What was there before the Big Bang?

What was the Big Bang, that massive explosion that slashed the vacuum and created the universe? It’s still a mystery today, even though the theories and the studies are trying to give it a concrete shape, to answer to the big question: how did everything begin?

If already the Big Bang and the same Universe are an incredible mystery how could we push ourselves even further and wonder what was there before? What was there before the Big Bang? It must be something even before. Something that probably is beyond our knowledges and to which we aren’t able to give a shape, much further our biggest imagination.

But it’s clear, anyway, that we wonder what was there before. It’s clear that many scientists wondered and tried to answer to this question. Because it’s right it that the science and its members do, they make crazy questions, to the limits of the improbable, and spend the whole life looking for the answer.

Before the Big Bang

Let’s give like established that around 13,8 billion of years ago took place that big explosion which gave the life to all we know and all we couldn’t see yet. We can say as true, according to what we currently know, that it must be something before. But is there a way to look through that before?

“Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”

According to a study published by some scientists on Physical Review Letters, it seems that yes, it’s possible to see what there was before that everything started.

The study is focused on the recreation of the inflation, that quick and exponential expansion that affected the Universe right a billionth of second after the Big Bang. If we would be able to recreate not only this one, but all the possible scenarios, we could know what there was before.

The theory of the Big Bounce

The one of the inflation, which means the quick expansion happened right after the Big Bang, is without any doubt the most spreaded and approved one, but we know that this isn’t the only model assumed.

The theory of the Big Bounce, which is next the main theory, believes that the Universe right before the Big Bang was contracting itself. This means that the current expansion is the result of the previous contraction and that the moment normally known like Big Bang was in reality the Big Bounce.

But to really understand if the matter was always there, while contracting and expanding, we need to answer before to one question: how big was the primordial universe?

If the scientists that believe in the theory of the Big Bounce will find an answer they will be able to confirm that their model is the correct one.

The problem is the time

Let’s come back now to our main theory, the one of the classic Big Bang and let’s assume that in reality we are making the wrong question. What was there in that time before the Big Bang, but maybe the time before wasn’t like the one we know now.

Hawking, infact, said that the time was always there, but not in the same way we as human being are used to feel it.

If we imagine to come back in time, at 13,8 billion of years ago, when the whole universe were compressed into the size of an athom. Into this ultra compact cosmic grain the laws of time and physics stop to exist and we can’t talk any more about a before, because it doesn’t exist any before outside the time.

Before the Big Bang the time was folded on itself. “It was really close to reach the nothing, but it was never nothing. There was never a Big Bang that produced something from the nothing. It seems so far from the human perspective”, explains Hawking.

So we can say that our time started with the Big Bang, but not that there was nothing before it. We just aren’t able to fell and understand something that it’s outside the time.

This post is also available in: Italiano