Question: Do you know anything about the big bang and how the world evolved? if yes what do you know?

Jim Caryl answered on 21 Jun 2011:

I know the basics about the big bang, but I don’t know why it happened. I remember when I first read about the big bang theory when I was a child, I was fascinated by the Planck epoch, which describes the period when the universe was between 0 and 10e-43 seconds old. 10e-43 basically means 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds old. The time when time began. It just seemed amazing to me that anyone could focus their attention on such a small time-frame, when the universe was a very different (and much hotter) place than it is today.

I don’t really know much more about the early days of the Earth than is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Earth#Hadean_and_Archaean_eons

The point when I become interested is when the first biological systems capable of storing information and self-replicating came into being, and how these evolved into the first life-forms and so on.

As for evolution, it is important to recognise that evolution does not explain how life began on planet Earth; this is process is called abiogenesis (life from non-life). Evolution is the theory that describes the origin of species, i.e. how and why there are so many different species, and why certain groups share many characteristics and why other don’t. It describes a mechanism by which new species might evolve, natural selection, which is where those organisms that are best suited to a particular environment do best (are naturally selected) and reproduce more effectively, than those that are less well suited (selected against).

I’ll leave you with one thought, which is that in the 3.5 billion years since the origins of life on this planet, there has been an unbroken line of cells giving rise to daughter cells between that time and you. If you go back to your mother, and her mother, and her mother, right the way back through billions of years, there is this unbroken line of living, successful cells that kept going despite all the odds. They were the successful ones, and everyone alive today – indeed everyTHING alive today, is the product of those successful cells, and ultimately, the further you go back, the more that these early cells were the ancestors of everything.