There Was No Big Bang Singularity
It’s one of the biggest assumptions we’ve ever made about the Universe. Here’s why it’s wrong.
Almost everyone has heard the story of the Big Bang. But if you ask anyone, from a layperson to a cosmologist, to finish the following sentence, “In the beginning, there was…” you’ll get a slew of different answers. One of the most common ones is “a singularity,” which refers to an instant where all the matter and energy in the Universe was concentrated into a single point. The temperatures, densities, and energies of the Universe would be arbitrarily, infinitely large, and could even coincide with the birth of time and space itself.
But this picture isn’t just wrong, it’s nearly 40 years out of date! We are absolutely certain there was no singularity associated with the hot Big Bang, and there may not have even been a birth to space and time at all. Here’s what we know and how we know it.
When we look out at the Universe today, we see that it’s full of galaxies in all directions at a wide variety of distances. On average, we also find that the more distant a galaxy is, the faster it appears to be receding from…