Unless you've studied cosmology or taken a maths course involving spaces with more than three dimensions (and probably even if you have), there's an excellent chance your mental picture of the Big Bang bears a striking resemblance to an explosion such as you might commonly see in any Hollywood sci-fi – except bigger, and with more bang.

The trouble with all of those explosions, however, is that they occur at some time and place in space. That is, they are events in space-time. But what if I told you that the Big Bang wasn't an explosion in space-time, but an explosion of space-time? It wasn't that the matter in the universe rapidly flew apart, it was that the fabric of space-time itself suddenly expanded its proportions.

The difference between these two scenarios may sound like philosophical pedantry, but their respective logical implications are (pardon the pun) worlds apart. In the first case, there is one special, super-dense place where all the matter resides, while all the surrounding space is hanging around emptily, waiting for a sudden influx of post-explosion matter to fill it. In the second case, there is no special place and no "outside" space – everywhere is super-dense, and the result of the "explosion" is merely that everywhere suddenly becomes, well, less dense.

In both scenarios it will look like matter is getting further away from you, regardless of where you sit. This is what Edwin Hubble first observed in 1929 in the motions of galaxies. Its importance was not that it revealed the nature of the Big Bang, but that it showed that there was a Big Bang.

The clincher came in 1964 with the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, a faint signal which is interpreted as the afterglow of the Big Bang. The CMB has the amazing property that it looks the same no matter which direction you look. This uniformity must mean one of two things. Either there is a special place in the universe where the Big Bang happened – and we are in it. Or, there is no special place in the universe. I, for one, think that the latter is much more likely.

Where did the Big Bang happen? Well, everywhere!

* Correction: Last week's column stated plants have caused a pause in the increase of atmospheric CO2. This should' ve read "a pause in the rate of increase …"

Response by: Sam McSweeney, PhD student, Curtin University

Brought to you by the Fuzzy Logic science show, 11am Sundays on 2XX 98.3FM. Send your questions to askfuzzy@zoho.com