Dear Antares 531:

On Jul 16, 5:50*am, Antares 531 wrote:
Was the "Big Bang" an explosive event, similar to a
thermonuclear bomb, or was it a matter of unrolling
the three dimensions we now perceive as identifying
our space?

Unrolling the dimensions, from a perspective within
this universe, may have been a smooth, gentle
process that would not have produced the
inferno that most Big Bang ideas are built around.

Not really. Using the laws of physics we have now, and compressing
the Universe from its current temperature / size, to a much smaller
size... yields very high temperatures. Witness the CMBR radiation,
that indicates that the entire Universe was filled with a glowing
hydrogen plasma at about 3000K. This (CMBR quench) was supposedly
300,000 years after the Big Bang, and it is reasonable to expect it
was much hotter than this before.

Inferno =/= Explosion

David A. Smith