There is only One Big Bang...

For those of you in the know, ignore this, as it a return to the point of this Blog - to explain in simple terms things scientific.

Everybody has heard of the Big bang. And it's not Yuko, as she is far too small.

The Big Bang is supposed to be the beginning of everything. But is it not as simple as a big explosion.

We came to this conclusion because we discovered the Universe was expanding (See the Cepheid variables post).

So, we turned back time and thought backwards and it was obvious that in the past everything was in the same place.

And it went "Bang!".

However, it's not as simple as that. The equations tell us that not only everything was in the same place at the same time, but time and space were too. Another way to say this is that there was literally nothing "outside" the Big Bang.

The best way to illustrate this is to think 4-dimensionally. Very hard to see, but the model usually used is that the 4 dimensions of spacetime can be represented in three.

By a balloon. An inflating balloon is easy to see, and if you have dots on it to represent the galaxies, it is clear to see that all the dots "move away" from each other, BUT there is no "center" that they are moving away "from".

The surface of the balloon represents both time and space "expanding".

So how did it start? That is another post, however.

The balloon model has been going for years, but not many people outside science circles have heard of it.

There are three models of this expansion. 1. Open (the universe will continue expanding forever)

2. Closed (the universe will stop expanding, slow down, and gravity will pull everything back into a "Big Crunch"

3.Neither. (The universe will stagnate and end up neither expanding nor crunching)

And now the time for enlightenment. How many people have realised the significance of my blog url, www.gnabgib.blogspot.com??.

It's another phrase coined by us for scenario (2) above! "GNABGIB" is "Big Bang" backwards, and both phrases are used! Gotcha!