They pushed the button and nothing happened. It was kind of a shame too, because the machine that should have switched on as result took decades of planning, building and ridiculous amounts of money. Its purpose was to recreate the particles present during the first few seconds of the universe and give scientists a peek into what was rather simplistically labeled "The Big Bang," but there was nothing; not even the slightest hum.
Some scientists weren't surprised. Mainly because they had serious doubts about this long-standing hypothesis of the beginning of everything. After working through hundreds of equations, these antithetical theoreticians postulated that there actually was no beginning and that our universe was in fact made up of layers upon layers of other past universes. Like a Russian doll inside an onion inside a rubber band ball.
Of course the Big-Bang-believers thought these contrary assertions were preposterous and that one would have to execute some pretty crazy mathematical gymnastics, if not outright chicanery, to reach such a cosmological conclusion. But those alleged number-fudging physicists figured that if The Big Bang never occurred then the Big Bang Machine had nothing to reveal and wouldn't do a damn thing. They were smug. They were chuckling at their Big-Bang-believing peers. But thirty seconds later, they were all instantaneously disintegrated by an enormous burst of energy.
The blast was so powerful that it broke every law of physics. It was so hot and so massive that it created new laws of physics—that it then promptly broke just for good measure—destroying everything it engulfed.
Eventually, the explosion dissipated and things began to cool down. The tiniest atoms began to find their niches in the grand scheme of things as the passing shock wave shaped gases into stars and stars into galaxies. Molten materials coalesced into perfect little spheres upon which liquids and lava collected. On some of those spheres, elemental molecular chains, which at first were merely detritus from the apocalyptic cataclysm, started linking together into bigger and bigger strands. They divided into twos and fours and sixteens and so on.
Then they discovered sex and really started to multiply. And, oh, the things they became. Jelly-filled fish, hard-shelled crustaceans and multi-limbed bugs flying from plant to plant eating leaves and drinking nectar.
Some of the offspring grew scales, some grew feathers, and some fur. After a while, the brain in the furry species' head got big enough to ponder its own existence. It created language and gods, numbers and science in an effort to find answers. It began to see all the strange shapes and signals in the sky as the leftovers of a violent expulsion of matter and perhaps a clue into the origins of everything.
And finally, after thousands of generations had lived and died, these now mostly furless creatures and their somewhat more developed thinking organ built a machine that could recreate the very beginnings of space and time. Scientists came from all over to witness the moment this machine got switched on. They watched in wonder and with great anticipation.
They pushed the button and nothing happened...