• Question: How close, realistically, are we to discovering how the universe was created?

    Asked by pokemaster1337 to Dilwar, Lou, Rachel, Simon, Susan on 11 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Simon Langley-Evans

      Simon Langley-Evans answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      Pokemaster, I am not a physicist but as far as I know the ideas that cosmologists have come up with about the origins of the universe are pretty secure. The Big Bang has been modelled in a lot of detail and there is a good idea of what was happening less than a second after the event that created the Universe. What caused the Big Bang, or what was there before the Big Bang is the thing that nobody knows about.

    • Photo: Susan Skelton

      Susan Skelton answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      Hi pokemaster1337!
      I think we are very close, but there are still things we don’t know.

      Most astronomers believe the Universe began in a Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. At that time, the entire Universe was inside a bubble that was thousands of times smaller than a pinhead. It was hotter and denser than anything we can imagine.

      Then it suddenly exploded. The Universe that we know was born. Time, space and matter all began with the Big Bang. In a fraction of a second, the Universe grew from smaller than a single atom to bigger than a galaxy. And it kept on growing at a fantastic rate. It is still expanding today.

      We can work out what happened by measuring the amounts of different chemicals and energy in space, and then calculating backwards. But we only know things that happened starting from a fraction of a second after the explosion. We don’t know what caused the big bang, or why it happened, or what was there before the big bang… because everything we could have measured was “reset” during the big bang.

      I think these unanswered questions are really interesting, but we may never be able to answer them, because we will probably never be able to see anything outside our universe or know about anything that happened before our universe was created.

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