Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, man.

And the world. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, and this is your host, James Fodor.

In this podcast, I discuss a wide variety of topics in natural and social science,

attempting to better understand the world in which we live.

This is episode number 11, and the topic for today is the origin of the universe.

So, in this episode, we're going to look at, well, how the universe came to be. And particularly, I'm going to take the approach from a very interesting

model called the chaotic inflation theory of the origin of the universe. I think it provides a very

useful way of looking at how the universe

could have come into existence essentially from nothing. It is, of course, not the only model

for the very origin of the universe, but I think it's probably one of the leading candidates,

and certainly if everything I say today is not exactly correct, then probably I think it is at least

on the right track. And so without further ado, let's get into it. First of all, I want to

discuss the standard Big Bang model, because when I say the origin of the universe, most of you

probably automatically think back to, well, isn't it the Big Bang? And yes, that is true.

However, the Big Bang model itself mostly talks about the very early development of the universe,

not actually the actual origin itself of the universe.

So you can think of it like the Big Bang talks about the development of the universe

as if it were a fetus, a developing child, from embryo to fetus to newborn.

But it doesn't really talk about conception itself, like the very origin of life itself.

That's what I hope to address in this podcast.

So, the Big Bang model essentially starts with the observation that all of the largest structures in the universe,

like galaxies and clusters of galaxies and stuff like that are moving away from each other,

...