Temperature at the beginning

[wurf]

Some people say the big bang was more like a superheating than an explosion, but either way it's said that it was very hot. Why did the singularity have heat? Wouldn't heat require that there already be molecules or at least atoms? How could there be temperature before there was time, space and forces?

 

[SpeedFreek]

<font color="yellow"> How could there be temperature before there was time, space and forces? </font><br /><br />Well, technically, according to the theory there was only temperature <i>after</i> there was space and time!<br /><br />In particle accelerators, we smash particles together to try to recreate the conditions during the early universe before atoms formed. At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) physicists slammed gold nuclei together, producing a temperature 300 million times hotter than the sun, and recreating a quark-gluon plasma - this is a plasma theorised to be around at the beginning of the universe.<br /><br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#ff0000">_______________________________________________<br /></font><font size="2"><em>SpeedFreek</em></font> </p> </div>

 

[weeman]

<font color="yellow"> Some people say the big bang was more like a superheating than an explosion, but either way it's said that it was very hot. </font><br /><br />Yes, the universe early on was very, very hot. Fractions of a second after the big bang, the universe had a temperature of about 10^32 Kelvin. However, I would say that the term "superheating" is a misnomer. The universe was definitely incredibly hot, however, it began to cool as it expanded. It did not get any hotter after the initial BB, it gradually cooled until it became transparent when it was about 300,000 years old. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><strong><font color="#ff0000">Techies: We do it in the dark. </font></strong></p><p><font color="#0000ff"><strong>"Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.</strong><strong>" -Albert Einstein </strong></font></p> </div>