How can the universe be infinite if it began with the big bang? This is going to come as a shock to you, but the physics community does not believe in the Big Bang and it does not believe that there was a ”singularity”. The term Big Bang is misleading, and was in fact invented by the British astronomer Fred Hoyle to mock the idea of the universe exploding from a “singularity” (he believed in a steady state universe, which exists forever, more or less unchanged). Our best theories of the early universe say that there was a time when our visible universe was incredibly small, hot and dense. That’s it. You could extrapolate back from that and say “Well, looking at this graph of the size of the universe, it crosses the zero line at this time, therefore it must have come from nothing, or a point of zero size, which we call a singularity.”, but you would be mistaken in doing so. Lots of people have made this mistake, and the name also helps to create the commonly held misconception that there was a big explosion where previously there was nothing. I could do the same for your mass, as a foetus: I’d say “Well, looking at this graph, we can see the mass of the foetus crossing the zero line at this time here - therefore, the foetus came from a singularity!”. But, you didn’t come from nothing. There was a single fertilized cell, which we know about, and then before that, something happened, but we don’t know exactly what. (And we don’t really want to know, thanks, that’s between your mom and dad). The current leading theory states that the universe expanded incredibly rapidly in a very very short space of time, due to a process called cosmic inflation. This theory made some predictions which have since been borne out, eg by some features of the cosmic background radiation, and so it’s a strong, widely accepted theory. That begs the question “Well, what inflated?”, and that is a good question. We’re not quite sure. But, it seems that there was something there before, that dumped a great deal of energy (for some reason), and that triggered a short runaway expansion of a small part of space into the much much larger part of space which made up the very early universe. Then, the inflation chain reaction stopped, and the universe continued to expand just due to the fact that it was incredibly hot and dense, and that’s what hot and dense things do if they’re not contained. Personally, i think we could cure a lot of public misunderstanding if we ditched the phrase “The Big Bang” and replaced it with “The Big Stretch”. Regarding infinity - you're right: if it is infinite now it must have been infinite then too: you can't transition from finite to infinite. All we know about is our finite part of the entire Universe (as opposed to the visible Universe that we can see out to the cosmic background radiation). We don't know if the larger Universe is infinite. It might be - this is actually one of the debated subjects of cosmology. #hardtalknews
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