• Question: what was there before the big bang

    Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sarah Casewell

      Sarah Casewell answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      No-one knows! I think the general idea is that there was nothing at all, and the the universe came into being with the big bang.

    • Photo: Nate Bastian

      Nate Bastian answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Good question, we don’t know yet, but we’re still working on it 🙂 Imagine how much we’ve learned in the last 100 years alone (we didn’t know about other galaxies, what matter was made of, etc), so perhaps the answer to this will come in the next 100 years.

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      We just don’t know!

      There are lots of people working on it at the moment though, it’s one of the really big picture questions that scientists all over the world are trying to find an answer to!

    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      We are not sure! One idea is that before the Big Bang there was something called the Big Crunch — basically, that’s the Big Bang but seen in reverse (like watching a movie backwards). But this theory is not well supported by the observations we can make of the moments after the big bang.

      In reality, we don’t know what happens at t=0, that’s when the Big Bang goes off. Perhaps, time didn’t even exist before the big bang, so then it would not make sense to even talk about what existed “before” — since the very idea of before didn’t exist before the Big Bang (if that makes sense!)

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