• Question: where did the energy come from to start the big bang?

    Asked by anon-191322 to Kathryn, Graeme, Chris, Anne, Agnes, Adam on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Agnes Wojtusiak

      Agnes Wojtusiak answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Good question – it’s one of those we don’t quite yet have an answer for! Maybe you’ll be the one to answer it in the future 😉

    • Photo: Anne Green

      Anne Green answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      We don’t know. We know that the universe started off very hot and dense. We’re pretty sure (because our theoretical predictions match observations) that we know what happened right the way back to the first tiny fraction of a second. But we don’t know what happened right at the very beginning. To understand this we need a `theory of everything’, which combines quantum mechanics and general relativity. And this is one of the big open questions of Physics.

    • Photo: Kathryn

      Kathryn answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      I cannot add more than my colleagues have written below. This is one of the fundamental questions in science and one I hope will be answered in the future.

    • Photo: Adam McGuinness

      Adam McGuinness answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      Wow, great question! I don’t think anyone really knows at the moment, although a lot of people are trying to figure it out, I think the answer is still quite far away. Maybe one of you students will become a scientist and find out for us!

    • Photo: Graeme Poole

      Graeme Poole answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      That’s the million dollar question!! (Literally – solved that and you’d win the Nobel Prize and the $1 million cash that comes with it).

      At the moment, the theory is that the energy was already there, concentrated into an infinitely small space. Which is mind-boggling!! Hopefully one day we’ll find out!!

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