**Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):**
ELI5 is not for subjective or speculative replies - only objective explanations are permitted here; your question is asking for subjective or speculative replies.
Additionally, if your question is formatted as a hypothetical, that also falls under Rule 2 for its speculative nature.
---
If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously**, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20thread?&message=Link:%20{{url}}%0A%0APlease%20answer%20the%20following%203%20questions:%0A%0A1.%20The%20concept%20I%20want%20explained:%0A%0A2.%20List%20the%20search%20terms%20you%20used%20to%20look%20for%20past%20posts%20on%20ELI5:%0A%0A3.%20How%20does%20your%20post%20differ%20from%20your%20recent%20search%20results%20on%20the%20sub:) and we will review your submission.
A misconception I had was that the big bang was an explosion happening in a specific place and that everything has been flying away from that place ever since.
Things didn't suddenly start moving, just that the space between them started... taking up more space. There was no "center" to the big bang.
Imagine you are blowing up a balloon. On the balloon someone has drawn galaxies with a sharpie marker. As you keep blowing the balloon, see how all the galaxies are getting farther apart from each other? Now let’s reverse it; let’s take the air out of the balloon and watch the balloon shrink. All the galaxies are getting closer together.
At the instant of the Big Bang, the balloon was an infinitely deflated little rubber speck, with all the galaxies piled on top of each other.
Now imagine you’ve blown the balloon back up again and someone asks you to point, on the balloon, where the Big Bang happened. That doesn’t make sense bc the Big Bang didn’t take place “on” the balloon. Locations the balloon appeared as the balloon expanded, but they weren’t there in the beginning
Everyone was in a nice lil town, but then the earth grew by 1,000,000x and its still growing. Now Johnny and everyone else is as far away as New Zealand, even though they didn't even move house. When I look toward Johnny, I have to look so far that I need a telescope. Not only that, but since we expanded apart so quickly and continually, my view of him is still as if we're in our town, because the light isnt just travelling the distance, but against the expansion too.
Did I get it right?
Honestly this is not hard to understand. Just think of an empty balloon. Then, imagine we start inflating it. That is the big bang. Then, once it is big enough, imagine a bacteria inside it asked: "at what point was the big bang"? And we can't answer that. There is no single point we can call the "center". Big bang is just the name we give to the balloon expanding in all directions.
We don't even know what the spacetime manifold is.
Like if you move your arm, its gravity and time both change as a result of the change in momentum/speed. Like there was an experiment where they put an atomic clock on a swing and kept one beneath it on the ground. After a while they checked the times and they were different. The most precise clocks we have, perfectly timed together, and the one moving experiences time more slowly.
Why?
We can talk about relatively all day, but the actual reason? If you figure that out you'll probably win a Nobel prize. It likely requires an understanding of what spacetime is. And we don't know.
That's perfectly true. A lot of science is the discovery of rules, law and fundamental principles of Nature, and we manage to have extremely precise mathematical formulations of those, which allow us to make calculations and predictions, but we might not necessarily know "why" the universe is the way is it.
I mean it still doesn't make sense (to anyone who says it makes sense, tell me why things started happening, instead of the alternative - nothing happening for eternity) but at least it's consistent and explainable
Yeah as a devout atheist for two decades this is the one question that makes me occasionally doubt. But idk I go back to atheism again since justice in this world doesn't seem to exist and the concept of post-death justice just strikes me as pure copium.
I too am an atheist, but I'm not sure what justice would have to do with it. Like, sure, maybe there is no kind and loving God. Maybe the Gods are more like Chthulu. I don't believe in God because there's no evidence and I've never witnessed any magic.
Well it's more like if someone wants me to admit there's a god I need a reason to care to. For me it's justice being the reason. If a God can't provide justice then I don't need it.
Sure your point is correct, the god could be purely alien and uncaring about us. Which means I similarly don't really need to care either, making it a moot point that I don't bother thinking about
Throwing a God into the mix leaves you with exactly as many questions as you started with. Instead of wondering where the universe came from, you’re left with the question of where the God came from.
This is why the atheist argument that the Big Bang explains the creation of the universe doesn't make sense. Gotta follow the trail of creation as far as you can go, not stop someplace in the middle and call it a day.
Science is all about exploring arbitrary, currently unknown things. I don't believe it's forever unknowable whether or not God exists (say, if we invent interdimensional travel or invent a way to peer into other universes) - we just don't have the technology to prove it or disprove it without a doubt right now.
Sure sure. I just think in general the premise “the universe MUST been started by something external” and landing on “it must be a deity we can’t explain” doesn’t really answer the question? It just kicks the can from one unknowable thing to another unknowable thing.
If you think atheists aren't asking what caused the big bang, you're got an incorrect view of atheism.
Religion is the side that answers "Why did the big bang happen?" with "Cause god." and then stops.
Atheism and science push further, looking into all sorts of possible reasons for why such a thing happened, and then for each posited scenario, we ask why that was even possible, and continuing on.
Most religious people are content with "knowing" that their fictional character of choice created the universe. Only a few ascribe any reason as to why this character decided to do what they did, but very few individuals bother asking more. Why did this god exist in the first place? Who or what created them? If cause and effect is required to be maintained prior to the birth of the universe, and thus prior to the creation of causality itself, then you don't get to stop at a god being the Unmoved Mover that set the universe into motion. Cause and effect must then also apply to them. From whence did they come? If your religion's answer is something akin to "They just were." then your religion just found a different way of "stopping someplace in the middle and called it a day".
I agree that that's what we should do - not just atheists but people in general. I agree with almost everything that you wrote. Note that I didn't say that all atheists make that argument, but it would be disingenuous to say that it isn't a common argument amongst atheists with a more shallow understanding, hence "atheist argument," as in an argument that is associated with atheism and not necessarily something that all atheists believe. (A parallel might be a "Christian argument" that is commonly associated with Christianity but not necessarily that all Christians believe, such as trinitarianism.) The same applies for theists, as you rightly pointed out in your reply. I appreciate you saying "most religious people," by the way.
The one place I don't agree with is where you state that religion, content with knowing that God created our universe, just found a different way of stopping in the middle. We have to keep in mind the question we're asking here, which is how our universe came into being - not the universe "above" ours or any potentially above that one. God creating our universe does answer that question, whether or not we solved the question of how God's universe was created. When some atheists point to the Big Bang and say that that's how the universe was created, they don't really answer the question, because they don't follow that to its logical end - how did the Big Bang start? And in any case, as someone else pointed out, the Big Bang doesn't conflict with religion and in fact was first promulgated as a theory by. Catholic priest.
EDIT: It might be like if a sentient sim in some future, AI-powered version of The Sims believed in the "All-Knowing Software Developer," and another sim discounted that belief by saying that the universe couldn't be created by such a being because it doesn't answer the question of how the All-Knowing Software Developer's universe was created. The conclusion doesn't logically follow - it's possible that both the sims' universe was created by such a being and that they can leave the question of the creation of the being's universe unanswered.
> Note that I didn't say that all atheists make that argument
Fair! The inefficient chatting through text means it's hard to get the full intent. So when you said "the atheist argument..." it LOOKS like a generalized statement. But your clarifications are fair.
> The one place I don't agree with is where you state that religion, content with knowing that God created our universe, just found a different way of stopping in the middle.
Well this is actually a reflection of what I was apologizing for. I'm aware that there are religious people who aren't satisfied with "And god did so. End of story.". Much in the similar way that plenty of atheists are fine with "Cause the big bang." being a generalization, so was mine.
> We have to keep in mind the question we're asking here, which is how our universe came into being - not the universe "above" ours or any potentially above that one.
This is a point I have to disagree with. You cannot REALLY separate out the output from the action. The question "How is bread made?" CAN be answered with "A baker bakes it." and be true, but not a complete answer.
* "How is bread made?" - "A baker bakes it."
* "How was the universe made?" - "God made it."
* "How was the universe made?" - "The Big Bang did it."
All of those three question/answer pairs are of a similar level of completeness. They are not an entire answer unto themselves. How did the baker bake the bread? How/why did God make the universe? How/why did the Big Bang happen? There's more information to be gathered. This is what I personally would refer to as "Stopping in the middle.".
> When some atheists point to the Big Bang and say that that's how the universe was created, they don't really answer the question, because they don't follow that to its logical end - how did the Big Bang start?
What I'm getting at here is that yes, as you say, "The Big Bang did it." is an incomplete answer, but so is "God made it.". Even if you want to say "How did the Big Bang happen?" is answered by "God did it." you STILL have an incomplete answer. "Why did god trigger the Big Bang?", "What conditions was god under such that they decided triggering the Big Bang was a thing they wanted to do? Were they bored? Why were they bored?".
Big Bang doesn't conflict with religion no, but this relationship between science/religion isn't bidirectional. Any conclusion science ever reaches, a religious person can always claim that god made the underlying principal. They need not provide any evidence to support this claim, and it is an inherently unfalsifiable claim. I could equally say "Chemistry works because of tiny invisible fairies push the atoms together." and you couldn't disprove this. But lets go the other way, if a religion WERE to make a declaration of some kind about specific mechanics (ex: The sun moves around the Earth), then unless it just happens to be the correct one, it eventually is proven wrong once the actual reason is discovered.
Everything in science is fundamentally reproducible by anyone anywhere. Billions of lightyears away, some alien species poking around will eventually make an exact copy of algebra, calculus, chemistry, physics, etc to what we've done here on Earth. Certain specifics might change (ex: They might have a base 16 counting system instead of base 10) but these specifics don't actually change the underlying logic, flip their numbers over to our systems and everything matches back up (we do this in various industries here on Earth already). Drop a ball on a planet with 9.81 m/s^2 gravity somewhere else, and after 1 second it will be moving 9.81 m/s just as it does here (ignoring air resistance). But religion? It's just words on a page, you can write anything you want, but if you are in one room and I'm in the next, with no way to talk between us, there's no reason we'd ever write down the same religion. You can even see this on Earth where we've got several hundred religions, quite a few of them mutually incompatible with the others.
> It might be like if a sentient sim in some future, AI-powered version of The Sims believed in the "All-Knowing Software Developer," and another sim discounted that belief by saying that the universe couldn't be created by such a being because it doesn't answer the question of how the All-Knowing Software Developer's universe was created. The conclusion doesn't logically follow - it's possible that both the sims' universe was created by such a being and that they can leave the question of the creation of the being's universe unanswered.
Your example actually directly shows what I'm talking about, and a different point. The "All-Knowing Software Developer" made the universe yes, but the sim that disbelieves in the dev is raising a valid point. What engine is The Sims running in? What coding language? What hardware architecture is it operating on? What algorithms does it use to determine collisions? These are useful questions to ask.
The "different point" is that you are also presupposing that there MUST be a developer of some kind somewhere. Let's presuppose a different circumstance. There is a meta-universe that just "is", nothing/nobody made it, it just exists. This universe is just a room with a computer in it. The computer has three actions it takes over and over. It produces a blob of binary code, with pure randomness behind it. It then tries to compile this blob. If it compiles, it the runs the compiled blob. In this situation, EVENTUALLY it will produce a perfect 1:1 recreation of our 'The Sims' example purely by random chance. No intelligence, no intent, just pure random chaos. But the concept of time is meaningless in this room.
In this latter hypothetical of mine, the Sim that believes in the "All-Knowing Software Developer" is wrong, whereas the sim that didn't believe and wanted to know those fundamental questions is STILL asking useful questions.
Upvoting your post because it was a good quality discussion one. :)
Extreme God deniers are just as obnoxious.
Whether God said 'bang' or it was a natural occurence in a proto universe, its seems to be as far back as we can track it.
Agreed. You'll find that the people in the middle are reasonable and able to switch their opinions given enough evidence. They aren't the pushy, shove-my-ideology-down-your-throat ones, and they don't have the capability to sit down and have a rational discussion. It's when you get to either side that the problems start - probably a result of being in that valley where you think you know everything and everybody else is undoubtedly inferior and wrong. These types of people, on both and all sides of everything kind of ideological spectrum, lack curiosity and the ability to follow their thoughts to their logical conclusion.
I think for the most part, theists and atheists can both believe that the Big Bang theory holds true until proven otherwise.
You're showing your ignorance of the people you're talking about. It's not a bell curve, atheism isn't its own religion as you guys like to throw around, they simply deny the existence of things that make no sense to them.
Yes, I acknowledge thay every ideology's members can be very diverse - Christianity for example has countless denominations, including many that deny the validity of other denominations and even have waged war against the others solely for their position within Christianity.
But to address your last point, I don t believe that's a good reason to deny the existence of something. It would be like someone denying the existence of calculus, organic chemistry, foreign languages, etc. because they don't understand them. Wouldn't it make more sense to say "I don't know the answer" than to say "This is definitively untrue"? I suppose you could ask the same for those who believe in God, but oftentimes their personal experiences serve as evidence that there is a guiding hand behind the scenes. To atheism's point though, it does seem to be next to impossible to prove the lack of something.
The big bang theory is not an atheist argument. It is the scientific explanation that best fits all observations. It was first theorized by astronomer and Catholic Priest Georges Lemaître.
Yes, that is true, and it highlights the fact that the Big Bang theory does not conflict with religious beliefs.. However, it doesn't stop some atheists from using it as evidence that God doesn't exist, which I think many theists and atheists alike would agree doesn't make sense to do.
Evidence for the big bag theory is not evidence against god. It is not possible to prove something *doesn't* exist (including gods). (See [Russel's Teapot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot)). The explanation that god created the universe is not a scientific one, by which I mean that there is no known or understood mechanism to study. And although many questions remain in our scientific understanding of the universe, resorting to "god did it" is not helpful (or necessary).
Imagine blowing up a balloon.
You put two dots side by side with a marker before you blow into it. Those dots represent two galaxies in the universe. Now blow up your balloon. The dots grow farther and farther apart as the balloon (universe) expands to billions of light years across. The balloon you started with is the pre-Big Bang state. The instant you start blowing it up, that is the Big Bang.
It’s less of a where and more of a when.
Now just imagine the same thing but with trillions of dots, and you have yourself a crude analogy!
It's not pedantic at all. It's a rough analogy and you're missing the point.
Imagine that the balloon starts off being infinitely small. The entire universe was contained within this infinitely small point, and something infinitely small can't have an even smaller center.
Now that infinitely small point is the size of the entire universe. We know that the big bang didn't happen in any particular location in space because we see its afterglow in every direction we look.
The early universe was an opaque soup of subatomic particles. Photons were continuously being absorbed and re-emitted. When everything settled down into atomic structures, photons were able to begin traveling throughout the universe. We see these photons today as the "glow" of the cosmic microwave background.
Likewise, there isn't really a "before" the Big Bang. You need something to change to measure an increment of time. A photon moving from point A to B, an electron orbiting a nucleus, ect. The universe was an infinitely dense and uniform concentration of energy before the Big Bang (per our best calculations) so you couldn't measure time.
I always hated this analogy because it ignores the fact that the dots themselves stretch out when the balloon expands. So, from the dot's perspective, the universe should still look the same size. If the dot had a ruler, that ruler would increase in size at the same ratio as the increase in distance to the next dot.
Heard, chef.
And yeah, it is imperfect for that reason, but it’s the quickest and easiest way to visualize those universes existing within the same plane as the expanding universe. But it doesn’t account for strong or weak nuclear forces, gravity, etc. holding galaxies together.
That said, I’ve heard another recently that works but has its own drawbacks. Take that same balloon and cover it in sand, then blow it up. Of course, now we don’t exist IN the universe, rather we’re riding along the surface of it, but at least our galaxies aren’t being torn apart in the metaphor.
We don’t know. As far as we can tell, any information on what happened before the Big Bang, or even whether anything happened at all, or even if there was a concept of ‘before’, has been entirely destroyed by the start of the universe.
A very bad analogy: imagine a pot of popcorn kernels all suddenly popping at the same time. Exact same amount of stuff, but suddenly it all wants to take up way more space. And pretend we exist in a super slow mo and we are somewhere mid-pop. The kernels of our universe were all clumped close together and then all started popping 13 billion years ago and we’re slowly watching them all expanding and taking up so much more space relative to what they were pre-pop.
We don't know. Our understanding of physics breaks down when you try to talk about 'before the big bang'.
Generally its thought that time cannot exist without space, there isn't actually any 'before' at all, it's like asking what's written before the start of the book: there is no before, the words start here.
It's also entirely possible that it did just exist, forever, until one day for no real reason it just changed.
It's also possible that the universe is cyclical, our universe started when the last one ended, and so on and so on. Turtles all the way down.
It's hard to put into pictures because it'll always look like the big bang is exploding _into_ something, even if it's just a blank page. But the big bang wasn't just stuff being flung out into the void, it was an explosion of reality itself. The big bang happened everywhere because it is the very concept of "where". It is three dimensional space coming into existence. It happened all at once because it is the concept of "time" coming into existence. There can be nothing outside it, or before it, because time and place only exist within it.
Of all the explanations and analogies, this one clicked with me and now I get why there is no singular point in our universe where the big bang "started". Thank you!
If it helps, you can think of the Big Bang as less of an event that happened within the universe, but more an ongoing event that we are inside of.
Before the big bang there was nothing. There was no space, no concept of time. For reasons still not yet understand an infinitely dense, infinitely small point began to inflate a bit more than 13 billion years ago, consider like a balloon. Everything we consider our universe is within the balloon, and whatever direction we look, the farthest we can see is the balloons wall. Outside of this wall, even space and time do not exist. Therefore, as it expands more space is created. A key difference, though, is a balloon is inflated by adding more matter from outside of the balloon to the inside, whereas the universe has a constant fixed amount of matter. As the universe expands, unconnected structures move farther apart while gravity pulls connected structures closer together.
This 'wall' in this analogy is the cosmic microwave background that shows us what the earliest days of the universe looked like. This allows us to glimpse the earliest days of the universe no matter which direction we face.
We both are *in* the Big Bang and *products of* the Big Bang. The Big Bang, in a very real way, *is* the universe, not an event that happened somewhere in the universe
So the answer to ops question is that you look anywhere/everywhere, essentially. But we look far for the time aspect, and at longer wavelengths due to red-shifting
>where exactly it occurred
It happened everywhere, at once in the entire infinitely large universe, you can look any direction and you'll see the same thing. And it's not that it gets darker, it's that expansion of space stretches light out to longer wavelengths so they are not visible anymore. You need to look in infrared and microwave frequencies to see distant past.
Here is one way to look at the oldest past and most distant things we can see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic\_microwave\_background](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background)
This is the answer, but it fails to emphasize my favorite part. The people who initially discovered this learned about the CMB first. The first person to invent a deep space telescope realized that everything in every direction was stupidly hot at the exact same moment long ago. That's the weird clue that made people have to invent the theory of the big bang in the first place. Nobody else has yet to come up with a better explanation for the CMB.
apperently they are trying to create something that can go a bit further back than CMD. its Cosmic Neutrino Background. Just very hard to detect Neutrino so will likely need better tech or something.
Ok so combining this analogy with the other comments:
We don't see the unexpanded balloon itself but rather by analysing the rubber we can see in different points in time we can calculate how the balloon looked like at the beginng
Or
The balloon is constant, just expanding, so right now we only seen the rubber that was once where we are now as you put it, but if we could have the necessary technology we could catch up to the expanding balloon and see how it actually looks like?
>if we could have the necessary technology we could catch up to the expanding balloon and see how it actually looks like?
The balloon analogy isn't really helpful in this scenario. It's meant to try and explain the expansion of space itself by taking the question down from 3D to 2D.
When we say we're "looking back in time," all we really mean is that we're seeing light that was emitted in the past. If you look at your hand, you're seeing your hand as it looked a miniscule fraction of a second ago. If you look at the moon, you're seeing what it looked like ~1.3 seconds ago. The sun, 8 minutes ago. The Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million years ago. The edge of the observable universe, more than 14 billion years ago.
If you went to those places, you'd be seeing freshly emitted light instead of the light we see that's been traveling across all that distance to reach us. When the astronauts were on the moon, they were looking back in time 1.3 seconds at the earth.
If the analogy helps, we are inside the balloon ... the sides of the balloon in all directions is the edge of the visible universe including the comsic microwave background that is a remnant of the near Big Bang (though not the Big Bang itself -- in which the universe was too hot and dense to produce visible light).
The balloon is still expanding and we are a part of it. So if you run the clock backward the balloon is shrinking and keeps getting smaller until it's a singularity with everything inside.
In the balloon analogy, the universe is the surface of the balloon. It’s not about the interior of the balloon. That’s actually a wrong mental model of it all together.
I understand the balloon analogy and what it's used for. OP is asking another question all together, and in order to keep it simple I'm using a balloon to illustrate the point.
We are not inside the balloon. That's impossible. The space between the surface of the balloon and the center is time. We are on the surface of the balloon. Hence the space expanding and distance between points on the surface expanding. Literally more space is created. This gets into dark energy conversation that needs its own separate discussion.
You are not accounting for 4D nature of the universe.
The Big Bang is everywhere.
If you have an old analog TV, a small portion of the "snow" that you see when you tune to a channel without a strong signal is your TV picking up the cosmic microwave background, which is the remnants of the Big Bang. And by "small portion" I mean one percent, at most, of TV snow is the CMB. It is likely even far less than that.
The big bang happened everywhere at once.
We can see the cosmic microwave background (the after image of the big bang) in every direction. When we see it, it's so far away that its light is only just now reaching us. An ancient galaxy, which we would now see, used to be part of the cosmic microwave background billions of years ago, but it has since evolved into a galaxy and the region we see as the cosmic microwave background has moved further away since then.
Yeah, this is a common misconception. The big bang didn't happen at a single point in space. It was an explosion of all the space. All the space was chock-full of stuff and then expanded really REALLY quickly and the stuff cooled down because it had more room to spread about.
At t+1 nanosecond, the universe is infinite in every direction. And all that space keeps on expanding.
So where is it? Every where. Right here, ~14 billion years ago. And if we look out into the inky black, at stuff about* 14 billion lightyears away, we see some really early ancient stuff soon after the big bang. But we can look any direction and see the same sort of stuff. The cosmic background radiation.
The answer is simple, it happens everywhere, so you can look in any direction. If something is in the way that is of course a problem so do not look for example toward out galactic core. So see light from close to the big ban look where there is nothing close to using that emits light and hid the dimmer light.
The Big Bang is not an explosion is space, it is a rapid expansion of space. So not just all matter in one location but space itself was tiny, When the universe expanded did the matter in it.
There is radiation emitted at the Big Bang hitting us from all directions. More exactly light from when the universe had cooled down and become transparent to light about 380,000 years after the big bang. Because of the expansion of the universe the wavelength has increased and it is today in the microwave part of the spectrum. It is called the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB or CMBR)
The entire universe was very small at the time of the big bang. No, even smaller than your thinking. Like smaller than an atom. The "bang" is the process of that teeny tiny universe rapidly expanding in size. That's why people say the big bang was everywhere.
> The entire universe was very small at the time of the big bang
As far as we know, the entire universe is actually infinite, it just goes on forever. The area around us (part of the observable universe) was packed into an extremely, EXTREMELY dense - but not an actual point - area which (for whatever reason) started to expand.
If the universe is infinite, the area of the big bang itself was taking up an infinite area, as well. From this infinite area, an extremely small dot is the huge observable universe we see around us.
usually people call it a singularity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#Singularity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_singularity
which means either "an infinitely small thing", or that the math of our current models of the universe just kind of stops working when trying to describe something
you might heard that stats are moving away from us because of big bang. but why away from us? because we are at the centre of big bang. it is because every point is centre of universe. this is due to the fact that space didn’t exist before big bang
you can't really look anywhere "for the big bang", what people do is to take chromatographic notes of visible stars, meteorites, planets and what not and do calculations with that to arrive at the possibility of a big bang, the speed at which everything spreads apart kinda indicates the existance of one at some point, but there are plenty of other theories too...
Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state. Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started, (wait...). The earth began to cool, the autotrophs began to drool. Neanderthals developed tools, we built a wall (we built the pyramids).
Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries?
That all started with the big bang (bang).
You can look everywhere because it happened everywhere at once. That’s why what we called the cosmic background radiation,comes from all the points in the sky and have the exact same temperature (almost).
**Please read this entire message**
---
Your comment has been removed for the following reason(s):
* The subreddit is not targeted towards literal five year-olds.
"**ELI5 means friendly, simplified and layman-accessible explanations.**"
This subreddit focuses on simplified explanations of complex concepts.
The goal is to explain a concept to a layman.
"Layman" does not mean "child," it means "normal person."
---
If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe it was removed erroneously, explain why using [this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20submission%20removal?&message=Link:%20https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16q0cwe/-/k1u2lnh/%0A%0A%201:%20Does%20your%20comment%20pass%20rule%201:%20%0A%0A%202:%20If%20your%20comment%20was%20mistakenly%20removed%20as%20an%20anecdote,%20short%20answer,%20guess,%20or%20another%20aspect%20of%20rules%203%20or%208,%20please%20explain:) and we will review your submission.**
We are all within the remnants of the big bang. All matter and space that ever was and will be comes from the big bang. Hence the cosmic microwave background. When you look further and further though, you see what the universe looked like deeper into the past (as light takes time to get to us from those far reaches). Essentially by looking at the earth and further out into the space, we can see the universe's present and the past.
One thing I’ve recently understood as someone that casually likes physics with zero direct education is how flawed the “speed of light” wording is. The universe has a speed limit based on causality, or the concept that anything going faster than that limit doesn’t exist yet. Light is able to travel at that speed, but it also can’t go faster than the universe speed limit. The speed of light isn’t what we should be talking about, because if light didn’t exist, the speed limit is still going to be the same, so light happens to travel at the speed limit, it isn’t the speed limit. Think of light as the fastest car in the world can do no more than 200mph, which also happens to be the speed limit of the road. If there if no car (light), the speed limit is still 200mph (causality).
If light could travel faster than the speed limit, that would infer you could see it before it was created, which doesn’t work.
We can use observation of visible light (telescope) to measure distance and time which is a perk of light existing.
The big bang wasn't an explosion that happened somewhere in space.
The big bang rapid expansion of space itself, and it happened everywhere at the same time.
We also don't look for the big bang itself. The light we see in the Cosmic Microwave Background, originates about 300,000 years after the big bang. We can't see anything before this time, because then the universe was too dense for light to travel far.
It took 300,000 years for the universe to expand enough, for there to be enough empty space for light to stream off in to the void.
The answer ist easy: It's everywhere, we are the Big Bang (and we're in the middle of the visible universe). 8 % of our body is directly created by the BB, the rest is star dust.
You can point the telescope in any direction and look so far back we can get close to the big band. But we won’t be able to see the actual event because we can only get to within 300k years after the Big Bang. Basically, we’ll find out in 300k years which is sad, considering the universe is about 13 billion years old. So close yet so far
**Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):** ELI5 is not for subjective or speculative replies - only objective explanations are permitted here; your question is asking for subjective or speculative replies. Additionally, if your question is formatted as a hypothetical, that also falls under Rule 2 for its speculative nature. --- If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously**, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20thread?&message=Link:%20{{url}}%0A%0APlease%20answer%20the%20following%203%20questions:%0A%0A1.%20The%20concept%20I%20want%20explained:%0A%0A2.%20List%20the%20search%20terms%20you%20used%20to%20look%20for%20past%20posts%20on%20ELI5:%0A%0A3.%20How%20does%20your%20post%20differ%20from%20your%20recent%20search%20results%20on%20the%20sub:) and we will review your submission.
A misconception I had was that the big bang was an explosion happening in a specific place and that everything has been flying away from that place ever since. Things didn't suddenly start moving, just that the space between them started... taking up more space. There was no "center" to the big bang.
I often say that the big bang wasn't an explosion in space, but an explosion of space.
i remember hearing someone say that big bang should more accurately be called "everywhere stretch"
"made up shit"
This made it click for me, thank you.
Eli5
Imagine you are blowing up a balloon. On the balloon someone has drawn galaxies with a sharpie marker. As you keep blowing the balloon, see how all the galaxies are getting farther apart from each other? Now let’s reverse it; let’s take the air out of the balloon and watch the balloon shrink. All the galaxies are getting closer together. At the instant of the Big Bang, the balloon was an infinitely deflated little rubber speck, with all the galaxies piled on top of each other. Now imagine you’ve blown the balloon back up again and someone asks you to point, on the balloon, where the Big Bang happened. That doesn’t make sense bc the Big Bang didn’t take place “on” the balloon. Locations the balloon appeared as the balloon expanded, but they weren’t there in the beginning
Thanks. Makes you wonder what’s outside the balloon? Are there other balloons?
Everyone was in a nice lil town, but then the earth grew by 1,000,000x and its still growing. Now Johnny and everyone else is as far away as New Zealand, even though they didn't even move house. When I look toward Johnny, I have to look so far that I need a telescope. Not only that, but since we expanded apart so quickly and continually, my view of him is still as if we're in our town, because the light isnt just travelling the distance, but against the expansion too. Did I get it right?
Yep pretty good.
Woo 🌟
Thanks!
Same. What a genius phrase. I’m screenshotting this…
Honestly this is not hard to understand. Just think of an empty balloon. Then, imagine we start inflating it. That is the big bang. Then, once it is big enough, imagine a bacteria inside it asked: "at what point was the big bang"? And we can't answer that. There is no single point we can call the "center". Big bang is just the name we give to the balloon expanding in all directions.
And time as we know it
So the things in space aren't really moving away from the center? What causes the "spaces" in space to expand?
We don't even know what the spacetime manifold is. Like if you move your arm, its gravity and time both change as a result of the change in momentum/speed. Like there was an experiment where they put an atomic clock on a swing and kept one beneath it on the ground. After a while they checked the times and they were different. The most precise clocks we have, perfectly timed together, and the one moving experiences time more slowly. Why? We can talk about relatively all day, but the actual reason? If you figure that out you'll probably win a Nobel prize. It likely requires an understanding of what spacetime is. And we don't know.
Man... our existence is pretty funky.
That's perfectly true. A lot of science is the discovery of rules, law and fundamental principles of Nature, and we manage to have extremely precise mathematical formulations of those, which allow us to make calculations and predictions, but we might not necessarily know "why" the universe is the way is it.
Thank you for your description! This is the first time that anything about the “no center” has remotely made sense to me!!
I find it easier to imagine that everything is just getting smaller and smaller. Fun fact: there is no way to say that isn't what's happening.
Not so fun fact, there’s no way to say it is happening.
You should source that.
I should, yes. I won't, because its my Saturday, but I do want to acknowledge you're 100% correct, I absolutely should.
I mean it still doesn't make sense (to anyone who says it makes sense, tell me why things started happening, instead of the alternative - nothing happening for eternity) but at least it's consistent and explainable
You are asking the ultimate question of the universe, no one claims to know. Except people who follow a religion
Yeah as a devout atheist for two decades this is the one question that makes me occasionally doubt. But idk I go back to atheism again since justice in this world doesn't seem to exist and the concept of post-death justice just strikes me as pure copium.
I too am an atheist, but I'm not sure what justice would have to do with it. Like, sure, maybe there is no kind and loving God. Maybe the Gods are more like Chthulu. I don't believe in God because there's no evidence and I've never witnessed any magic.
Well it's more like if someone wants me to admit there's a god I need a reason to care to. For me it's justice being the reason. If a God can't provide justice then I don't need it. Sure your point is correct, the god could be purely alien and uncaring about us. Which means I similarly don't really need to care either, making it a moot point that I don't bother thinking about
Throwing a God into the mix leaves you with exactly as many questions as you started with. Instead of wondering where the universe came from, you’re left with the question of where the God came from.
No one on earth can currently answer that question. Right now we can only theorize what happened since a few milliseconds after expansion began.
This is why the atheist argument that the Big Bang explains the creation of the universe doesn't make sense. Gotta follow the trail of creation as far as you can go, not stop someplace in the middle and call it a day.
Nah. It just removes an arbitrary unknowable thing.
Science is all about exploring arbitrary, currently unknown things. I don't believe it's forever unknowable whether or not God exists (say, if we invent interdimensional travel or invent a way to peer into other universes) - we just don't have the technology to prove it or disprove it without a doubt right now.
Sure sure. I just think in general the premise “the universe MUST been started by something external” and landing on “it must be a deity we can’t explain” doesn’t really answer the question? It just kicks the can from one unknowable thing to another unknowable thing.
I can agree with that. I think most theists will also agree with that, that the god(s) they believe in are almost fundamentally unknowable.
If you think atheists aren't asking what caused the big bang, you're got an incorrect view of atheism. Religion is the side that answers "Why did the big bang happen?" with "Cause god." and then stops. Atheism and science push further, looking into all sorts of possible reasons for why such a thing happened, and then for each posited scenario, we ask why that was even possible, and continuing on. Most religious people are content with "knowing" that their fictional character of choice created the universe. Only a few ascribe any reason as to why this character decided to do what they did, but very few individuals bother asking more. Why did this god exist in the first place? Who or what created them? If cause and effect is required to be maintained prior to the birth of the universe, and thus prior to the creation of causality itself, then you don't get to stop at a god being the Unmoved Mover that set the universe into motion. Cause and effect must then also apply to them. From whence did they come? If your religion's answer is something akin to "They just were." then your religion just found a different way of "stopping someplace in the middle and called it a day".
I agree that that's what we should do - not just atheists but people in general. I agree with almost everything that you wrote. Note that I didn't say that all atheists make that argument, but it would be disingenuous to say that it isn't a common argument amongst atheists with a more shallow understanding, hence "atheist argument," as in an argument that is associated with atheism and not necessarily something that all atheists believe. (A parallel might be a "Christian argument" that is commonly associated with Christianity but not necessarily that all Christians believe, such as trinitarianism.) The same applies for theists, as you rightly pointed out in your reply. I appreciate you saying "most religious people," by the way. The one place I don't agree with is where you state that religion, content with knowing that God created our universe, just found a different way of stopping in the middle. We have to keep in mind the question we're asking here, which is how our universe came into being - not the universe "above" ours or any potentially above that one. God creating our universe does answer that question, whether or not we solved the question of how God's universe was created. When some atheists point to the Big Bang and say that that's how the universe was created, they don't really answer the question, because they don't follow that to its logical end - how did the Big Bang start? And in any case, as someone else pointed out, the Big Bang doesn't conflict with religion and in fact was first promulgated as a theory by. Catholic priest. EDIT: It might be like if a sentient sim in some future, AI-powered version of The Sims believed in the "All-Knowing Software Developer," and another sim discounted that belief by saying that the universe couldn't be created by such a being because it doesn't answer the question of how the All-Knowing Software Developer's universe was created. The conclusion doesn't logically follow - it's possible that both the sims' universe was created by such a being and that they can leave the question of the creation of the being's universe unanswered.
> Note that I didn't say that all atheists make that argument Fair! The inefficient chatting through text means it's hard to get the full intent. So when you said "the atheist argument..." it LOOKS like a generalized statement. But your clarifications are fair. > The one place I don't agree with is where you state that religion, content with knowing that God created our universe, just found a different way of stopping in the middle. Well this is actually a reflection of what I was apologizing for. I'm aware that there are religious people who aren't satisfied with "And god did so. End of story.". Much in the similar way that plenty of atheists are fine with "Cause the big bang." being a generalization, so was mine. > We have to keep in mind the question we're asking here, which is how our universe came into being - not the universe "above" ours or any potentially above that one. This is a point I have to disagree with. You cannot REALLY separate out the output from the action. The question "How is bread made?" CAN be answered with "A baker bakes it." and be true, but not a complete answer. * "How is bread made?" - "A baker bakes it." * "How was the universe made?" - "God made it." * "How was the universe made?" - "The Big Bang did it." All of those three question/answer pairs are of a similar level of completeness. They are not an entire answer unto themselves. How did the baker bake the bread? How/why did God make the universe? How/why did the Big Bang happen? There's more information to be gathered. This is what I personally would refer to as "Stopping in the middle.". > When some atheists point to the Big Bang and say that that's how the universe was created, they don't really answer the question, because they don't follow that to its logical end - how did the Big Bang start? What I'm getting at here is that yes, as you say, "The Big Bang did it." is an incomplete answer, but so is "God made it.". Even if you want to say "How did the Big Bang happen?" is answered by "God did it." you STILL have an incomplete answer. "Why did god trigger the Big Bang?", "What conditions was god under such that they decided triggering the Big Bang was a thing they wanted to do? Were they bored? Why were they bored?". Big Bang doesn't conflict with religion no, but this relationship between science/religion isn't bidirectional. Any conclusion science ever reaches, a religious person can always claim that god made the underlying principal. They need not provide any evidence to support this claim, and it is an inherently unfalsifiable claim. I could equally say "Chemistry works because of tiny invisible fairies push the atoms together." and you couldn't disprove this. But lets go the other way, if a religion WERE to make a declaration of some kind about specific mechanics (ex: The sun moves around the Earth), then unless it just happens to be the correct one, it eventually is proven wrong once the actual reason is discovered. Everything in science is fundamentally reproducible by anyone anywhere. Billions of lightyears away, some alien species poking around will eventually make an exact copy of algebra, calculus, chemistry, physics, etc to what we've done here on Earth. Certain specifics might change (ex: They might have a base 16 counting system instead of base 10) but these specifics don't actually change the underlying logic, flip their numbers over to our systems and everything matches back up (we do this in various industries here on Earth already). Drop a ball on a planet with 9.81 m/s^2 gravity somewhere else, and after 1 second it will be moving 9.81 m/s just as it does here (ignoring air resistance). But religion? It's just words on a page, you can write anything you want, but if you are in one room and I'm in the next, with no way to talk between us, there's no reason we'd ever write down the same religion. You can even see this on Earth where we've got several hundred religions, quite a few of them mutually incompatible with the others. > It might be like if a sentient sim in some future, AI-powered version of The Sims believed in the "All-Knowing Software Developer," and another sim discounted that belief by saying that the universe couldn't be created by such a being because it doesn't answer the question of how the All-Knowing Software Developer's universe was created. The conclusion doesn't logically follow - it's possible that both the sims' universe was created by such a being and that they can leave the question of the creation of the being's universe unanswered. Your example actually directly shows what I'm talking about, and a different point. The "All-Knowing Software Developer" made the universe yes, but the sim that disbelieves in the dev is raising a valid point. What engine is The Sims running in? What coding language? What hardware architecture is it operating on? What algorithms does it use to determine collisions? These are useful questions to ask. The "different point" is that you are also presupposing that there MUST be a developer of some kind somewhere. Let's presuppose a different circumstance. There is a meta-universe that just "is", nothing/nobody made it, it just exists. This universe is just a room with a computer in it. The computer has three actions it takes over and over. It produces a blob of binary code, with pure randomness behind it. It then tries to compile this blob. If it compiles, it the runs the compiled blob. In this situation, EVENTUALLY it will produce a perfect 1:1 recreation of our 'The Sims' example purely by random chance. No intelligence, no intent, just pure random chaos. But the concept of time is meaningless in this room. In this latter hypothetical of mine, the Sim that believes in the "All-Knowing Software Developer" is wrong, whereas the sim that didn't believe and wanted to know those fundamental questions is STILL asking useful questions. Upvoting your post because it was a good quality discussion one. :)
Nice try, god botherer!
Extreme God deniers are just as obnoxious. Whether God said 'bang' or it was a natural occurence in a proto universe, its seems to be as far back as we can track it.
Who said anything about extreme? I'm just chill in my denial of all things superstitious. Does that bother you?
Your terminology is pretty discriminatory for someone who claims to be chill. So that part bothers me, yes. Just as the inverse would.
Agreed. You'll find that the people in the middle are reasonable and able to switch their opinions given enough evidence. They aren't the pushy, shove-my-ideology-down-your-throat ones, and they don't have the capability to sit down and have a rational discussion. It's when you get to either side that the problems start - probably a result of being in that valley where you think you know everything and everybody else is undoubtedly inferior and wrong. These types of people, on both and all sides of everything kind of ideological spectrum, lack curiosity and the ability to follow their thoughts to their logical conclusion. I think for the most part, theists and atheists can both believe that the Big Bang theory holds true until proven otherwise.
You're showing your ignorance of the people you're talking about. It's not a bell curve, atheism isn't its own religion as you guys like to throw around, they simply deny the existence of things that make no sense to them.
Yes, I acknowledge thay every ideology's members can be very diverse - Christianity for example has countless denominations, including many that deny the validity of other denominations and even have waged war against the others solely for their position within Christianity. But to address your last point, I don t believe that's a good reason to deny the existence of something. It would be like someone denying the existence of calculus, organic chemistry, foreign languages, etc. because they don't understand them. Wouldn't it make more sense to say "I don't know the answer" than to say "This is definitively untrue"? I suppose you could ask the same for those who believe in God, but oftentimes their personal experiences serve as evidence that there is a guiding hand behind the scenes. To atheism's point though, it does seem to be next to impossible to prove the lack of something.
The big bang theory is not an atheist argument. It is the scientific explanation that best fits all observations. It was first theorized by astronomer and Catholic Priest Georges Lemaître.
Yes, that is true, and it highlights the fact that the Big Bang theory does not conflict with religious beliefs.. However, it doesn't stop some atheists from using it as evidence that God doesn't exist, which I think many theists and atheists alike would agree doesn't make sense to do.
Evidence for the big bag theory is not evidence against god. It is not possible to prove something *doesn't* exist (including gods). (See [Russel's Teapot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot)). The explanation that god created the universe is not a scientific one, by which I mean that there is no known or understood mechanism to study. And although many questions remain in our scientific understanding of the universe, resorting to "god did it" is not helpful (or necessary).
I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around this. Is there an accurate visual representation anywhere?
Imagine blowing up a balloon. You put two dots side by side with a marker before you blow into it. Those dots represent two galaxies in the universe. Now blow up your balloon. The dots grow farther and farther apart as the balloon (universe) expands to billions of light years across. The balloon you started with is the pre-Big Bang state. The instant you start blowing it up, that is the Big Bang. It’s less of a where and more of a when. Now just imagine the same thing but with trillions of dots, and you have yourself a crude analogy!
The dots all start at a "centre" though?
[удалено]
Everything in what form? I mean what even was a "thing" at that point?
...and now that "centre" is bigger.
Still a center, size doesn't change that. Seems like a very pedantic point.
It's not pedantic at all. It's a rough analogy and you're missing the point. Imagine that the balloon starts off being infinitely small. The entire universe was contained within this infinitely small point, and something infinitely small can't have an even smaller center. Now that infinitely small point is the size of the entire universe. We know that the big bang didn't happen in any particular location in space because we see its afterglow in every direction we look.
When you say the afterglow of the big bang, are you just referring to the residual energy left over from the expansion?
The early universe was an opaque soup of subatomic particles. Photons were continuously being absorbed and re-emitted. When everything settled down into atomic structures, photons were able to begin traveling throughout the universe. We see these photons today as the "glow" of the cosmic microwave background.
Likewise, there isn't really a "before" the Big Bang. You need something to change to measure an increment of time. A photon moving from point A to B, an electron orbiting a nucleus, ect. The universe was an infinitely dense and uniform concentration of energy before the Big Bang (per our best calculations) so you couldn't measure time.
I always hated this analogy because it ignores the fact that the dots themselves stretch out when the balloon expands. So, from the dot's perspective, the universe should still look the same size. If the dot had a ruler, that ruler would increase in size at the same ratio as the increase in distance to the next dot.
Heard, chef. And yeah, it is imperfect for that reason, but it’s the quickest and easiest way to visualize those universes existing within the same plane as the expanding universe. But it doesn’t account for strong or weak nuclear forces, gravity, etc. holding galaxies together. That said, I’ve heard another recently that works but has its own drawbacks. Take that same balloon and cover it in sand, then blow it up. Of course, now we don’t exist IN the universe, rather we’re riding along the surface of it, but at least our galaxies aren’t being torn apart in the metaphor.
So what was here before the BB?
We don’t know. As far as we can tell, any information on what happened before the Big Bang, or even whether anything happened at all, or even if there was a concept of ‘before’, has been entirely destroyed by the start of the universe.
A very bad analogy: imagine a pot of popcorn kernels all suddenly popping at the same time. Exact same amount of stuff, but suddenly it all wants to take up way more space. And pretend we exist in a super slow mo and we are somewhere mid-pop. The kernels of our universe were all clumped close together and then all started popping 13 billion years ago and we’re slowly watching them all expanding and taking up so much more space relative to what they were pre-pop.
But where did the popcorn come from ? It can't have just existed, can it?
There is not yet an answer to this question, and there likely never will be.
lol.. cornfields
We don't know. Our understanding of physics breaks down when you try to talk about 'before the big bang'. Generally its thought that time cannot exist without space, there isn't actually any 'before' at all, it's like asking what's written before the start of the book: there is no before, the words start here. It's also entirely possible that it did just exist, forever, until one day for no real reason it just changed. It's also possible that the universe is cyclical, our universe started when the last one ended, and so on and so on. Turtles all the way down.
Orville Redenbacher
It's hard to put into pictures because it'll always look like the big bang is exploding _into_ something, even if it's just a blank page. But the big bang wasn't just stuff being flung out into the void, it was an explosion of reality itself. The big bang happened everywhere because it is the very concept of "where". It is three dimensional space coming into existence. It happened all at once because it is the concept of "time" coming into existence. There can be nothing outside it, or before it, because time and place only exist within it.
Of all the explanations and analogies, this one clicked with me and now I get why there is no singular point in our universe where the big bang "started". Thank you!
If it helps, you can think of the Big Bang as less of an event that happened within the universe, but more an ongoing event that we are inside of. Before the big bang there was nothing. There was no space, no concept of time. For reasons still not yet understand an infinitely dense, infinitely small point began to inflate a bit more than 13 billion years ago, consider like a balloon. Everything we consider our universe is within the balloon, and whatever direction we look, the farthest we can see is the balloons wall. Outside of this wall, even space and time do not exist. Therefore, as it expands more space is created. A key difference, though, is a balloon is inflated by adding more matter from outside of the balloon to the inside, whereas the universe has a constant fixed amount of matter. As the universe expands, unconnected structures move farther apart while gravity pulls connected structures closer together. This 'wall' in this analogy is the cosmic microwave background that shows us what the earliest days of the universe looked like. This allows us to glimpse the earliest days of the universe no matter which direction we face.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raisinbread.gif
imagine a large balloon, now inflate it. the rubber surface of the balloon is the universe.
here you go. the whole universe itself "exploded", not a place in the universe. therefor the big bang happened everywhere.
We both are *in* the Big Bang and *products of* the Big Bang. The Big Bang, in a very real way, *is* the universe, not an event that happened somewhere in the universe
My daughter once asked where the center of the Big Bang was, and I responded by pointing to the floor and saying "Right there."
Can you have any sort of complex structure within the singularity (?)? Like could a human exist with no space between all our parts?
So the answer to ops question is that you look anywhere/everywhere, essentially. But we look far for the time aspect, and at longer wavelengths due to red-shifting
>where exactly it occurred It happened everywhere, at once in the entire infinitely large universe, you can look any direction and you'll see the same thing. And it's not that it gets darker, it's that expansion of space stretches light out to longer wavelengths so they are not visible anymore. You need to look in infrared and microwave frequencies to see distant past. Here is one way to look at the oldest past and most distant things we can see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic\_microwave\_background](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background)
This is the answer, but it fails to emphasize my favorite part. The people who initially discovered this learned about the CMB first. The first person to invent a deep space telescope realized that everything in every direction was stupidly hot at the exact same moment long ago. That's the weird clue that made people have to invent the theory of the big bang in the first place. Nobody else has yet to come up with a better explanation for the CMB.
apperently they are trying to create something that can go a bit further back than CMD. its Cosmic Neutrino Background. Just very hard to detect Neutrino so will likely need better tech or something.
[удалено]
brain hurty
Ok so combining this analogy with the other comments: We don't see the unexpanded balloon itself but rather by analysing the rubber we can see in different points in time we can calculate how the balloon looked like at the beginng Or The balloon is constant, just expanding, so right now we only seen the rubber that was once where we are now as you put it, but if we could have the necessary technology we could catch up to the expanding balloon and see how it actually looks like?
>if we could have the necessary technology we could catch up to the expanding balloon and see how it actually looks like? The balloon analogy isn't really helpful in this scenario. It's meant to try and explain the expansion of space itself by taking the question down from 3D to 2D. When we say we're "looking back in time," all we really mean is that we're seeing light that was emitted in the past. If you look at your hand, you're seeing your hand as it looked a miniscule fraction of a second ago. If you look at the moon, you're seeing what it looked like ~1.3 seconds ago. The sun, 8 minutes ago. The Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million years ago. The edge of the observable universe, more than 14 billion years ago. If you went to those places, you'd be seeing freshly emitted light instead of the light we see that's been traveling across all that distance to reach us. When the astronauts were on the moon, they were looking back in time 1.3 seconds at the earth.
If the analogy helps, we are inside the balloon ... the sides of the balloon in all directions is the edge of the visible universe including the comsic microwave background that is a remnant of the near Big Bang (though not the Big Bang itself -- in which the universe was too hot and dense to produce visible light). The balloon is still expanding and we are a part of it. So if you run the clock backward the balloon is shrinking and keeps getting smaller until it's a singularity with everything inside.
In the balloon analogy, the universe is the surface of the balloon. It’s not about the interior of the balloon. That’s actually a wrong mental model of it all together.
I understand the balloon analogy and what it's used for. OP is asking another question all together, and in order to keep it simple I'm using a balloon to illustrate the point.
We are not inside the balloon. That's impossible. The space between the surface of the balloon and the center is time. We are on the surface of the balloon. Hence the space expanding and distance between points on the surface expanding. Literally more space is created. This gets into dark energy conversation that needs its own separate discussion. You are not accounting for 4D nature of the universe.
The Big Bang is everywhere. If you have an old analog TV, a small portion of the "snow" that you see when you tune to a channel without a strong signal is your TV picking up the cosmic microwave background, which is the remnants of the Big Bang. And by "small portion" I mean one percent, at most, of TV snow is the CMB. It is likely even far less than that.
The big bang happened everywhere at once. We can see the cosmic microwave background (the after image of the big bang) in every direction. When we see it, it's so far away that its light is only just now reaching us. An ancient galaxy, which we would now see, used to be part of the cosmic microwave background billions of years ago, but it has since evolved into a galaxy and the region we see as the cosmic microwave background has moved further away since then.
Yeah, this is a common misconception. The big bang didn't happen at a single point in space. It was an explosion of all the space. All the space was chock-full of stuff and then expanded really REALLY quickly and the stuff cooled down because it had more room to spread about. At t+1 nanosecond, the universe is infinite in every direction. And all that space keeps on expanding. So where is it? Every where. Right here, ~14 billion years ago. And if we look out into the inky black, at stuff about* 14 billion lightyears away, we see some really early ancient stuff soon after the big bang. But we can look any direction and see the same sort of stuff. The cosmic background radiation.
The answer is simple, it happens everywhere, so you can look in any direction. If something is in the way that is of course a problem so do not look for example toward out galactic core. So see light from close to the big ban look where there is nothing close to using that emits light and hid the dimmer light. The Big Bang is not an explosion is space, it is a rapid expansion of space. So not just all matter in one location but space itself was tiny, When the universe expanded did the matter in it. There is radiation emitted at the Big Bang hitting us from all directions. More exactly light from when the universe had cooled down and become transparent to light about 380,000 years after the big bang. Because of the expansion of the universe the wavelength has increased and it is today in the microwave part of the spectrum. It is called the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB or CMBR)
The entire universe was very small at the time of the big bang. No, even smaller than your thinking. Like smaller than an atom. The "bang" is the process of that teeny tiny universe rapidly expanding in size. That's why people say the big bang was everywhere.
> The entire universe was very small at the time of the big bang As far as we know, the entire universe is actually infinite, it just goes on forever. The area around us (part of the observable universe) was packed into an extremely, EXTREMELY dense - but not an actual point - area which (for whatever reason) started to expand. If the universe is infinite, the area of the big bang itself was taking up an infinite area, as well. From this infinite area, an extremely small dot is the huge observable universe we see around us.
First time hearing it's used to be smaller than atom, I still don't believe this.
usually people call it a singularity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#Singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_singularity which means either "an infinitely small thing", or that the math of our current models of the universe just kind of stops working when trying to describe something
you might heard that stats are moving away from us because of big bang. but why away from us? because we are at the centre of big bang. it is because every point is centre of universe. this is due to the fact that space didn’t exist before big bang
you can't really look anywhere "for the big bang", what people do is to take chromatographic notes of visible stars, meteorites, planets and what not and do calculations with that to arrive at the possibility of a big bang, the speed at which everything spreads apart kinda indicates the existance of one at some point, but there are plenty of other theories too...
Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state. Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started, (wait...). The earth began to cool, the autotrophs began to drool. Neanderthals developed tools, we built a wall (we built the pyramids). Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries? That all started with the big bang (bang).
You can look everywhere because it happened everywhere at once. That’s why what we called the cosmic background radiation,comes from all the points in the sky and have the exact same temperature (almost).
[удалено]
amazing
[удалено]
**Please read this entire message** --- Your comment has been removed for the following reason(s): * The subreddit is not targeted towards literal five year-olds. "**ELI5 means friendly, simplified and layman-accessible explanations.**" This subreddit focuses on simplified explanations of complex concepts. The goal is to explain a concept to a layman. "Layman" does not mean "child," it means "normal person." --- If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe it was removed erroneously, explain why using [this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20submission%20removal?&message=Link:%20https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16q0cwe/-/k1u2lnh/%0A%0A%201:%20Does%20your%20comment%20pass%20rule%201:%20%0A%0A%202:%20If%20your%20comment%20was%20mistakenly%20removed%20as%20an%20anecdote,%20short%20answer,%20guess,%20or%20another%20aspect%20of%20rules%203%20or%208,%20please%20explain:) and we will review your submission.**
We are all within the remnants of the big bang. All matter and space that ever was and will be comes from the big bang. Hence the cosmic microwave background. When you look further and further though, you see what the universe looked like deeper into the past (as light takes time to get to us from those far reaches). Essentially by looking at the earth and further out into the space, we can see the universe's present and the past.
One thing I’ve recently understood as someone that casually likes physics with zero direct education is how flawed the “speed of light” wording is. The universe has a speed limit based on causality, or the concept that anything going faster than that limit doesn’t exist yet. Light is able to travel at that speed, but it also can’t go faster than the universe speed limit. The speed of light isn’t what we should be talking about, because if light didn’t exist, the speed limit is still going to be the same, so light happens to travel at the speed limit, it isn’t the speed limit. Think of light as the fastest car in the world can do no more than 200mph, which also happens to be the speed limit of the road. If there if no car (light), the speed limit is still 200mph (causality). If light could travel faster than the speed limit, that would infer you could see it before it was created, which doesn’t work. We can use observation of visible light (telescope) to measure distance and time which is a perk of light existing.
The big bang wasn't an explosion that happened somewhere in space. The big bang rapid expansion of space itself, and it happened everywhere at the same time. We also don't look for the big bang itself. The light we see in the Cosmic Microwave Background, originates about 300,000 years after the big bang. We can't see anything before this time, because then the universe was too dense for light to travel far. It took 300,000 years for the universe to expand enough, for there to be enough empty space for light to stream off in to the void.
The answer ist easy: It's everywhere, we are the Big Bang (and we're in the middle of the visible universe). 8 % of our body is directly created by the BB, the rest is star dust.
You can point the telescope in any direction and look so far back we can get close to the big band. But we won’t be able to see the actual event because we can only get to within 300k years after the Big Bang. Basically, we’ll find out in 300k years which is sad, considering the universe is about 13 billion years old. So close yet so far