The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics just announced how the universe started. (It’s really blowing up.) Let me try to explain it to you.
Courtesy of Mark Rushing, a counterpoint from astronomer Peter Coles suggesting that it’s still too early to declare victory on this discovery - http://telescoper.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/time-for-a-cosmological-reality-check/
A great explanation of inflation theory, and how it solves some of the problems of the big bang theory - http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/cosmology/inflation.html
Two of my favorite physicists, Lawrence Krauss and Michio Kaku, explain what happened just after the beginning of the universe - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_MFhAoUUmQ
Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains why the universe is flat - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4UpvpHNGpM