The Universe as we know it began 13.8 billion years ago in an event scientists refer to as the Big Bang. The name, however, is a bit of a misnomer. It was neither big, nor was it a bang, since no space or time existed in which a bang could have taken place. Rather, it was a near-instantaneous expansion of both time and space. The traditional Big Bang theory states that everything, all time, all space, all matter, burst into existence from an infinitely small, infinitely dense point known as a singularity (more on singularities later). But that’s not the whole story.