The First Energy

[Deepwater6]

What is the current theory of where or how the energy that created the big bang was produced? If all that energy was converted to matter what caused it to explode or ignite?

 

Also, if almost as much anti-matter was around at the beginning as mater why is there still so much matter left? It would seem that there would be much less matter if anti-matter took out 99% of it?

 

On the tv show the "Universe" it's explained that water was created in the first few moments after the big bang. How can we tell the age of water? thx

 

Deepwater

[CraigD]

What is the current theory of where or how the energy that created the big bang was produced?

As best I can tell, 2 main families of modern theoretical answers to this question:

• It came from a large-scale quantum vacuum fluctuation.
  Theories of this kind (of which there are fewer than the next kind) are best summarized, I think, as “nothing theories”, or more catchily, "the universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time” (for more, see this 1994 article).
  
• It came from the interaction of large bodies in a higher dimensional space than ours. Brane theories, which propose that the mass/energy of our universe came from the collision of two hyper-dimensional “membranes”, are an example of a popular subfamily of these kinds of theories.
  

 

If all that energy was converted to matter what caused it to explode or ignite?

The big bang model does not suggest that some accumulation of matter was ignited and exploded like a chemical bomb. This is a misconception. The name “big bang”, which actually was coined by Fred Hoyle, a critic of an early version of the model to ridicule it, is arguably in part to blame for promoting this misconception.

 

Also, if almost as much anti-matter was around at the beginning as mater why is there still so much matter left? It would seem that there would be much less matter if anti-matter took out 99% of it?

According to the big bang model, compared to the amount of matter and antimatter generated by the big bang, there is only a very little, no much, matter left: about 1/30,000,000th.

 

How this happened – why there is any matter in the universe, rather than just tiny fraction more photons than we observe – is one of the most compelling and studies questions in physic, known as the bayron asymmetry problem.

 

On the tv show the "Universe" it's explained that water was created in the first few moments after the big bang.

This isn’t correct according to the big bang model, which theorizes that only atomic nuclei with 1 to 4 protons – hydrogen, helium, lithium, and beryllium – were formed during big bang nucleosynthesis from about 3 to 20 minutes ABB. Oxygen, which is needed to form [ce]H_2O[/ce] (water), has 8 protons, so is much to massive to have been formed in the big bang.

 

The universe had to wait, about 100 million years, for the death of the first short-lived giant stars (known as population III), for oxygen and water to exist.