noooooo , not even atoms existed at the big bang, let alone stars, where is your science ?

I've been reading @ScienceBiker blog and it's very informative. Most of what he explains I already understand. But my question is probably worded so poorly that I'm not being understood. I understand everything you said, it makes sense and I understood it going into the question. My question is, at the time of the big bang explosion the energy/matter being expelled was traveling at some velocity. I'm not talking about the expansion of the universe (at least I don't think I am) I'm talking about the matter, antimatter, and the heat energy. I'm still not asking this right. I need time to think about how to ask the question and I'll get back to you.

@paul1967 I think you might be looking for an explanation of the state of the universe in the first moments after the big bang. It is a theory called inflation and it is far from being considered settled science. There are a few physicists that have promising theories but that's pretty much it. Here is a link that will help you dig deeper into it. Google "inflation cosmology" for more threads to follow on this topic.

[aether.lbl.gov]

@paul1967 the same mechanism was at work at the early stages after the big bang. The word "bang" is ill-chosen here because it suggests that there was an explosion where matter was violently accelerated within space, but instead, the universe itself was initially very dense, and the quick expansion of space itself is what caused the rapid expansion, not an "explosion" of something dense within a much larger space.
The big bang was not an explosion, it was the early inflationary expansion of space itself.

@josmi6699 -Please correct me if I'm misinterpreting what you're explaining. Are you saying that the expansion of space essentially dragged matter and antimatter outward as it expanded out to the size of a universe in the femtosecond after it occurred?

@paul1967 basically yes, except that drag is maybe not the right word here. To be honest, now that you asked this, I am getting quite curious to look at the mathematical details of this as well (I never did, but I think I understand it sufficiently to be able to point out that the big bang is not an expansion within space, but of space).
What I do not understand myself is the exact mechanism behind this.
I am also not sure if the current theories go back to femtoseconds after the singularity -- they get astonishingly close but at some point there is no way to get closer with our current understanding. As far as I know there are also some physicists who suggest that this was not a singularity at all, but I do not know the details either. I guess I have to read up on it!

@josmi6699 I'm switching gears here, and this is probably going to come across as an anti-big bang comment, and it's not. I do understand that the best evidence we have points to this model. I don't like using the term theory for a model that has as many gaps in knowledge as this model does. It seems what we know is a thing happened, and it happened fast. Shortly (less than a second) after it happens we have the workings of spacetime and matter, and that is understood well. We know what it is and how it works. My issue is that the critical moment that started all future moments is poorly understood and that is the "bang" in the big bang (poorly labeled or not.) To the lay people like myself, the Big Bang Theory isn't the moments after the Big Bang, it's the event itself. It would seem to get it's, designation as a theory because of all the stuff that occurred after the big bang. I wish we could revise our labeling system in a way that communicated to the masses our level of understanding. To me, The Theory of inflation, even though I don't understand it, science does, and I'm okay calling that a theory. The Big Bang Theory and String Theory, to me, don't reach the level of theory, I would think it would be more honest to call these models, hypotheses.

@paul1967 well as far as I know, scientists agree that we do not know much about either the singularity or the first few atto or femtoseconds after, but since the theory seems to work well up to that close, and no-one has come up with a better theory yet, we need to go with it for now, no? I would say, this hardly is of any concern to lay people at all and nothing that can actually be properly understood by almost all of them either. Science is full of this, and actually, it is mostly what science is about: we push forward the boundaries of an ever increasing area of knowledge, and necessarily, the more we do that, the larger the border becomes and the more questions there are to answer.
To make a judgement about what can be called a theory I think it is necessary to really know about all the details, which I don't so I will just admit that I don't know.

@josmi6699 Sounds like a very valid point.

@paul1967 Ok, I did a bit read up on this and am relieved that what I said was not bollocks
I was wrong though about the time where current theory breaks down: this is much closer to the "singularity" than just a femtosecond (10E-15 sec) or even an attosecond (10E-18 ) but more in the region between 10E-32 and 10E-44 seconds. The problem that eventually makes all odds go off is that this close to the singularity, some form of quantum gravity unified with quantum mechanics must have been at work, and we know nothing about that so far.
Now, since we do not know what happened at that point, we also do not know if there really was a singularity. Actually most scientists probably think there was no singularity but simply something we do not understand because it is too different from anything we can observe now.

So to sum up: the big bang was not at all an explosion, it is just our extrapolation backwards until it now longer works of a space that expands everywhere in a (probably) infinite universe.

We know a whole lot about this, but all speculation ends at about 10E-40 seconds from where our equations break down. But the thing is, while these equations seem to work well for the time since that point, they may be bollocks from somewhere close to that point and further back.

Most important take-away: "big-bang" theory is a terrible and utterly misleading name for that theory.

@josmi6699 Honestly, I never really thought it was an explosion, not because I'm smart or informed, but because it's just not how I envisioned it. I'm going to expose my ignorance here a bit and describe what I picture (This is just the mental silly workings of a novice.) I envision a lack of any"thing," meaning matter or energy. I would describe it like layers of sheets (I'm going to call it sheets for lack of a better word) of emptiness, with dimensional potential, distance potential, and thickness and finally a potential charge. Each sheet, having different possibilities and properties, with the potential to merge, a lot like DNA. The fusion of these unique layers at a point on these sheets creates the illusion of an explosion as they "bang" into each other. I don't think of the universe as being alive, but with the properties of something that grows, get's old and, not dies, but ends. I know, I'm adding my own imagination and information that probably has nothing to do with reality, but it's the only way I can describe how I envision the big bang.

@paul1967 I am not sure I understand fully what you envision, but let me tell you what I think the current model is essentially about. Let us assume that the universe has no or no significant curvature, something that is currently assumed to be true based on the observations that have been made (it could also be spherical or hyperbolic, but probably only with a very low curvature)

In that case, the universe is infinite. However, because of the expansion of space that takes place everywhere, only a finite part of that infinite universe is observable, everything else is in space that moves away from as faster than the speed of light.

Now if you go back half the age of the universe, the universe at that point is still infinite. It has not become "smaller". However the yardstick was shorter. Light would have needed less time to travel between the same two locations in space than now, i.e. the distance between things was shorter. Since density is measured as matter/volume and volume is measured with the yardstick, the density of the universe was higher back then.

If we rewind time more and more, the universe does not actually shrink, it stays infinite, but it is infinite with smaller and smaller units. Like an infinite chessboard where the length of the sides of each square shrink maybe. The density per cubic light year was bigger and bigger the further we go back in time. At some point the density becomes so incredibly big that the normal laws of physics we know about now cannot be applied any more. This is the point about 10e-40 after the time when according to our formulas, the "singularity" took place: the point where an infinite universe had a yard stick of zero length and thus infinite density.

What scientists call the Big Bang is not the singularity, it is essentially everything after of which quite some things are known.
Starting at about 10E-40 to 10E-30 seconds after the singularity, most things that must have happened for something like the current universe to come up can probably be understood with the laws of physics we think are at work now but there is still a lot of speculation going on with regards to all the details.

It is really hard to envision anything of this, simply because the human mind does not have any senses or experiences for all the things involved here. This is why physicists love maths: with that language and with thinking in those abstractions it is actually much easier to "make sense" of all this.

Yes, the limit of the speed of light, or even the speed of light itself, is often misunderstood. It is only an absolute limit within the confines of spacetime itself. Believe it or not, the speed of light is actually...relative.