Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

150 SKIES AT NIGHT ARE BIG AND BRIGHT
He also realized that the moment of creation, the Big Bang,
was more than just a simple (though all-encompassing) explosion.
It was not an explosion in space, it was an explosion of space.
Everything was created in the initial event, including space and
time. So asking what there was before the Big Bang really has no
meaning. It’s like asking, where was I before I was born? You were
nowhere. You didn’t exist.
But time was created in the event as well. So asking what happened
before the Big Bang is what we call an ill-posed question,
another question with no meaning. The physicist Stephen Hawking
likens it to asking, “What’s north of the north pole?” Nothing is!
The question doesn’t even make sense.
We want it to make sense, because we are used to things happening
in a sequence. I get up in the morning, I ride my bike to
work, I make my coffee. What did I do before I woke up? I was
sleeping. Before that? I got into bed, and so on. But face it, at
some point there was a first event. In my case, it was a moment in
January 1964, which probably happened because it was a cold
night and my future parents decided to snuggle a bit.
But there was something even before that, and before that.
Eventually, we run out of thats. There was a first moment, a first
event. The Big Bang.
In television documentaries it’s very common to show an animation
of the Big Bang as an explosion, a spherical fireball expanding
into blackness. But that’s wrong! Since the explosion was
the initial expansion of space itself, there isn’t anything for the universe
to expand into. The universe is all there is. There is no outside,
any more than there was a time before the Big Bang. What’s
north of the north pole?
The illusion of living in a big expanding ball persists. I have a
hard time shaking it myself. You would think that there was some
direction to the center of the universe, and if you looked that way
you’d see it. The problem is, the explosion is all around us. We are
part of it, so it’s everywhere we look: the biggest movie theater of
them all.
Still confused? That’s okay. I sometimes think even cosmologists
get headaches trying to picture the fourth dimension and the