• Question: If there where a big bang What happened Before the Big Bang?

    Asked by anon-258116 on 29 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Marios Kalomenopoulos

      Marios Kalomenopoulos answered on 29 Jun 2020:

      We actually don’t know what is happening even AT the Big Bang, so what happened before is still very speculative. Many people would also say that time started at the Big Bang, so then it makes no sense to discuss what happened before that.
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      In any case, our standard model of cosmology work pretty fine till the very first moments AFTER the big bang, but then breaks down, because we don’t know if our current theory of gravity works well at these scales (actually we expect it to break down), and a new “quantum gravity” theory would be needed to describe these moments.

Comments

  • Photo: Scott

    Scott commented on :

    The way I was always taught about the big bang is to think about travelling north on a globe. No matter if you approach it from the UK, America or Russia, you will eventually reach the same spot: the North Pole. There is no further ‘north’ you can go (unless you jump off the Earth into space!). In the same way, if you go back in time (no matter where or when you are in the universe), eventually you reach a time where time runs out: there is no time before that point. This is the Big Bang. The Big Bang is where time began. There is no ‘before’ the big bang.