What did Hawking say caused the Big Bang?

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The late Stephen Hawkings had specific theories about what existed before the Big Bang (he calls it Singularity) and what happened afterwards. I don’t see anywhere what he believed, caused the BIg Bang. Can anybody enlighten?
 
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The singularity would be the moment of the big bang before the bang.

I think he may have said something like, time didn’t exist before the big bang so no use thinking about it or something like that. I may be misremembering. And that may have been in reference to a history of time.
 
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Our Universe floats inside a giant cosmic jellyfish.
 
How are you always on your A game? I swear you are like the reincarnation of ever comedians best days!
 
He and others believed that time started at the big bang, a point of infinite density. It is always surprising to see scientists use the word infinite.
 
My understanding is that there was nothing and nothing happening. Then there was something and then something happening. And, then the thing that was just happened and then just was.
 
No, seriously, it was a question that was begging to be asked! There are only two possible options:
a) Something inside the Singularity caused it to explode, in which case he would have to admit that the Singularity was unstable, or in disequilibrium, which is a contradiction in terms, because for a Singularity to be such, it would NEED TO BE in equilibrium.
OR
b) The causative agent lay outside the Singularity, which would have forced him to admit that it could only have been God.
 
John Lennox is a well-known mathematician who wrote a book called God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design is it Anyway? Lennox is quoted as saying:
As for the universe creating itself from nothing, it worries me that here is Hawking claiming that he solved the problem that his own science partly created. You see, he was involved in getting to the point where there was, informally speaking, a beginning to space-time. And so there was nothing, whatever it means, before that. And so we have a universe from nothing. And so that result in mathematical physics leads to the question, How do you get a universe from nothing? And he’s trying to solve it in this book and he fails because he doesn’t get a universe from nothing at all, because what he calls nothing isn’t nothing; it’s a quantum vacuum or something else.
Click to expand...
The book he refers to is Hawking’s The Grand Design. A link to an interview with Lennox concerning Hawking is here:


My limited understanding is that Hawking said a quantum fluctuation caused the Big Bang.
 
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Hawking was a theorist which means that most of what he told us was a theory only and not base on any scientific knowledge. We must separate theory from fact.
 
When Hawkings said that there was nothing “before” the Big Bang (BB), he was coming from his perspective that “time”, as we know it, started with the BB. He came up with the concept of a Singularity, viz an infinitely dense sub-atomic particle that was in beginingless/eternal existance, to explain what was there “before” the BB (if it were permitted to use that term).

So if we take Hawkings at face value, he still has to explain what it was that caused the Singularity to unravel into the universe that we have today. If it was an internal “quantum fluctuation” which was not neutralised by a corresponding reverse fluctuation, then it points to a disequilibrium in the Singularity. Whether Hawkings would accept such a proposition?
 
At least in part, Hawkings explains his theory of the “unraveling of a singularity” in one of his lectures found here:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures.html

The lecture to which I refer is called “The Beginning of Time,” listed on this webpage.

The direct link to the article says we are not supposed to reproduce any of it without permission, so I will just direct you to the page with the lecture title which leads you there. The lecture is not very long. To give a very short synopsis, he says General Relativity is not adequate for the Big Bang because it doesn’t allow for the Uncertainty Principle. Hawking combines General Relativity with the Uncertainty Principle, which he calls the Quantum Theory of Gravity, to describe the Singularity and what happens with it. He uses Quantum Theory as a basis of Imaginary Time, a dimension needed to delineate a “no boundary” universe in the same way you can picture the Earth as having no particular boundaries. The Singularity “borrows” from gravity in order to expand the universe after the Big Bang starts.

The details are in the lecture. Though the lecture was quite a while ago, I also have a short clip, linked below, of an interview that shows he still held these ideas up to his recent death. The link is on YouTube here:

 
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Not defending Hawking, but saying he did not base his theories on scientific knowledge is very wrong.
 
When you step back and think that humankind faces nuclear war, global warming which is melting the polar regions, causing massive changes in our weather patterns and rising sea levels, a financial breakdown of our financial system, increasing poverty around the world due to corporations greed, we might ask what good is discovering how black holes exist ?
 
Blessings
I saw this interview. I watched both of his movies. He drew a T on the concrete. Space is a vacuum (negative pressure) There is radiation in space. There were parts of atomic material. Reference is Natl Geographic magazine w graphic design of BIG BANG.
His drawing may have had another element in it besides the T for time. Essentially, the vacuum of space pulled the elements he projected and that made the Bang. Don’t laugh here. I’m trying to recall. I had arguments about Time being a constant?! If Time has mass, it could explode. But, if time is a measurable concept, can negative pressure cause it to explode?
I need to watch movie again. That Star talk show was good.
The Japanese Cosmologist, when asked to relate to HAWKINGS having Science as a god, stated we are all born w a GOD gene. I liked that. It explains why our species, usually hungers for more, even if they have all worldly possessions.
In Christ’s Love
Tweedlealice
 
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