Imagine nothing. Try to perceive a time before time in which neither light nor darkness, neither mass nor matter existed. According to Big Bang theory, this was the way everything was (or wasn’t, technically) before the one critical moment that began time and begat our universe. Originally developed by Georges Lemaître, a physicist and Roman Catholic priest, the Big Bang theory is currently the leading scientific explanation for how existence itself came to exist. The main idea of this theory is that approximately 13.7 billion years ago, an infinitely small, hot, dense singularity spontaneously appeared in that empty nothing. It then expanded at an inconceivably rapid rate and, over time, formed the universe as we perceive it today Although the theory has undergone much revision since it was first conceived and still suffers from many unresolved issues, the current proof and scientific consensus fortifies the Big Bang’s hold on the most widely accepted model of the universe’s beginning, a hold it doesn’t seem likely to relinquish any time soon.
To start, an understanding of the few picoseconds, seconds, minutes, and millions of years after the Big Bang is required. One thing that must be noted is that whatever spawned the Big Bang is, as of yet, an enigma. Scientists say that it was a singularity, which laymen should consider just a different way of saying they do not yet have a good way to physically explain it. The farthest modern science can see with any certainty into the cosmic “explosion” (most scientists reject such a term to describe it) is 10-43 seconds after it happened; before that, scientists can only speculate as to what really occurred, though the general consensus is that it was extremely energetic, hot, and dense. At the earliest period that we know of, though, the universe was in a state of unfeasibly rapid expansion, which lessened exponentially just a few moments later. About .001 seconds after the beginning of the expansion, a sea of...