The Real Big Bang

When Edwin Hubble looked out into the Universe in the 1920s he saw that ALL (except Andromeda) the galaxies were racing away from us! More than that he saw that the further away a galaxy was the faster it was receding from us! This is Hubble`s Law. It is also the way that debris behaves in an explosion. Imagine filming an exploding car. Frame by frame (second by second) the faster moving fragments are further and further from the centre of the explosion. If you were sitting at the centre of that explosion (besides being fragments yourself) you would see all the debris moving away from you and also you would see the more distant fragments moving away faster and faster! i.e. You would see Hubble's Law for the explosion fragments! So, the motions of the galaxies in the universe look like an Explosion! The Big Bang is often presented as a normal explosion of matter and energy (atoms, galaxies, stars and planets) into space, like the exploding car. This is a simplification and not how the Big Bang is thought of. The problem with this simple view is that it places The Earth, our galaxy The Milky Way, at the centre of the Universe! Modern science and astronomy has been moving away from this idea for the last couple of hundred years. Indeed the modern view is that the Earth, our galaxy, is at a typical or average place in the universe. i.e. We are NOT in a special position. The implication of this is, if you were sitting in any other galaxy in the universe, you should be able to look into the night sky and see Hubble's Law. i.e. It should look as if there was an explosion of all the galaxies zooming out from that point too, from EVERY point in the universe to be precise! Now, envisaging how that can be so in our 3-Dimensional universe is hard to do, so let's make the problem simpler. Rather than considering our 3-D space (the whole volume of a balloon for example), let's consider a 2-D universe (just the outer surface of a balloon). So, if we place dots on the surface of the balloon and call them galaxies, we can see a solution. Just blow the balloon up. More surface area (SPACE) is created by doing this. E.g. each millimetre of surface doubles to become 2mm. Galaxies that are further apart appear to move away from each faster as there are more millimetres of surface (space) to double in the fixed amount of time it takes to blow the balloon up! It you think about it a bit (or better still get a balloon and put dots on it and blow it up) this reproduces Hubble's Law as seen from the viewpoint every dot (galaxy). The Galaxies are NOT actually moving in this model but they appear to move as more and more space is created between them! (This means that you actually have no problem with galaxies far enough away apparently moving faster than light). So, in this 2-Dimensional universe (the surface of the balloon) a 2-D being might ask, "where is the centre of the universe, of the explosion?" It's a valid question. BUT from the viewpoint of the 2-D beings there is NO CENTRE, every point on their 2-D balloon surface/universe is equivalent, there is no special point or centre! Indeed, if their universe has a centre, it is the centre of the balloon, off in the 3rd Dimension, which they cannot perceive and this point is not IN their universe, which is just the surface of the balloon! OK, if that messes with your head a little bit lets return to our 3-D universe and apply this idea to it. The Big Bang is the explosion of our 3-D space (surface) into a FOURTH SPACIAL DIMENSION that us, as limited 3-D beings, cannot perceive. If OUR universe has a centre it is off at some point in that 4th Dimension, like the centre of a 4-D balloon. The implication of this is that if you imagine time flowing backwards and the Big Bang running in reverse, the WHOLE of our 3-D space/universe shrinks and folds down in on itself as seen from a higher 4-D view (like the surface of the balloon collapsing to zero as it deflates towards the centre). So seen with time flowing forwards, the Big Bang is the creation and expansion of the actual Space and Time of our Universe, not some boring every day explosion of energy/matter into pre-existing space!