What was there before the BIG BANG?

Question

You know which one. The one that took place between 15 and 20 billion years ago.

Answer 1

The best estimate is 13.8 billion years ago.

The big bang wasn't a bomb going off. The energy of the big bang was a statistical anomaly of the zero point energy, a phenomenon treated in quantum mechanics.

Imagine a room full of air molecules. Most of the time, the distribution of the air will be such that the air's density is almost constant throughout the whole room. But, if you can wait long enough, you might witness a very rare event. It's possible (just very unlikely) that all the air molecules in a room could, by chance, move toward one corner in such a way as to arrive at nearly the same moment, leaving the rest of the room in vacuum. It's highly improbable, but it could happen in principle.

If it did happen, it wouldn't last long. In the next eye-blink, all the air would come blasting out of that corner back into the room, quickly re-establishing the more probable distribution of near homogeneous density. The blast would resemble an explosion, and it would make a big bang. Get it?

Space is full of energy; there's more of this latent energy than there is contained in the matter and radiation and motion of the universe. However, unless you're the size of an atom or smaller, you might never notice it. This "quantum chaos" energy is randomly distributed in frequency, in phase, and in polarization plane. In other words, it cancels itself out... almost.

That qualification "almost" is necessary because energy occurs as quanta, and the manifestations of quantum chaos energy occur with randomness, which only means that nature isn't striving for any particular outcome. With pure chaos, anything can happen, including, now and then, an event involving a high degree of order. Order isn't typical of chaos, of course, but the reason that order isn't typical is that ordered sets are a very small subset of all sets. Nonetheless, given lots of random permutations of energy fluctuations, a few of them will be ordered.

Once in a while, it just so happens that the latent energy of existence fluctuates many times in about the same spot, with the waveforms in phase so that they add constructively instead of cancelling out. It's much more energy than would be required for the creation of a virtual particle-antiparticle pair. Indeed, so much energy appears that it manages to form an event horizon around itself. The energy basically creates its own pocket of spacetime and falls out of whatever region it had been in.

Let me shift the subject a bit to make a comparison.

Suppose an astronaut were falling into a black hole - one large enough to permit him living passage through the event horizon. As he approached the event horizon, he'd be able to see the universe, the stars among which he was born, through a narrowing cone of light above himself. But the cone would be narrowing, narrowing.... At the moment he reached the event horizon, the last little dot of light from the outside universe would wink off. After this, there is no path that leads from the astronaut to the outside of the black hole. There is no direction in which he can move that leads anywhere but further into the black hole.

But can't the astronaut remember his home planet? Sure, as long as he's alive he can. If there's no path from inside the black hole to the outside, what relevance can this information have to the astronaut? Well, the relevance is that the black hole isn't all of existence. Someone BORN in the black hole might think so, since he'd have no way to prove otherwise. But the astronaut wasn't born inside; he just fell inside. He remembers another place.

Now, back to the original subject. The question "What was before the Big Bang?" is not the best way to phrase what the questioner really means. The Big Bang was the beginning of time, and it serves us as the event horizon of the black hole served that astronaut. Once inside, there's no path back out. We were born in this universe, and so we remember no other place. But that doesn't mean that our universe is the totality of all existence. There may be another place, a place where quantum chaos events are, perhaps, the largest events which happen.

Perhaps that's what universes become when they grow very old, when all the black holes have evaporated from Hawking radiation, and after all the protons have decayed. Maybe they remain as quantum mechanical breeding grounds for new universes, which pinch away from their thermodynamically dead parent as soon as they're born.

Answer 2

There was just empty space. A complete vacuum. Not even hydrogen was present (even in normal empty space today hydrogen is present).

Except at the very center of the universe, there was a mass of infinitely dense matter. The matter was so compressed that every atom in the universe today was contained in it under extremely high levels of gravity.

Of course, its gravity eventually gave way to its internal pressures and it exploded which causes the "Big Bang". No one knows for sure what caused it to explode at that moment rather than another because if current beliefs are correct, that mass had just sat there for an infinite amount of years before exploding.
Some say that it is possible that a previous universe collapsed in on itself to create the mass and that our universe is destined for the same action. If this is true than the fate of the universe is to perpetually expand and collapse back in forever with nothing ever existing the transfer.

Answer 3

this is actually a common misconception about the big bang. the big bang says space-time itself originated 13.7 billion years ago. the universe may be something like the two-dimensional surface of a sphere, it has no edge (boundaryless) and no center.

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147

also, think about this: the universe is 13.7 billion years old, but the most distant part of it that we can observe, the cosmic microwave background, is something around 46 billion lightyears away.

Answer 4

The same thing that is here now. It expanded for years and years then all ran into each other on the other side of the universe, crushed back together and exploded back out in the other direction. Now we are on our way back to the other side to crush back together.

Answer 5

It is currently beyond the realm of science to answer that question. I suggest you post it in the Religion and Spirituality section.

Answer 6

Nothing but an infinitly small infinitly dense "ball". Absolutly nothing else.

Answer 7

Nothing, since there was no big bang.

Answer 8

Theoretically, another universe.

Answer 9

The implsoion of what was here last.

Answer 10

absolutely nothing but matter compressed to a point.