesting thing to me is that as human animals, we’ve evolved to make sense of the world as we experience it – and fundamental to that is seeing cause and effect and the experience of time, so that I think we’re *physically* not able to think about time and cause and effect in any other way…

    • Photo: Steven Gardner

      Steven Gardner answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      String Theory has an idea that the big bang was started by two things called ‘branes’ (said the same as ‘brains’) colliding. Can’t say I really understand the idea though!

      Edited to add: Should probably explain what string theory is!

      String theory is the idea that all the different particles are in fact tiny loops and the particles we see are what results when these loops vibrate in different ways. You can think of it like each particle is a different note you can play on the string.

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