Before the Big Bang

Big Picture Science

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2014

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s one of the biggest questions you can ask: has the universe existed forever? The Big Bang is supposedly the moment it all began. But now scientists wonder if there isn’t an earlier chapter to our origin story. And maybe chapters before that! What happened before the Big Bang? It’s the ultimate prequel. Plus – the Big Bang as scientific story: nail biter or snoozer? Guests: Roger Penrose – Cosmologist, Oxford University Sean Carroll – Theoretical physicist, Caltech, author of The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World Simon Steel – Astronomer, Tufts University Andrei Linde – Physicist, Stanford University Jonathan Gottschall – Writer, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human Marcus Chown – Science writer and cosmology consultant for New Scientist magazine Descripción en español First released December 17, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.
0:04.2	I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Safeguarding Sound Science, Evolution Edition.
0:09.6	Evolution is the unifying principle of biology, yet it still breeds controversy a century
0:15.3	and a half after Charles Darwin.
0:17.7	Join us as we meet the passionate researchers and communicators who are expanding our knowledge
0:23.0	and fighting to keep good science in our schools and politics. Subscribe to Safeguarding Sound
0:29.3	Science on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you like to listen. In the beginning, there was,
0:36.4	well, an explosion.
0:41.5	Or maybe it was a flash. Say cheese.
0:44.7	Cheese.
0:46.0	I mean, who knows really, it could have been a pop.
0:48.9	Happy New Year! We can only guess what it was like.
0:52.2	We can only guess what it was like.
1:06.5	The point is, to the best of our knowledge, it all got underway in an instant.
1:11.9	The conventional view is that the universe began with what's called the Big Bang.
1:18.2	The Big Bang is our current idea of how the universe began.
1:30.1	All matter, all energy, all the stuff that would eventually be turned into stars, planets, galaxies, oceans, minerals, trees, animals, and humans traces its ancestry to the Big Bang.
1:32.8	It is the scientific origin story.
1:38.9	And this explosion took place where it's something like 14,000 million years ago.
1:44.4	The idea that anything happened before the Big Bang is sort of inconceivable in many ways.
1:48.0	That's the beginning of everything, the beginning of time, the beginning of space,
1:54.3	the beginning of the universe, and to ask what happened before the Big Bang is just a pointless question.
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