Thread by @AstroKatie

This piece by @StartsWithABang is a nice explanation of how the mental picture most people have of the “Big Bang” is outdated and wrong (!)

❌ singularity➡️hot dense plasma➡️galaxies etc

✅ [unknown]➡️inflation (probably)➡️hot dense plasma➡️galaxies etc

bigthink.com/starts-with-a-…

I talk a little bit here about what cosmologists CURRENTLY mean when we say “the Big Bang” (a.k.a. “Hot Big Bang”) — the hot dense glowing plasma phase of the early universe. NOT a singularity. We don’t have any evidence a singularity ever happened!

vm.tiktok.com/ZM8gVuDG7/

Here, I talk about the language ambiguity around the term “the Big Bang.” It’s best to think of the Big Bang as the theory that the early universe was hotter, denser, and in some sense smaller than it is today. But a singularity isn’t part of that picture! vm.tiktok.com/ZM8gVfVxr/

Why is there so much misunderstanding about the Big Bang? As far as I can tell, around the 70s & 80s, popular explanations of cosmology talked a LOT about the Big Bang as a singularity, the beginning of all space and time, because it’s a cool/weird idea. And that just… stuck.

The theory of cosmic inflation (which effectively replaced the singularity picture) didn’t hit the scene in cosmology until the early 1980s, and took a while to get worked out in academic circles, and it’s not so simple to explain, so it just didn’t really get out there as much.