Caused the Big Bang

Lucifer: Once upon a time, a boy met a girl, and they fell in love. They had sex. The only trouble was they were celestial beings, so that moment created the Universe.
Dr Linda Martin: Mm, the Big Bang?
Lucifer: Never knew how appropriate the name was until now, did you?

— Lucifer (2016), "Everything's Coming Up Lucifer"

The Big Bang. The start of the Universe. Scientist have many theories about what it was. But here comes The Reveal... it was the scientists who made it. Or an accident. Maybe even the very protagonists of the story.

Part of the Historical In-Joke or Been There, Shaped History. Compare Beethoven Was an Alien Spy, Phlebotinum Killed the Dinosaurs. Tends to involve a Stable Time Loop. Subtrope of Real Event, Fictional Cause. Can be considered a subtrope of Creation Myth — well, except that this is usually in-universe reality rather than myth.

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Examples

Comedy

• In her "Circle" DVD, Suzy Eddie Izzard states that she prefers the idea of a bumbling idiot God of Chaos to the perfect, all-powerful God of the Abrahamic religions, and tells an alternate version of the creation story in which Chaos lives in a caravan in deep space and crated the universe completely by accident when his oven exploded while he was trying to bake a flan.

Comic Books

• Imperiex of The DCU, a hive minded mechanical entity, saw its purpose as being the "hollowing" of the universe, destroying the flawed creation and remaking it in a new Big Bang. Ironically, the flaw it detected in the universe was itself, and a massive cooperative effort managed to throw him into the past where he in fact became the Big Bang in the first place, via a Stable Time Loop, a fact which Imperiex realizes the moment before it dies. Also, it is stated that the reason there is a multiverse is that a scientist decided to view the Big Bang and disrupted it that way.
• Marvel Universe:
  • At the end of the Secret Wars II series, the energy of the Beyonder is shunted out of our universe and becomes a Big Bang, thus creating a new universe.
  • In Venom (Donny Cates), the primordial god Knull credits the Celestials with causing the Big Bang; though in the 2014 Silver Surfer comic it's revealed that Norrin Radd was in-part responsible as well.
  • One Doctor Strange comic has Strange and his Arch-Enemy Baron Mordo act as the "good angel" and "bad angel", respectively, to a sorcerer from the future who is traveling back in time, becoming ever more powerful with each passing second. Mordo convinces him to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, but Strange convinces him to create the Garden of Eden for a protohuman and his mate. Finally, at the very beginning of existence, the sorcerer concludes that life has the right to exist and sets off the Big Bang before ascending beyond the physical universe.
• The Transformers (Marvel) gets in on this. Unicron (at this point a "dark god", not yet his robotic self) destroyed the entire universe, even "the stuff of space itself", and then went to sleep in the void. But he hadn't been thorough enough, and the tiny leftovers coalesced and another universe (the current one) was off and running.

Literature

• The Ur-Example seems to be The Accursed Galaxy (1935) by Edmond Hamilton, where it turns out the reason the universe expands is that a race of Energy Beings once faced the disease of life spreading among the planets of the original supergalaxy, and had no choice but to spin it apart. Not quite a bang, but then, the term wasn't coined until over a decade later.
• Isaac Asimov:
  • The Gods Themselves: At the end, the heroes say that the way they are draining the energy from another universe (which is all a single star) will eventually cause a Big Bang by making the star go supernova. It is unknown whether it happened in our universe, since spontaneous leakages are quite possible.
  • "The Instability": This Short Story ends with two time travelers realizing they didn't travel 27 million years to their own future, but into the primordial chaos of some dimension. And since they are here, they are introducing an instability, meaning... Oh Shi-
  • "The Last Question": The titular question refers to humans trying to figure out how to reverse entropy, the heat-death of the universe. By the end of the story, the massive human-designed computer Multivac has figured out an answer, but the universe has already died. So it recites from Book of Genesis, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!", implying the creation of a new universe.
• Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov's Norby Finds a Villain: Ing's plan for revenge is to set off a bomb in hyperspace. He believes that this will cause the current universe to collapse and create a new one in its place. He ends up being wrong, as it sends him into a different universe instead, one ruled by the Master Cult.
• In Captain Underpants and the Revolting Revenge of the Radioactive Robo-Boxers, Crackers and Sulu time travel themselves with Slightly Younger Tiny Tippy to before the creation of the universe before his galaxy-destroying nuclear bomb can detonate, causing the Big Bang and creating the universe.
• Cities in Flight: Evidence arises that two universes (one of them 'ours') will pass "through" each other, incidentally wiping each other back to a blank slate. Several members of one of the Cities decide to use energy from the engines to throw themselves outside of the universe into the Void just before contact, along with a package of explosives in at least one, and possibly all, of the space suits. Then the explosives will be detonated, either on a timer or by manually pressing a button, depending on preference. The new universe(s) will be seeded with constants based on those embodied by the astronaut(s).
• Discworld
  • In Soul Music, it's revealed that the first thing ever heard in the universe was "One. Two. One, two, three, four." and then the big bang happened, thanks to "Music with Rocks In", as the main theme of the book is that the music is alive, and wants to be played, no matter the cost to the player. This is in contradiction to earlier books, but Discworld is famously loose with its origin stories.
  • In The Science of Discworld, the wizards of the Unseen University first create an empty Bigger on the Inside "universe" different from their own by draining away the Background Magic Field from an area — and then the Dean sticks his hand in and wiggles his fingers, which, since nothingness is just somethingness waiting to happen or something, causes the Big Bang that creates our universe.
• In God's Debris, the event known as the Big Bang was actually God killing Himself to experience the only thing He hasn't yet known—His own death. The entire post-BB universe is actually the eponymous debris of God, i.e. matter and probability.
• The Star Diaries has an episode where scientists are trying to send into the past a particle which will become the Big Bang (they are also trying to imbue it with the properties to create a better universe... doesn't really work out).
• In Harry Harrison's Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, it is revealed at the end that the ultimate weapon works by sending an area of space to the past in order to create the Big Bang. Naturally, It Only Works Once.
• A possible case in A.E. van Vogt's The Weapon Shops of Isher, where a man travels through time, accumulating energy the further he is away from his time. In the end, he is at a time before the planets formed, and is tired of it, so he releases the energy (although it is not stated that outright it is actually the Big Bang that was created that way).
• Master of Space and Time by Rudy Rucker revolves around a machine that can give you nigh-unlimited Reality Warper powers. One of the machine's users is asked to find out "why the Universe is the way it is" and sends his consciousness back in time, only to discover that he himself created the Universe, because it looked like it wasn't happening on its own. Not only that, he gave the Universe a few "quick fixes" along the way — such as creating the Baryon Asymmetry and making the first DNA molecule — to make sure mankind would exist after all.

Live-Action TV

• In Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019), the entirety of The Multiverse is destroyed by the Anti-Monitor. The only way to undo the damage is to travel back to the Dawn of Time and jumpstart a new universe, one that more or less recreates the world as they knew it. All Arrowverse episodes that air after Crisis are set in the universe that the heroes created and dubbed "Earth-Prime".
• Doctor Who:
  • In "Terminus", it is revealed that the Big Bang was triggered by a time-travelling space ship that was forced to dump unstable fuel into the void before going back up the timeline. The fuel exploded, triggering the Big Bang.
  • In "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang", the Doctor is forced to restart the entire universe after cracks in reality and timey-wimey paradoxes have made it so that everything never was, using the restoration beam from inside the Pandorica and the energy from the exploding TARDIS.
• Lucifer (2016): Lucifer claims that the "Big Bang" was his parents having sex. His mother seems to support that suggestion.
• Supernatural: The Big Bang was caused when Chuck and Amara, i.e. God and the Darkness, separated in two and created the Balance Between Good and Evil upon which the universe is built.
• Star Trek: Voyager: In "The Omega Directive", it's speculated that a natural particle of the Omega molecule created the universe with the Big Bang, and even the coldly logical Seven of Nine has what she can only compare to a religious experience on seeing it stabilize for a mere 3.2 seconds.

Radio

• In the Doctor Who radio play "Slipback", the Big Bang was caused by the freighter Vipod Mor travelling back in time to the beginning of the Universe and self-destructing.

Video Games

• A question in The Impossible Quiz Book Chapter 3 requires the player to start the Big Bang and create the universe, by typing "B-A-N-G" on the keyboard.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater: Sarda the Sage went back to the beginning of the universe to create it in his image. However, he carelessly sent White Mage slightly further back, and she accidentally creates the universe as-is first.

Western Animation

• Ben 10: Omniverse: In "A New Dawn", It is revealed that the Contumelia used the Annihilargh not just to destroy universes; if activated in a dimension without one, a new universe is created. Maltruant travelled back in time to just before the Big Bang to try to create his own universe In Their Own Image, but Ben and Rook stop him. The Contumelia allow them to witness the creation of their own universe instead.
• A Brief History: The fanciful opening to this three-minute cartoon that depicts the history of the universe shows a fly buzzing around Carmen Miranda. (Yes.) Carmen sneezes, causing her fruit hat to explode, creating the universe.
• Family Guy
  • In "The Griffin Family History", when Peter starts telling the history of his family, he starts at the beginning of the universe, which was the result of one of God's farts that He set on fire.
  • In "The Big Pang Theory", it turns out the entire universe came into existence because of an accident involving Stewie's time machine.
• In Green Lantern: The Animated Series, to an extent. The Big Bang is completely natural, but Aya tries to mess with it to create a universe she considers better.

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