Phil, Naesh, welcome to the show.

Thanks. Great to be on.

Pleasure to be here.

What exactly is the Big Bang, Phil?

Well, people think they know, but actually there's quite a bit of controversy as to what we even mean by the term Big Bang.

So we talk about two definitions, the hot Big Bang, and that's just the idea that the universe

evolved from a very hot, dense state.

And then after that, it's expanded and expanded and it called, and then galaxies formed,

and then planets formed, and us.

But there's another definition of the Big Bang, which you might call

the Big Bang singularity. That says that 14 billion years ago, time stopped ticking. This was

the beginning of the universe. So that's based off of theorems proven by Penrose and Hawking.

And what's interesting is that neither Penrose nor Hawking actually stood by those theorems.

They actually think that some of the assumptions in the theorem don't hold in reality.

And so maybe we shouldn't trust the idea that the Big Bang was the beginning.

And in fact, Niayash and I went to a large conference in Copenhagen, and we surveyed physicists.

We asked them all sorts of controversies within the field.

And in fact, the only one where we got a majority view was that the Big Bang should not be considered the beginning of time.

Rather, it's much more modest claim that the universe evolved from a hot-dense state and then expanded afterwards.

Interesting. And that hot-dense state that you're referring to is not the same thing as this singularity, right?

When people imagine the Big Bang, almost by definition, it's, well, it's the bang at the beginning. It's where everything got started. And so when you describe this hot, dense state, people might be imagining taking all of the matter and shoving it down to the, you know, the size of an atom. But this hot, dense state is not that singularity that people imagine. This is

sort of a little bit later on in the history of the universe. If there is such a thing

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