How can we understand the World in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from?

So there was this chicken, ok, and then there was this egg. No, wait. So there was this egg, ok, and then there was this chicken.

Traditionally these were questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead, philosophy has not really kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.

Philosophy of cosmology is a new field of study within the philosophy of physics which aims to bring a philosophical approach to the basic questions of physics, including those concerning the nature, age and fate of the universe.

Some people simply proclaim that God created the universe. Apart from, there is very good evidence that the universe did come into existence in a Big Bang, about fifteen billion years ago.

So we are faced with the problem of what happened before the Big Bang.

If the Big Bang was the beginning of time itself, then any discussion about what happened before the Big Bang, or what caused it seems simply meaningless.

The Big Bang was very much a sudden, explosive origin of space, time, and matter.

First, time did not always exist; and second, there was no first moment of time. Science is good at telling us how, but not so good on the why. Maybe there is not a why.

To wonder why is very Human, but perhaps there is no answer in Human terms to such deep questions of existence. Or perhaps there is, but we are looking at the problem in the wrong way.

What happened before the Big Bang?

Most physicists agree on the Big Bang theory, which says that 14 billion years ago the entire observable universe was roughly a million billion billion times smaller than a single atom.

It has been expanding ever since, to its current size of something like 100 billion galaxies. 

But what was there before it? Anything? Nothing? The answer is, Nothing.

There was nothing around before the Big Bang. This new theory is based on the assumption that the universe has no boundaries.

The Big Bang theory holds that the universe in retrospective can shrink to the size of an extremely small subatomic ball known as the singularity.

According to this new theory, the laws of physics and time cease to function inside that tiny particle of heat and energy.

The ordinary real time as we know now shrinks infinitely as the universe becomes ever smaller but never reaches a definable starting point. Before the Big Bang real ordinary time was replaced by imaginary time.

It was always reaching closer to nothing but didn’t become nothing. One can regard imaginary and real time beginning at the South Pole. There is nothing south of the South Pole.

There was never a Big Bang that produced something from nothing. It just seemed that way from our perspective.