If you say that the Big Bang theory says "something came from nothing"?

@win

....no, the picture. last I recalled, I specifically said equation. besides "Big bang" is not what people in the scientific community call it, just idiots or when we are trying to it dumb. It is more properly called Cosmic Inflation.

@vmcm

Yes, I do realize that but it's a good thing that we have irrefutable evidence (the First Law of Thermodynamics, elaborated upon below) suggesting that Energy is eternal. Why is it irrefutable? because it would not be called a LAW if it were not. Laws only go to the most irrefutable of things. not even relativity or evolution are laws.

And since someone will undoubtedly asks the utterly stupid question of "how did matter/energy get created?" let me answer that: dE/dt = 0. This is the First Law of Thermodynamics and it says the change in Energy per change in time equals zero. This has also lab tested and shown to never be wrong, thus always true. Now, the consequence of this law is that if we perform Integration (from calculus) over any 2 intervals in time, the amount of energy will be a constant. It does not matter if we are integrating from 1 second ago to right now, from 2 years ago to yesterday, we could even integrate from 5 billion years ago to 100 Trill

100 Trillion years from now an the answer would still be the same. As it is, we are going to integrate from 0 seconds (0 seconds would be just before Cosmic Inflation occurred) to infinitely far in the future. Now, since we are referring to the universe, the constant mentioned earlier (we will call it "C") will be equal to however much energy exists inside of the universe, which can be calculated by knowing what the mass of the universe is. Lets call the mass of the universe "m_universe". Now, from Einstein we know that E=mc^2 (also tested in labs and proven to always be true...in fact, America tested this on Hiroshima...). So,

dE/dt = 0. -- Integrate from t=0 to t=infinity: E=C, where the constant C can be found from C= m_universe*c^2.

In case you're wondering how I know what happened before t=0 that can be explained by understanding the concept of the singularity. At a singularity, and in fact at every point inside an event horizon (this is the point at wh

event horizon (this is the point at which light can no longer escape gravity, or whatever force is creating the event horizon), time does not pass. What does this mean: this means that we know for a fact that before Cosmic Inflation 0 time passed. If you were outside of the singularity then 10 trillion years could have passed but whatever was inside the singularity would have experienced 0 time passing. Basically, this allows us to know that however much Energy exists in the universe also existed before Cosmic Inflation and thus: Energy was Never Created and has existed infinitely long. The above is in addition to the fact that creating Energy violates the First Law of Thermodynamics, which is impossible.

@nothing

A singularity is defined as dimensionless (it is not, but it's dimensions are so small that it might as well be), which technically means it is "nothing"despite having a mass equal to that of the universes.

Stephen was just trying to dumb it down.

@paulB

Alexander Friedmann came up with it in 1924. It is called the Friedmann–Lemaître–Walker equation if you want to google it. here's a wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRW

Beware, scientific literature does not use the phrase "big bang", preferring to call it "inflation" and refer to the universe as having "inflated"

Let give all of you a lesson in Physics:

There is no such thing as a "singularity." That is, a "dimensionless point of infinite density", does not exist and this is a well known fact.

The problem is that Einstein's Field Equations, published in 1916, have never been truly complete and the Theory of General Relativity(GR), as it is currently written, is wrong and physicists, including Einstein, have known this ever since Karl Schwarzschild produced the solution for a black hole in 1916. This is why has been called the "Theory" of GR and not the LAW of GR for the past 98 years.

The reason you will never hear a Physicist say the Eq's are wrong though, is because the problem is not a mystery (in addition to the fact that being incomplete is inconsequential outside of a Schwarzschild Radius, which I will touch on below). They KNOW what the problem is and how to fix it. All they need to do is add Quantum Gravity to the equation (at which point it c

They KNOW what the problem is and how to fix it. All they need to do is add Quantum Gravity to the equation (at which point it can finally be called a Law) and, they, including Einstein, have been trying to come up with a theory of Quantum Gravity ever since. However, this has proven to be quite trifling.

Furthermore, the fact that GR is "wrong" is inconsequential outside of a Schwarzschild Radius. This is because the effect of quantum gravity is nearly zero outside of the Schwarzschild Radius. How can this be you may ask? Well, when we insert conditions into the Equations of GR and then measure the effect of these conditions in a lab, the measurement has been exactly the same as what is predicted by GR! However, this is a technological limitation because the scale on which our computers can measure these tests have limited accuracy and the current scale is not accurate to enough decimal places to detect the effects of Quantum Gravity. But we know that Quantum gravity is re

But we know that Quantum gravity is real and GR is "wrong" because of the fact that infinity is not a possible quantity.

But, assuming infinity when GR breaks down has produced extremely useful results, such as allowing us to accurately predict the state of the universe as far back as 10^-43 seconds after inflation. However, this is when GR stops working as it is currently formulated and thus to predict the state of the Universe any further back requires that GR be modified to include the effects of Quantum Gravity. and, if I recall correctly, there are even some things that happen after 10^-43 seconds that we need Quantum Gravity to determine.