• Question: what existed before the big bang

    Asked by markfalloon to Daniel, Jon, Louise, Sharon, Zoe on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Jon Copley

      Jon Copley answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      I have no idea. But I don’t think time existed before the Big Bang, which makes it tricky to talk about “existed” or “before”.

    • Photo: Zoe Duck

      Zoe Duck answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      I’m not sure anyone knows the answer to this… I think it generally considered that there was a lot of energy and it all got very close together to cause the big bang. it is very difficult to know what was before because so far we havent been able to recreate the conditions as our particle accellerators aren’t good enough yet. Correct me if I’m wrong physicists!

    • Photo: Louise Dash

      Louise Dash answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Good question! The answer is nothing – but a different kind of nothing to “normal” – because there was no vacuum, no space, not even time! It’s something that I suspect humans cannot even understand, because we can’t imagine it at all. And of course there’s the problem of what made the big bang happen, because *something* must have caused it, and if there was something, how could there be nothing?!?

      It’s very strange stuff, something I try and leave to the cosmologists and philosophers, because it makes my head hurt just trying to think about it!

    • Photo: Sharon Sneddon

      Sharon Sneddon answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Truthfully, I have no idea. The simple answer would be to say that nothing existed, apart from a lot of energy, but then something must have existed as you can’t make something from nothing. I think its going to take a few more years, and lots of scientists to get to the bottom of this question!

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