Big Bang

“These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past.”

“The main efforts of investigators have been in papering over contradictions in the big bang theory, to build up an idea which has become ever more complex and cumbersome.”

“I have little hesitation in saying that as a result a sickly pall now hangs over the big bang theory. As I have mentioned earlier, when a pattern of facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that it rarely recovers.”

“This circumstance of an expanding universe is irritating.”

“To admit such possibilities seems senseless to me.”

“Bothers science because it clashes with scientific religion—the religion of cause and effect, the belief that every effect has a cause. Now we find that the biggest effect of all, the birth of the universe, violates this article of faith. .\xa0.\xa0. what came before the Big Bang is the most interesting question of all.”

“Theologians are delighted that the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of Genesis—but curiously, astronomers are upset.”

“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened—the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery... That it happened is reasonably clear. All the matter in the universe was concentrated at extremely high density—a kind of cosmic egg, reminiscent of the creation myths of many cultures—perhaps into a mathematical point with no dimensions at all.”

“The first, and main, problem is the very existence of the big bang.”

“One may wonder, What came before? If space-time did not exist then, how could everything appear from nothing? .\xa0.\xa0. Explaining this initial singularity—where and when it all began—still remains the most intractable problem of modern cosmology.”

“[Big Bang theory] suggested that matter and motion originated rather as Genesis [in the Bible] suggests, ex nihilo, out of nothing, in a stupendous explosion of light and energy.”

“Take but degree away (see above, the one quadrillionth of 1 percent margin for error), .\xa0.\xa0. and what follows is not just discord but eternal entropy and ice. So, what—who?—was the great Tuner?”

“The big bang theory does not describe the birth of the universe … Another theory describing even earlier times will be needed to explain the original creation of the universe.”

“Many scientists did not like the idea that the universe had a beginning, a moment of creation.”

“The ideas that prove to be of lasting interest are likely to build on the framework of the now standard world picture, the hot big bang model of the expanding universe. The full extent and richness of this picture is not as well understood as I think it ought to be, even among those making some of the most stimulating contributions to the flow of ideas.”

“It is true that physicists hope to look behind the ‘big bang,’ and possibly to explain the origin of our universe as, for example, a type of fluctuation. But then, of what is it a fluctuation and how did this in turn begin to exist? In my view, the question of origin seems always left unanswered if we explore from a scientific view alone.”

“The big bang was not an explosion in space; it was more like an explosion of space.”

“The big bang happened everywhere. It was not a bomb going off at a particular spot that we can identify as the center of the explosion.”

“There are some questions that scientists can never answer, “It may be that the Big Bang happened 12\xa0billion years ago. But why did it happen? .\xa0.\xa0. How did the particles get there in the first place? What was there before?” Utley concludes: “It seems .\xa0.\xa0. clearer than ever that science will never satisfy the human hunger for answers.””