Question: what started the big bang

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 13 Nov 2014:

Nobody knows, and I doubt anyone’s going to find out any time soon.

We know the big bang happened, we can see that all the galaxies are whizzing away in a pattern that means they used to be much closer together, and around 1990 the COBE satellite found the cosmic background radiation that should have existed if the Big Bang model was correct, and other scientists have used quantum physics and complicated models of the Big Bang to work out what happened a very very short time (billionths of a second) after the universe suddenly did whatever it did and began.

But right now our best models stop making sense if we use them to try and figure out what happened any earlier than that. We don’t yet know enough about matter and energy and the basic forces of the universe to look back any further.

Hopefully, some very clever physicists and mathematicians will be able to work out some of the kinks and make the models more accurate so that we can work out what happened nearer the start of the universe. If I learned anything about quantum physics though, it’s that quantum physics is insanely complicated and difficult stuff, so it’ll probably be a very long time until anyone figures it out.

Until then, pretty much any explanation is as good as another. Some people like to think it was some kind of god. I prefer to think that the Big Bang was started by someone in another universe saying “I wonder what happens if I push this butto-KABLAM!” 🙂