what caused the big bang?

[sith123]

:)

[WyeDyed]

mibn2cweus - I've never seen the program but that is as good an analogy as any ;-)

[beso]

//Do not the Unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together (as one unit of creation), before we clove them asunder?//

Quite a stretch of the imagination to claim that this is a description of the Big Bang. " .. we clove them asunder" describes them being split apart by the active hand of God.

The Big Bang begins with pure radiation. Matter eventually condenses from the fireball entirely as an inevitable unguided consequence of the Laws of Physics. No cloving involved at all. Quite the opposite.

[sith123]

i want to hear any and every explanation people have got

[beso]

The Big Bang comes from a physical system that lies beyond of the Universe as we know it.

The Universe is a consequence of nature seeking to reach minimum energy and order in that system. A perfect void of infinite extent would by definition be extremely ordered. Consequently the distribution of energy varies throughout.

Some places have so much energy that they burst forth as universes. There are probabaly countless other universes beyond ours each with different physical laws.

[birdie1971]

^ If such universes do exist*, the physical laws they obey couldn't be very different from our own. In fact they would have to be almost identical because if you alter (even slightly) any of the four forces, the matter in that universe could not coalesce to form strictures such as stars and planets. A universe with (say) a slightly decreased or increased electromagnetic force would be a universe full of nothing and nowt!

* more than likely.

[beso]

These other universes with different laws could certainly exist. It is just they peobably would mostly be far less interesting than ours. It is possible to manifest Space and Time yet have no matter. It would still be a universe.

Moreover there could be combinations of laws that had not been anticipated to allow the production of an entirely different type of matter. Humans do have a tendency to see everything in the perspective of what is familiar.

[birdie1971]

“... Humans do have a tendency to see everything in the perspective of what is familiar...”

Completely agree with that.

Saying that a universe is still a universe even though it has no matter within it is a stretch though. I'm no expert but would have thought that the minimum that a universe needs to have to qualify as a universe is matter in some shape or form.

[douglas9401]

A through draught.