Stuff?

I don't really think anyone knows, or even has much of an idea - they're pretty certain the bang happened, but sketchy on the why or the how or the what there was before that. Possibly it was some kind of giant cosmic exploding orang-utan, or a cartoon bomb with a lit fuse, or a Ford Fiesta with a blown exhaust. It might even have been God, or at least a God, or Gods, but where they came from is a whole other question that you'd have to ask them...

Maybe, before the big bang that created the universe, there was just.. the universe, and we're all going around in a big circle? The universe expands over billions of years, reaches some kind of elasticated limit, springs back on itself and explodes all over again in the confusion...? Since time itself is just one dimension within the same universe, it's not really repeating, it's just happened-ing. Permanently...

Delete! Delete!

Oh dear, i was hoping there was some kind of accepted theory on it all.

Honestly now...

There's a serious theory here - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1270726.stm - to me it doesn't really answer anything much though, since it suggests that our universe was started through some collision/friction with a parallel universe, which is all very well and might be true, but then how did this parallel universe start?

Delete! Delete!

I reckon before the big bang was The Lemon Meringue Pie. Maybe served with Some Ice Cream and One Of Those Cake Forky Things with which to eat it.

Maybe the big bang is like a mirror. Going past it to what we would consider is before it, everything just gets played out the other way round to our existence.

I prefer to believe the former.

Party!

The closest thing to a currently accepted answer (as I understand it) is that the answer is not defined. Following the clock back the density and temperature increases, and the size decreases. None of the known laws of physics apply at zero size , infinite density, and infinite density, so they cannot be used to look back any further. We'd need new physics to understand it. Hence the work being done at CERN to build ever larger particle colliders.

Tim's M-brane collision is an interesting theory, but like most of string theory there's no evidence, so most scientists don't accept it as true. That's not reason not to keep looking at it mind you; See if they can prove it.

The hiccough.

I love Stephen Hawking's analogy for what was before the Big Bang - "what's north of the north pole?"