Big Bang Question

For the last several years my reading activity has been a weird mix of books about artificial intelligence, quantum physics, one book that could be called theological (The God Problem) and the normal stuff one reads.

Recently that "normal" stuff has been a dive into the 20 Aubrey/Maturin books.

I'm currently at book four.

A question has distilled out of all of that.

I have asked the only astro physicist that I know, but I think he thought that I was kidding - or plug stupid.

So I finally decided to ask Bing/Copilot.

Here is that exchange.

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You

I have a question about the big bang:  I understand that "everything" pre-existed the bang as a "singularity".  That "singularity" although nonexistent in space and time was "potential". For some reason that I don't need to understand that potential became "everything", and "everything" began a limitless journey of expansion.  That gave birth to "time" which accounted for the fact that the new "everything" was moving, and the description of where everything had been, was "now" and,soon,  "would be" is called "time".  My question is did that phenomenon occur in a spherical manner, and if so, where in that spherical phenomenon are "we" ("we" being the portion of "everything" that came into existence at the four billion year mark)?

Copilot

The Big Bang theory describes the universe’s expansion from an extremely hot and dense state. While it’s common to visualize this expansion as a spherical explosion, it’s more accurate to think of it as the expansion of space itself, rather than an explosion into space. The universe doesn’t expand into pre-existing space; instead, space itself is expanding.

The expansion is often described as isotropic, meaning it looks the same in all directions. This isotropy suggests that there is no central point of expansion; every point in the universe is moving away from every other point. This can be visualized with the analogy of the surface of a balloon being inflated: as the balloon expands, every point on the surface moves away from every other point, but there is no center on the surface itself.

Regarding your question about our position in this expanding universe, we are not at a specific “edge” or “center” of a spherical expansion. Instead, we are part of this isotropic expansion. The observable universe is about 13.8 billion years old, and our solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago. We are located in one of the many galaxies that formed as the universe expanded and cooled.

In summary, the Big Bang’s expansion is not spherical in the traditional sense but rather an expansion of space itself, with no central point. We are simply one part of this vast, expanding universe.