• Question: How do you think the universe was created?

    Asked by parks093 to Charlie, Eoin, Jemma, Julian, Steve on 22 Mar 2011.
    • Photo: Charlie Ryan

      Charlie Ryan answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      hi parks093 it was nice chatting to you earlier. I’m no cosmologist, but i think that it probably did start as a big bang. The biggest evidence for this is the expansion of the universe. But whether there was a universe before the big bang who knows! some people have suggested that something like a big crunch might occur, where the universe collapses back down to nothing!! Some maybe it goes big crunch -> big bang -> big crunch etc for ever!

    • Photo: Stephen Moss

      Stephen Moss answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      I like the Big Bang theory, it makes plenty of sense and having read some books on the subject (I especially like Stephen Hawking) it does a good job of explaining how and why we have all the different elements and so on. But the thing I still don’t really get is, what exactly was it that went bang. Hawking calls it ‘a singularity’, but I still don’t really understand what that is.

    • Photo: Julian Rayner

      Julian Rayner answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      Hi parks093. Great question. I’m a biologist, so the way my mind works tends to only go back to the beginning of life. There are some great theories about that. For evolution to happen, all you need is an information code that copies itself (so there get to be more of them), and sometimes makes mistakes (so natural selection can act – some variants survive, and some die off). There is a theory that the first “life” was naked replicating RNA (similar to DNA, but just a single strand). Sounds cool, but we’ll never know for sure of course. Some of the organic building blocks for RNA seem to be able to form in stars, and could have been dumped on earth by comets (came up in Brian Cox’s recent TV series, if you saw it – very cool).

      Further back than that, I have to say my brain has a harder time wrapping itself around it. The big bang theory seems like it fits, or so say a lot of astronomers/physicisits who would know more about it than me. I have no way of assessing the data, which is how I would usually form on opinion, so all I can say is that it sounds plausible to me! Charlie probably has a much better answer on this one… 🙂

    • Photo: Jemma Ransom

      Jemma Ransom answered on 16 Mar 2011:

      I’m inclined to follow the big bang theory, the universe began according to this during a big explosion in which a very small amount of matter expanded rapidly into all the matter we can observe in the universe today. The Large Hadron Collider is doing vital research at the moment to piece together how this happened, and how the universe as we know today came about.

    • Photo: Eoin Lettice

      Eoin Lettice answered on 22 Mar 2011:

      Hi parks093,
      this is a great question and one which humans have been struggling with for thousands of years.
      I believe and accept the ‘big bang’ theory of the origin of the uiniverse but as for what caused the big bang and what was there before it, I don’t know!
      Some people believe that the universe was created by God. The two views don’t neccesarily rule one another out. Maybe God created the big bang? Who knows?

      Eoin

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