Was there anything before the big bang?
I’m not sure this question belongs under the heading “Astronomy & Space”; many quantum theorists have pointed out that theories concerning the origins of the universe and what if anything existed prior to the Big Bang cross the line from science into theology or perhaps philosophy. I take the view that since time is an integral property of the universe, talking about a “before” the Big Bang is meaningless – like talking about time before time existed. The universe is everything – all that we can know. Beyond its edges, one necessarily concludes there is literally “nothing” – no space, no entropy and no time. All that said, I choose to believe that there was an organizing intelligence behind the creation of the primordial atom – the particle describing the universe at moment of the Big Bang, when it was exactly the size of a single atom. My beliefs system inclines me to think it likely that intelligence was what many of us call God; but I’m open to other possibilities. But fundamentlaly
When astronomers think about the Big Bang, in general they don’t actually mean that one singular moment when the Universe burst into being. It’s really the name given to the model used to describe what happened an infinitesimally thin slice of time after that moment. The problem is, right at that moment, at T=0, our laws of physics… well, they stall out. You wind up dividing by zero a lot, which causes a lot of headaches. You get things like zero volume and infinite density of matter and energy. It’s not that this moment didn’t exist physically, or that something impossible happened, it’s just that the math we currently use can’t describe it. And let me be clear: what happened after that one moment we can model fairly well. We may not have a complete picture, and the model may yet be supplanted (more on that in a moment), but we have a relatively (har har) good grasp on how the Universe behaved after T=+0.0000000000000…1 seconds. But at T=0, fuggeddaboutit. And T<0? The way the math wo
