If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.
First of all, the Big Bang wasn't very big. Second of all, there was no bang. Third, Big Bang Theory doesn't tell you what banged, when it banged, how it banged. It just said it did bang. So the Big Bang theory in some sense is a total misnomer.
The big bang theory requires a recent origin of the Universe that openly invites the concept of creation.
We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.
One [idea] was that the Universe started its life a finite time ago in a single huge explosion, and that the present expansion is a relic of the violence of this explosion. This big bang idea seemed to me to be unsatisfactory even before detailed examination showed that it leads to serious difficulties.
I feel that I've often pointed out that there are countless aspects of life and nature that scientists and scientific thinkers cannot explain. Why the universe is accelerating in its expansion and what came before the Big Bang serve as compelling examples. The process of science provides a way to seek answers to those questions.
The Big Bang theory is the idea that if we go back early enough in the history of the universe - and we can do this, of course, by looking at starlight coming to us from billions of years ago - we will see a very hot and dense period where the universe was much smaller, denser, and hotter.
Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all. It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang.
Eventually, when the universe expands enough, all that will be left is the dark energy.
I have never thought that you could obtain the extremely clumpy, heterogeneous universe we have today, strongly affected by plasma processes, from the smooth, homogeneous one of the Big Bang, dominated by gravitation.
If our inconceivably ancient universe even had any beginning, the conditions determining that beginning must even now be engraved in the atomic weights.
Gravitational waves, because they are so imperturbable - they go through everything - they will tell you the most information you can get about the earliest instants that go on in the universe.
Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.
To understand the universe in the state that it began in, the so-called Big Bang, we need laws of physics that work better than our current set of rules and procedures, which break down when we try to push them back to the beginning.
It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time.
