Although everyone calls it the Big Bang, many books caution us not to think of it as an explosion in the conventional sense. It was, rather, a vast, sudden expansion on a whopping scale. So what caused it?
雖然人人都稱其為大爆炸，但許多書上都提醒我們，不要把它看做是普通意義上的爆炸，而是一次范圍和規模都極其大的突然爆炸。那么，它的原因是什么？
One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier, collapsed universe—that we're just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call "a false vacuum" or "a scalar field" or "vacuum energy"—some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was. It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.
有人認為，那個奇點也許是早年業已毀滅的宇宙的殘余--我們的宇宙只是一系列宇宙中的一個。這些宇宙周而復始，不停地擴大和毀滅，就像一臺制氧機上的氣囊。有的人把大爆炸歸因于所謂的"偽真空"，或"標量場"，或"真空能"--反正是某種物質或東西，將一定量的不穩定性帶進了當時的不存在。從不存在獲得某種存在，這似乎不大可能，但過去什么也不存在，現在有了個宇宙，事實證明這顯然是可能的。
It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place. Or it may be that space and time had some other forms altogether before the Big Bang—forms too alien for us to imagine—and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universe went from a form we can't understand to one we almost can. “These are very close to religious questions,” Dr. Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford, told the New York Times in 2001.
情況也許是，我們的宇宙只是眾多更大的、大小不等的宇宙的部分，大爆炸到處不停地發生。要不然也許是，在那次大爆炸之前，時間和空間具有某種完全不同的形式--那些形式我們非常不熟悉，因此無法想像--大爆炸代表某個過渡階段，宇宙從一種我們無法理解的形式過渡到一種我們幾乎可以理解的形式。"這與宗教問題很相似。"斯坦福大學的宇宙學家安德烈·林德博士2001年對《紐約時報》的記者說。
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