What Came Before The Big Bang? Stephen Hawking Says There Was Nothing!
If there's one way to twist your mind into knots, it's by trying to comprehend what this guy contemplates for fun.
The thing about astrophysics is that we¡¯ve got a little information and a whole lot of imagination. The beginning of our universe, heck even the beginning of our Earth, are so far away we have to rely on secondhand clues to figure out what happened. In some cases, like the Big Bang, we have more theories than clues.
But since that¡¯s a generally accepted story of the beginning of our universe, what was there before that? Was there just empty space? An unstable singularity that exploded? Puppies? No, as much as we want the answer to be that last option, Stephen Hawking believes differently.
American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson sat down with his colleague on his "Star Talk" show, and asked him what he believed existed before the universe.
¡°Nothing was around before the Big, Big Bang,¡± Hawking said.
He explains that, according to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, space and time form a continuum curved by the matter and energy in it. ¡°Ordinary real time is replaced by imaginary time,¡± he says. ¡°In the Euclidean approach, the history of the universe in imaginary time is a four-dimensional curved surface like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions.¡±
Basically, it compares the space-time continuum to a closed surface with no ends, just like the Earth¡¯s surface.
¡°One can regard imaginary and real time as beginning at the South Pole, which is a smooth point of space-time where the normal laws of physics hold,¡± Hawking says. ¡°There is nothing south of the South Pole, so there was nothing around before the Big Bang.
As far as we can parse, he¡¯s saying there was nothing before the Big Bang, so Time as a concept didn¡¯t exist. Therefore, there was only nothingness. Feel special yet?
