Big Bang: what was there before Big Bang?

As far we know. Nothing.

There's lots of speculation, but the *only* correct answer to your question about what was before the Big Bang is UNKNOWN.

All the Big Bang Theory actually states is that the universe used to be smaller. That's it...!

It is *NOT* a creation story. The Big Bang Theory is simply an explanation of how the universe has evolved and developed over the last 13.7 billion years. It makes no assumptions about "where" stuff came from, it merely evaluates the observations and the data we have acquired, and gives us a relatively complete model of how the universe has behaved since about 10^-30 (that's 0.0000000000000000000000000000001) seconds after the Big Bang. Anything before that point in time we do not know and can not measure because the laws of physics, as we understand them, break down before that time... you reach a *mathematical* singularity, where we just don't know what happened, and how space, time, matter, and energy behaved, because the laws of their behavior would not have been in place yet.

So while you are curious as to "where" and "how" it all began, the Big Bang theory can not take you there. It can get you as far back in the past as we can accurately measure.

The Big Bang cut off any history of what could be before it, if "before" makes any sense without matter/space/time. A current idea being worked on by some cosmologists is that our universe exists within a multiverse of many other universes -- perhaps an infinite number of them. Each universe would begin with its own Big Bang.

There are many well-respected physicists, such as Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Sean M. Carroll, Victor Stenger, Michio Kaku, Alan Guth, Alex Vilenkin, Robert A.J. Matthews, and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, who have created scientific models where the Big Bang and thus the entire universe could arise from nothing but a quantum vacuum fluctuation -- via natural processes.

I know that this doesn't make sense in our Newtonian experience, but it does in the realm of quantum mechanics and relativity. As Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman wrote, "The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as she is — absurd."

For more, watch the video at the 1st link - "A Universe From Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss.

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Before the BIG BANG was the BIG CRUNCH.

It all works this way:

Presently we're in the expansion period following a Big Bang that happened 5 billion years ago.

That Big Bang was so powerful that it blew pieces of the universe over a 100 billion light years from ground/point zero in three nanoseconds. During those three nanoseconds Satan and his angels, one third of all the heavenly angels were cast outta Heaven. A lotta $#!t hit the fan in just three nanoseconds so that oughta tell you that Einstein was wrong in saying the speed of light is the fastest thing in the universe. We just ain't discovered the physics that existed in those three nanoseconds. But when we do---LOOK OUT---we'll be sending the USS Enterprise at warp speeds to where no man has ever even known about much less gone before.

That is; assuming of course, the world doesn't end on December 21st 2012 like some people, including myself believe. But even if the world, the Earth, one little itty bitty planet in the vast cosmos does end the universe will just keep right humming.

Ain't nothing gonna stop the universe from doing it's thing.

The universe will continue to expand until EVERYTHING literally comes unglued.

Stars will burn out and atoms will break down and sub atomic particles will come apart leaving the universe in the BIG DARK where NOTHING exists.

In fact NOTHING is the universe's most abundant commodity. There is MORE NOTHING than anything else. Without NOTHING there would be NOTHING. So NOTHING is SOMETHING and NOTHING is sacred after all.

HALLILUEAH ! ! !

This my bretheran; Is the BIG DARK that follows the BIG BANG.

By-and-by; One little sub atomic particle bumps into another little sub atomic particle and one sez to the other "Oh, hello---Glad you're here I was getting lonely", and the other sez: "Hey babe, we got the whole uniververse to ourselves---Whatta you say we party?"

Well anyway they feel a mutual gravitational attraction and they bond together creating a force attracting other sub atomic particles whose combined gravitational forces eventually pulls in every atom that ever was into one black hole that collapses in on itself until EVERYTHING that ever was and will be is contained in one little itty bitty teeny weeny atom.

This stage of evolutionary recycling is the BIG CRUNCH ! !

With EVERYTHING squished into ONE little atom things get very hot, but the combined gravity is so intense that niether light or heat can escape the black hole so it just cooks and cooks in it's own juices.

This is the part in Genesis where it sez: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. But the Earth was void and without form and darkness was upon the face of the deep".

That's BIG CRUNCH alright.

Serious BIG CRUNCH!

Then God said: "LET THERE BE LIGHT !"

And man was there ever light!

Holy $#!t was there ever light!

The BIG BANG happened and in three nano seconds $#!t was slung 100 billion light years into space from ground/point zero and the devil and his angels were cast outta Heaven.

That's what happen and that's how it all works.

Brane universe hypothesis:

This hypothesis suggests that our universe is floating around in a higher 4th dimension or ‘hyperspace’ inside a 3 dimensional bubble. In this multiverse theory, there are other bubbles which could contain many different universes. New universes are created when a bubble buds off another, tiny bubble. When this “budding off” happens, a Big Bang occurs inside of the new bubble and it grows as space/time expands. This process could happen infinitely which means there could be an infinite number of universes inside this 4-dimensional ‘multiverse’.

I know this is a hard concept to get but their was nothing before the big bang! No matter, no energy, no space, no time, absolutely nothing.

Before the 'big bang' occurred the fuse was lit. It burned lazily for several insignificant minutes.

Unknown.

Extrapolation of the expansion of the Universe backwards in time using general relativity yields an infinite density and temperature at a finite time in the past. This singularity signals the breakdown of general relativity. How closely we can extrapolate towards the singularity is debated—certainly no closer than the end of the Planck epoch. This singularity is sometimes called "the Big Bang", but the term can also refer to the early hot, dense phase itself, which can be considered the "birth" of our Universe. Based on measurements of the expansion using Type Ia supernovae, measurements of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, and measurements of the correlation function of galaxies, the Universe has a calculated age of 13.75 ± 0.11 billion years. The agreement of these three independent measurements strongly supports the ΛCDM model that describes in detail the contents of the Universe.

The earliest phases of the Big Bang are subject to much speculation. In the most common models, the Universe was filled homogeneously and isotropically with an incredibly high energy density and huge temperatures and pressures and was very rapidly expanding and cooling. Approximately 10−37 seconds into the expansion, a phase transition caused a cosmic inflation, during which the Universe grew exponentially. After inflation stopped, the Universe consisted of a quark–gluon plasma, as well as all other elementary particles. Temperatures were so high that the random motions of particles were at relativistic speeds, and particle–antiparticle pairs of all kinds were being continuously created and destroyed in collisions. At some point an unknown reaction called baryogenesis violated the conservation of baryon number, leading to a very small excess of quarks and leptons over antiquarks and antileptons—of the order of one part in 30 million. This resulted in the predominance of matter over antimatter in the present Universe.

The Universe continued to grow in size and fall in temperature, hence the typical energy of each particle was decreasing. Symmetry breaking phase transitions put the fundamental forces of physics and the parameters of elementary particles into their present form.[39] After about 10−11 seconds, the picture becomes less speculative, since particle energies drop to values that can be attained in particle physics experiments. At about 10−6 seconds, quarks and gluons combined to form baryons such as protons and neutrons. The small excess of quarks over antiquarks led to a small excess of baryons over antibaryons. The temperature was now no longer high enough to create new proton–antiproton pairs (similarly for neutrons–antineutrons), so a mass annihilation immediately followed, leaving just one in 1010 of the original protons and neutrons, and none of their antiparticles. A similar process happened at about 1 second for electrons and positrons. After these annihilations, the remaining protons, neutrons and electrons were no longer moving relativistically and the energy density of the Universe was dominated by photons (with a minor contribution from neutrinos).

A few minutes into the expansion, when the temperature was about a billion (one thousand million; 109; SI prefix giga-) kelvin and the density was about that of air, neutrons combined with protons to form the Universe's deuterium and helium nuclei in a process called Big Bang nucleosynthesis.Most protons remained uncombined as hydrogen nuclei. As the Universe cooled, the rest mass energy density of matter came to gravitationally dominate that of the photon radiation. After about 379,000 years the electrons and nuclei combined into atoms (mostly hydrogen); hence the radiation decoupled from matter and continued through space largely unimpeded.

Nobody can know. It would be like asking what the first cave man's name was. Since the first cave man never had a written language that survives, we can never find out.

What is North of the North pole?