13.7 (give or take .14) billion years ago, the Universe began. Our knowledge of the Big Bang begins one Planck second after the Big Bang (10^-43 seconds). After that came the inflationary period, 300,000 years after, the Universe was cool enough for nucleosynthesis to begin, and the lightest gases were fused. A couple hundred million years later the first stars formed.
We know this all happened. The evidence points to the Universe not being infinite. It could be, but we know that it happened. It's always good to question the current predominant theory, but saying it's downright wrong is ignorant.
The thing that makes my head hurt the most was the lack of time and space before the big bang. Its like, there HAD to always be something.
The thing that makes my head hurt the most was the lack of time and space before the big bang. Its like, there HAD to always be something.
Many Astrophysicists and Cosmologists actually believe that there was nothing before the Big Bang. Many, such as the 'Brane' Theory use large Membranes that when collide create the Universe, to put it simply. There are other theories such as Big Bounce theory. Most of them have either have the Universe collapsing and being reborn, or caused by a larger object outside of the Universe. Then you have Multi-verses, such as the Chaotic Inflation Theory, which has many bubble Universes. Most of these theories require Infinite regressions of the Universe, which many people don't like. Personally, I don't believe that any one of these theories is the whole explanation, but they all might play a part.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. -Carl Sagan
The Universe is cool enough without making up crap about it - Phil Plait
30,000,000,000: Earliest possible date for the universe to collapse in the hypothetical scenario known as the Big Crunch.[15]
100,000,000,000: The Virgo Supercluster merges into one super galaxy, millions of light-years across, filled with red dwarfs and small amounts of white dwarfs. Other superclusters have also merged, yet have been separated from each other by distances of more than a billion light-years due to the acceleration of dark energy.
100,000,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion): The Big Freeze according to many cosmologists. Intelligent life existing then may flee to other universes, as suggested by the physicist Michio Kaku. Beginning of the Degenerate Era of our universe. End of normal star formation and normal stars in the Milky Way/M31 super-galaxy. New stars formed only via brown dwarf collisions every hundred billion years or so.
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one quintillion) to 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ten quintillion): The Universe ends in a Big Crunch according to physicist Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point
100,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one hundred quintillon) End of multiverses,[16] but due to a supertask of computation before the final singularity, its simulated inhabitants experience an infinite subjective lifetime.
10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 quintillion): The Galaxy relaxes gravitationally. Ninety percent of stars escape into intergalactic space while the rest merge with the central Black Hole.
10100 (one googol): If the theory of black hole evaporation is correct, it is predicted by many astronomers that all the black holes in our universe will have evaporated by around this year, the beginning of the Dark Era of our universe, unless proton decay does not occur.
101500: Cold fusion occurring via quantum tunneling should make the light nuclei in ordinary matter fuse into iron-56 nuclei (see isotopes of iron.) Fission and alpha-particle emission should make heavy nuclei also decay to iron, leaving stellar-mass objects as cold spheres of iron.
101026 to 101076: Stellar mass objects collapse into black holes by quantum tunneling.
The thing that makes my head hurt the most was the lack of time and space before the big bang. Its like, there HAD to always be something.
Many Astrophysicists and Cosmologists actually believe that there was nothing before the Big Bang. Many, such as the 'Brane' Theory use large Membranes that when collide create the Universe, to put it simply. There are other theories such as Big Bounce theory. Most of them have either have the Universe collapsing and being reborn, or caused by a larger object outside of the Universe. Then you have Multi-verses, such as the Chaotic Inflation Theory, which has many bubble Universes. Most of these theories require Infinite regressions of the Universe, which many people don't like. Personally, I don't believe that any one of these theories is the whole explanation, but they all might play a part.
The Universe is cool enough without making up crap about it - Phil Plait
Well, one day the universe will collapse on itself because it will have expanded too much. At least, that's one theory.
This will happen according to Wikipedia.
Sadly, we will never experience any of it..