What Caused the Big Bang?

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: ↓ More info below ↓ Check out the new Space Time Merch Store! Support Space Time on Patreon Every astronomy textbook tells us that soon after the Big Bang, there was a period of exponentially accelerating expansion called cosmic inflation. In a tiny fraction of a second, inflationary expansion multiplied the size of the universe by a larger factor than in the following 13 and a half billion years of regular expansion. This story seems like a bit of a … stretch. Is there really any mechanism that could cause something like this to happen? What what we’re covering today – the real physics of cosmic inflation. Hosted by Matt O’Dowd Written by Matt O’Dowd Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer Directed by Andrew Kornhaber Produced By: Kornhaber Brown Dark Energy Playlist: The Quantum Vacuum and Hawking Radiation Playlist Most cosmologists buy some variation of the inflation hypothesis. It seems to very neatly solve some of the biggest questions in cosmology. Those being: why is matter and energy so smoothly spread out across the entire observable universe? And why is the geometry of the universe so flat? Neither should be expected unless the universe expanded much more rapidly early on. We explored these problems in an earlier video – worth a look if you really want to get inflation. Another problem fixed by inflation is the absence of magnetic monopoles – strange particles predicted to have been produced in the early universe. We’ll come back to those another time. Big Bang Supporters: Anton Lifshits David Nicklas Fabrice Eap Juan Benet Justin Lloyd Morgan Hough Quasar Supporters: Mark Heising Mark Rosenthal Tambe Barsbay Vinnie Falco Hypernova Supporters: Chuck Zegar Danton Spivey Donal Botkin Edmund Fokschaner Hank S John Hofmann John R. Slavik Jordan Young Joseph Salomone kkm Mark Heising Matthew Matthew O’Connor Syed Ansar Gamma Ray Burst Supporters: Adrien Hatch Alexey Eromenko Andreas Nautsch Bradley Jenkins Brandon Labonte Carlo Mogavero Daniel Lyons David Behtala DFaulk Dustan Jones Geoffrey Short James Flowers James Quintero John Funai John Pollock Jonah Jonathan Nesfeder Joseph Dillman Joseph Emison Josh Thomas Kevin Warne Kyle Hofer Malte Ubl Mark Vasile Nathan Hitchings Nick Virtue Paul Rose Ryan Jones Scott Gossett Sigurd Ruud Frivik Tim Jones Tim Stephani Tommy Mogensen Yurii Konovaliuk سلطان الخليفي