So what happened before the big bang?
Not only don’t we know what happened before the Big Bang, we don’t even know what happened in the instant immediately following the Big Bang.
Our knowledge of physics in the first 10^-44 seconds after the beginning (which, admittedly, is a pretty damn short time) is virtually non-existent. This instant is known as the Planck Time, and since we don’t know what happened before the Planck time with anything even remotely resembling certainty, we absolutely don’t know what happened before the Big Bang. Regardless, logic dictates that we’re left with one of two possibilities:
* The universe had some sort of beginning, in which case we’re left with the very unsettling problem of what caused the universe in the first place.
* The universe has been around forever, in which case there’s literally an infinite amount of history, both before and after us.
Neither of these is satisfying. Take the Old Testament view, for instance. We’re to understand that God created the world. In that case our universe has a definite beginning. However, God himself is supposed to be eternal. What was he doing before he created our universe? It’s no more satisfying to assert that the universe has been here all along. Is there literally an infinite amount of history? That doesn’t make sense.
As a particularly clever cheat (or theory, if you prefer), in 1982 Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University showed how what we’ve learned from quantum mechanics might shed light on the how the universe popped into being.
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