In the time it takes to read this sentence…

…our universe will increase in size by 100 trillion cubic light-years — still being propelled by the unimaginable force of its explosive birth approximately 15 billion years ago.

    Over half century of meticulous observation of the recession of distant galaxies has proven beyond doubt that this expansion is occuring. Bolstered by discoveries in both astronomy and quantum physics, research is now beginning to probe the moment of creation — dubbed the Big Bang — which has hurled cosmic matter outward with such force that it is still flying away to this day.

    For many years it was assumed that whatever produced the Big Bang would remain a "singularity" — something forever inscrutable. Theoreticians and scientists think they have found one plausible explanation for the creation of all that we know exists.

    This theory also predicts the birth of trillions of other universes simultaneously with our own universe containing all the galaxies and the billion-trillion stars. To greatly simplify, within this view these structures are the coalescence of dust floating in an emmensity of space.

    There are sound theoretical reasons to support up this view. The creation agent can now be described mathematically — and it is beautifully simple. It can be explained as emerging from a fluctuation in a pre-existing vacuum. A phenomenon that can be described by quantum physics. That quantum physics (the study of the interaction of the smallest subdivisions of matter) and astronomy (the study of the largest structures) can be united to explain the origin of all that we know is the key to the new Genesis scenario.

    By mathematically running the cosmic clock backwards to a time just before the creation of the universe theorists calculate that there was a time when there were no stars, planets or galaxies as we know them today. All matter was unimaginably densely crammed together, a primordial soup of quarks, leptons and gluons at enormous temperatures corresponding to ultra-high energy. It was from this that all matter and energy we perceive today emerged. As you go to higher and higher energies, the universe gets simpler and simpler, but until recently, that’s where the conjecture stopped. Questions like what caused the Big Bang and where the primordial energy soup came from seemed totally inaccessible.

    Now it is possible in theory to trace events back to a point one trillion trillion trillionth of a second after the creation. Temperatures and pressures were so prodigious that the fundamental forces of nature the electromagnetic and weak and strong nuclear forces as well as gravity -must have become unified with equal and indistinguishable strengths.

    The forces were symmetrical at that instant in time, but as this primordial universe expanded, the temperature dropped, the symmetry was broken, and the forces became separate. This symmetry breaking can be thought of as a freezing of the hot primordial soup as the Big Bang explosion cooled. But just as heat is released as water freezes, the released energy, unable to escape, was then re-injected into the primal universe.

    It is at this 'symmetry-breaking' point that the theories predict that the primal universe was forced to expand much faster than the velocity of light. Almost instantaneously, it inflated to a billion, billion, trillion times its former size a greater increase than a grain of sand expanding to the size of the Earth. The new inflationary-universe scenario includes the astounding prediction that within this supercooled, hyperinflated primal universe, a nearly infinite number of universes would have to bubble into existence like foam to support the structure. From that point, each of those universes has been evolving -- ours among them for about 15 billion years. The expanding universe of stars and galaxies that we see today is but a minuscule segment of the whole of creation, an atom-like blip on the body of a colossal cosmic realm.

    For the first time, it explains in a plausible fashion the very earliest moments of creation.

    Following from this work, is possible to develop equations to describe the universe's total energy environment at various stages in its evolution. Working back to time zero—the instant of creation—the energy is zero. Which it turns out that's exactly what was needed. Scientists have known for some time that subatomic particles, called virtual particles, emerge from tiny fluctuations in a vacuum.

    Although the process normally occurs in much less than a trillion trillionth of a second, it has been observed and can be accounted for in quantum physics. Since the appearance of virtual particles is a random process, it is conceivable, that given: an infinite amount of time one of these vacuum fluctuations with exactly zero energy would occur. Such a fluctuation would not disappear but would hyperinflate, filling itself with energy, just as the new inflationary universe theories predict.

    The entire cosmos is then in essence, a re-expression of sheer nothingness, a random but predictable manifestation of the primal vacuum that predates our own universe. Extending equations to today's universe, there should still be-fallout from the creation in the form of matter being re-created in the vacuum around us.

    The amount would seem quite small — one proton created each year in a volume the size of the Earth. However, over the volume of the universe, the continuing creation of matter from the vacuum would be substantial enough for future generations of scientists to detect. Application of the inflationary universe theories makes our universe much more reasonable.

    Before we thought that our universe was all there was, it was impossible to explain why our universe has the properties it does — properties that allow stars and galaxies to form and matter to arrange itself into planets and life. Physicists could find no good reason why the rules of nature should not be different. The question was why the Big Bang made the universe the way it now is. With a nearly infinite number of universes emerging from the inflationary based theories, one universe like ours is virtually inevitable!