Possibly stupid question, shoot down as nessesary

mickeydevine

I have no qualifications in any field relating to this forum. I am however interested in all aspects of science, unfortunately dropping out of a biology course in uni about ten years ago, maybe not the course I was suited for. However I always watch any documentary shown on TV, never miss an episode of the sky at night and have read books like a short history of everything by Bill Bryson etc. Watched a doc on BBC2 last night with Prof. Brian Cox whom I really like, on the subject of time which is incredably hard for a lay person to understand. Anyway my question is:

We know that Dark matter and dark energy are there, we just cant "see" it. Is it possible that they were present before the big bang i.e could they have been contibutary factors in the big bang.

Flukey

The Big Bang is believed to have come from a single point with nothing outside it, not even nothingness. So if it was there, the dark matter would have been inside the big Bang, like everything else that we now see. Just as much as everything else did, it would have come from the Big Bang too. It may have been no more or less a contributor than anything else. It was just one in the list of things that were there and/or that arose from the Big Bang. That's not a definitive answer, just what I would presume. Others may have another viewpoint.

luckyfrank

What i cant understand is how something smaller than a particle 15 billion years ago grew to everything that we now know is in the universe

One theory ive heard that is interesting is that the big bang is just an end-less cycle of a big crunch though current trends suggest that this dark energy is infact expanding our universe even faster

Kevster

luckyfrank, my view is that the Big Bang is just a theory that describes everything we see now quite well, but it's not actually the truth when you go all of the way back to the 'beginning'. In fact, the big bang theory breaks down when you go back to 'Time Zero' (i.e. - the maths simply don't work).

My opinion is that I have no opinion, and that we will never know how the Universe has developed. After all, the human race will most likely have all but perished within the next few million years (or much less).

Kevin