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Comment by halter73 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for pointing this out. I've always thought about the initial singularity as a point in both time and space. Is it still correct to say all the matter that makes up our observable universe started out at a single point in space? Since the singularity was infinitely dense, this at least seems possible.

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I'm about to do something terrible, but it helped me immensely to understand the Big Bang. Let's pretend we have a magic box that tells us how space expands over time:

    V(t)

So, t starts at '0', which we're gonna call 't0', and goes until 'now'. So V could be small, it could be big. We don't know, and it kinda doesn't matter. The reason is that the way the Big Bang works is like this:

    (t - t0) * V(t)

So, when t == t0 (the beginning of time), it doesn't matter what shape space (V) has, the size of the universe (spacetime) is '0'.

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