• Question: do you think the Big Bang theory is accurate? or was there any other ways the world may have been created?

    Asked by alioshea to Adam, Alexander, Aron, Jess, Neil on 13 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by chelssxo.
    • Photo: Neil Bowles

      Neil Bowles answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      I reckon the broad elements of the Big Bang theory are correct, there is a great deal about the universe that current ideas can explain, the cosmic microwave background radiation that forms part of the static ‘hiss’ from an out-of-tune old analogue TV, abundances of the elements in the oldest stars etc.

      Things get tricky and interesting when you get close to the start of time (billionths of a second or less), this is the sort of stuff that colleagues at the Large Hadron Collider (a major engineering triumph itself) are working on.

      The other big one is the nature of things like dark energy and dark matter, but the European Space Agency is working on a mission called Euclid to help us learn more (http://sci.esa.int/euclid/)

    • Photo: Alexander Finch

      Alexander Finch answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      Yes, I do. The Big Bang theory is the best explanation that fits all the evidence we can see today in the Universe. As Neil says, the details of exactly what happened are still being examined, but a lot is already known pretty well. At the moment, there aren’t any widely accepted alternatives in the scientific world.

      It’s worth noting that the Earth wasn’t created in the Big Bang. The Big Bang created the universe and, after some time, the first stars, galaxies and planets. The universe was around for 10 billion years before the Earth was created.

    • Photo: Aron Kisdi

      Aron Kisdi answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      It is the best model that fits what we currently know. We need to keep discovering, exploring to either verify it or modify it if we find out new things about the universe.

      We could also be part of a very elaborate computer simulation.

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