MadSci Network: Astronomy |
Hi Dan
Sorry for the tardy reply but work and family commitments have got the better of me again.
It is a common misconcpetion that space existed, and always has existed, then the Big bang created matter which expanded into space. This may sound strange, but the Big Bang happened eveywhere in space; there is no single point where it happened. To appreciate this idea, you have to understand that the Big Bang created spacetime, afterwhich space began expanding. This leads to the bizarre notion that nothing whatsoever, nada, no space, no matter, no time, nothing existed before the Big Bang.
How do we know this?
The observation that remote galaxies are moving faster, the farther they are from us supports the idea of space expanding. The observation that there is a homogeneous (the same everywhere) microwave background radiation throughout space supports the idea that the Universe used to be hotter and denser, i.e., the Big Bang. Working backwards using known physics allows us to predict what may have happened after the Big Bang. These predictions, verified by observation, are for the ratio of Hydrogen to Helium, Deuterium, and Lithium in the Universe.
Saying all that, we do not know what happened at the Big Bang; our current understanding of physics breaks down. It is, however, an area of active research!
I would suggest reading some books on this. A good general level book is The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg and Black Holes and Time Warps, Einstein's Outageous Legacy by Kip S. Thorne both of which should be available in the library. There is also a good online debating forum for Astrophysics and Cosmology.
If you have any questions please contact me on thed@artar.demon.co.uk
Try the links in the MadSci Library for more information on Astronomy.