[Ng Jing Kiat]

Ng Jing Kiat asked the Naked Scientists:
   
Hello Naked Scientists

How was the Big Bang formed? Or, how did it even started? A classmate of mine asked me that question but I ran out of answers. I am supposed to get back to him as soon as possible. Please help!

Many Thanks and Cheers!

What do you think?

[LeeE]

How was the Big Bang formed? Or, how did it even started?

This question i.e. the cause of the Big Bang, cannot be answered because it deals with an event that occurred before our universe existed and is therefore not part of, and is outside the scope of our universe.

In terms of cause and effect, our universe is the effect resulting from a cause, but that cause must have existed before our universe came into being, so whatever the cause was, it was not part of our universe.

One can speculate that if it were possible to leave our four-dimensional universe (perhaps to a higher dimensional-order universe) then we might be able to answer the question, but by definition, everything we know of is part of our universe.

[Atomic-S]

Perhaps someone said "Let there be" and there was.

[Ron Hughes]

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=28452.0

[yor_on]

When you ask for what the Big Bang was you are actually asking a lot of different questions. You are asking how we were made, and what is time and matter, and light. Well, one answer is that we don't know, another is, we sure have some theories But those that seems to make the best sense won't answer the questions either. They may suggest, in a manner of thinking, why we have a ordered universe with an arrow of time. But they do not say why it is so. In a way it reminds me of Russian dolls, you know the doll, hidden inside the doll, hidden inside yet another doll, hidden etc ..

But, for what it is worth.
First read this.

It's NASAs 'The Universe And All', well, seen through WMAP at least.
The Universe And All

Good, now you have an idea of it, right Then try this news flash. Adrienne Erickcek Aha Got you interested, didn't it Yeah, me too. So let's see what we can find more. Whoa, a paper about the lopsided universe' Now, that sounds cool.The Lopsided Universe. 

Those links are from 2008 though. Maybe there are other stuff out there now. what we can see is that the way to do this research is too look at the 'footprints' left from the Big Bang in form of radiation and other lasting structures firstly, doesn't mean that we can't deduce smaller fingerprints from f.e how matter and other stuff are structured though. For a final touch up on the thoughts of how it may work you can read this, don't get stuck on the math, just read it through. Primordial gravity waves fossils and their use in testing inflation.

[yor_on]

For those of you interested
Someone should be?

Professor Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology speaks about the 'The Arrow of time' You can download or listen to it. Sixty seven minutes of interest..

"Abstract: Why do we remember the past, but not the future? Why don't we meet people who grow younger as they age? Why do things, left by themselves, tend to become messier and more chaotic? What would Maxwell's Demon say to a Boltzmann Brain? The answers can be traced to the moment of the Big Bang -- or possibly before.

Time pervades our lives -- we keep track of it, lament its loss, put it to good use. The rhythms of our clocks and our bodies let us measure the passage of time, as a ruler lets us measure the distance between two objects. But unlike distances, time has a direction, pointing from past to future. From Eternity to Here examines this arrow of time, which is deeply ingrained in the universe around us. The early universe -- the hot, dense, Big Bang -- was very different from the late universe -- cool, empty, expanding space -- and that difference is felt in all the workings of Nature, from the melting of ice cubes to the evolution of species.

The arrow of time is easy to perceive, much harder to understand. Physicists appeal to the idea of entropy, the disorderliness of a system, which tends to increase according to the celebrated Second Law of Thermodynamics. But why was entropy ever small in the first place? That's a question that has been tackled by thinkers such as Ludwig Boltzmann, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, all the way back to Lucretius in ancient Rome. But the answer remains elusive.

The only way to understand the origin of entropy is to understand the origin of the universe -- by asking what happened at the Big Bang, and even before."

[Madidus_Scientia]

Perhaps someone said "Let there be" and there was.

Perhaps it was a teapot

[Bill S]

Hi, Ng Jing Kiat.  Are you any nearer to an answer to your question?  Sometimes it is surprising how long it can take to say "don't know".  

I think the nearest I have come to finding an answer is that the BB resulted from a "quantum fluctuation".  Of course, my next question was: What fluctuated?".  The answer to that was "nothing".  I'm still trying to make sense of that.  

All I can do is wish you luck.  []