Ah, the Big Bang, our most science-y of creation myths. Everyone knows the story of how the universe and all its physical laws emerged from nothing in a massive explosion, growing from a singularity to the size of a breadbox until, over billions of years, it became the size it is today.

…actually, almost nothing in that paragraph is true. There are a lot of myths about the Big Bang, born from physicists giving sloppy explanations. Here are three things most people get wrong about the Big Bang:

1. A Massive Explosion:

When you picture the big bang, don’t you imagine that something went, well, bang?

In movies and TV shows, a time traveler visiting the big bang sees only an empty void. Suddenly, an explosion lights up the darkness, shooting out stars and galaxies until it has created the entire universe.

Astute readers might find this suspicious: if the entire universe was created by the big bang, then where does the “darkness” come from? What does the universe explode into?

The problem here is that, despite the name, the big bang was not actually an explosion.

In picturing the universe as an explosion, you’re imagining the universe as having finite size. But it’s quite likely that the universe is infinite. Even if it is finite, it’s finite like the surface of the Earth: as Columbus (and others) experienced, you can’t get to the “edge” of the Earth no matter how far you go: eventually, you’ll just end up where you started. If the universe is truly finite, the same is true of it.

Rather than an explosion in one place, the big bang was an explosion everywhere at once. Every point in space was “exploding” at the same time. Each point was moving farther apart from every other point, and the whole universe was, as the song goes, hot and dense.

So what do physicists mean when they say that the universe at some specific time was the size of a breadbox, or a grapefruit?

It’s just sloppy language. When these physicists say “the universe”, what they mean is just the part of the universe we can see today, the Hubble Volume. It is that (enormously vast) space that, once upon a time, was merely the size of a grapefruit. But it was still adjacent to infinitely many other grapefruits of space, each one also experiencing the big bang.

2. It began with a Singularity:

This one isn’t so much definitely wrong as probably wrong.

If the universe obeys Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity perfectly, then we can make an educated guess about how it began. By tracking back the expansion of the universe to its earliest stages, we can infer that the universe was once as small as it can get: a single, zero-dimensional point, or a singularity. The laws of general relativity work the same backwards and forwards in time, so just as we could see a star collapsing and know that it is destined to form a black hole, we can see the universe’s expansion and know that if we traced it back it must have come from a single point.

This is all well and good, but there’s a problem with how it begins: “If the universe obeys Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity perfectly”.

In this situation, general relativity predicts an infinitely small, infinitely dense point. As I’ve talked about before, in physics an infinite result is almost never correct. When we encounter infinity, almost always it means we’re ignoring something about the nature of the universe.

In this case, we’re ignoring Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics naturally makes physics somewhat “fuzzy”: the Uncertainty Principle means that a quantum state can never be exactly in one specific place.

Combining quantum mechanics and general relativity is famously tricky, and the difficulty boils down to getting rid of pesky infinite results. However, several approaches exist to solving this problem, the most prominent of them being String Theory.

If you ask someone to list string theory’s successes, one thing you’ll always hear mentioned is string theory’s ability to understand black holes. In general relativity, black holes are singularities: infinitely small, and infinitely dense. In string theory, black holes are made up of combinations of fundamental objects: strings and membranes, curled up tight, but crucially not infinitely small. String theory smooths out singularities and tamps down infinities, and the same story applies to the infinity of the big bang.

String theory isn’t alone in this, though. Less popular approaches to quantum gravity, like Loop Quantum Gravity, also tend to “fuzz” out singularities. Whichever approach you favor, it’s pretty clear at this point that the big bang didn’t really begin with a true singularity, just a very compressed universe.

3. It created the laws of physics:

Physicists will occasionally say that the big bang determined the laws of physics. Fans of Anthropic Reasoning in particular will talk about different big bangs in different places in a vast multi-verse, each producing different physical laws.

I’ve met several people who were very confused by this. If the big bang created the laws of physics, then what laws governed the big bang? Don’t you need physics to get a big bang in the first place?

The problem here is that “laws of physics” doesn’t have a precise definition. Physicists use it to mean different things.

In one (important) sense, each fundamental particle is its own law of physics. Each one represents something that is true across all of space and time, a fact about the universe that we can test and confirm.

However, these aren’t the most fundamental laws possible. In string theory, the particles that exist in our four dimensions (three space dimensions, and one of time) change depending on how six “extra” dimensions are curled up. Even in ordinary particle physics, the value of the Higgs field determines the mass of the particles in our universe, including things that might feel “fundamental” like the difference between electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. If the Higgs field had a different value (as it may have early in the life of the universe), these laws of physics would have been different. These sorts of laws can be truly said to have been created by the big bang.

The real fundamental laws, though, don’t change. Relativity is here to stay, no matter what particles exist in the universe. So is quantum mechanics. The big bang didn’t create those laws, it was a natural consequence of them. Rather than springing physics into existence from nothing, the big bang came out of the most fundamental laws of physics, then proceeded to fix the more contingent ones.

In fact, the big bang might not have even been the beginning of time! As I mentioned earlier in this article, most approaches to quantum gravity make singularities “fuzzy”. One thing these “fuzzy” singularities can do is “bounce”, going from a collapsing universe to an expanding universe. In Cyclic Models of the universe, the big bang was just the latest in a cycle of collapses and expansions, extending back into the distant past. Other approaches, like Eternal Inflation, instead think of the big bang as just a local event: our part of the universe happened to be dense enough to form a big bang, while other regions were expanding even more rapidly.

So if you picture the big bang, don’t just imagine an explosion. Imagine the entire universe expanding at once, changing and settling and cooling until it became the universe as we know it today, starting from a world of tangled strings or possibly an entirely different previous universe.

Sounds a bit more interesting to visit in your TARDIS, no?