MinutePhysics tackles "Science, Religion and the Big Bang"

Aug 20, 2013 17:11 GMT  ·  By

MinutePhysics has a rather erratic update schedule, weeks even months can go between new videos. But almost every time it's well worth the wait. The latest video, titled "Science, Religion, and the Big Bang," doesn't exactly tackle the first two things in its name, but rather focuses entirely on the Big Bang.

The Big Bang theory is currently our best explanation of the early universe and gives us a clue as to what happened when the universe was very small, hot and dense.

The theory explains that all the matter and energy in the universe, in the observable universe at least, was heavily compacted, though not into a single point.

The theory provides a timeline for the expansion of the universe, but only goes back to a point in time called the "singularity." Beyond that, we have no idea what happened, if anything happened at all.

However, the video explains how all of those terms, "big," "bang," and "singularity" are all wrong. "Bang" is wrong because there was no bang, no initial explosion. Rather, the universe expanded rapidly, it stretched, for a period of time. The rate of expansion slowed down after a while, but expansion continues today.

"Big" is wrong because the initial expansion wasn't just big, it was "everywhere," it encompassed all the observable universe.

Finally, "singularity" is wrong because it implies that there is a beginning, an initial state. But in reality, the physics we know today stops working as the universe gets smaller, what's known as a mathematical singularity.

The current laws of physics can't explain what happened when the entire energy of the universe occupied very little space, so we really don't know what was going on before that point.

In fact, we can't even use the word "before" to describe it, as our understanding of time also breaks down. Time itself may as well exist beyond the singularity and, in fact, there's no reason to believe that the universe itself, in some form, didn't exist before the "big bang."

Whether that previous universe existed, whether it leaked any "information" into this one and how time worked or if it existed in a form that would be recognizable to us is for future generations of physicists to find out.