“Math, science, history, unraveling the mystery. It all started with a big bang.”

That’s part of the theme song to the show The Big Bang Theory. I used to watch the show a lot, but ended up growing tired of it. It’s still entertaining, but just not my cup of tea.

The show’s title obviously coming from the theory that everything in the universe was created by a big bang approximately 13.7 billion years ago.

That’s been the mainstream theory for some time now and it states that everything came from a singularity that had everything in the universe in it. People don’t seem to realize how ridiculous that is. All of that dense matter had to come from somewhere.

There have also been several alternative theories as to the beginnings of the universe or even whether it had a beginning at all. Now there are some saying that the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning after all.

According to Big Think,

This new picture gives us three important pieces of information about the beginning of the universe that run counter to the traditional story that most of us learned. First, the original notion of the hot Big Bang, where the universe emerged from an infinitely hot, dense, and small singularity — and has been expanding and cooling, full of matter and radiation ever since — is incorrect. The picture is still largely correct, but there’s a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it.

Second, observations have well established the state that occurred prior to the hot Big Bang: cosmic inflation. Before the hot Big Bang, the early universe underwent a phase of exponential growth, where any preexisting components to the universe were literally “inflated away.” When inflation ended, the universe reheated to a high, but not arbitrarily high, temperature, giving us the hot, dense, and expanding universe that grew into what we inhabit today.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can no longer speak with any sort of knowledge or confidence as to how — or even whether — the universe itself began. By the very nature of inflation, it wipes out any information that came before the final few moments: where it ended and gave rise to our hot Big Bang. Inflation could have gone on for an eternity, it could have been preceded by some other nonsingular phase, or it could have been preceded by a phase that did emerge from a singularity. Until the day comes where we discover how to extract more information from the universe than presently seems possible, we have no choice but to face our ignorance. The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn’t the beginning we once supposed it to be.

The full article that explains the more can be found at Big Think and it’s an interesting read, but long.

If you’d like to know my personal take on the matter, I believe in a big bang only as far as I know the one who banged it, and that is God. Everything hasn’t just always existed and it didn’t all come out of thin air and explode into this beautifully crafted universe that we have today.