Stephen Hawking Reveals His Theory on What Existed Prior to the Big Bang

by Brandon Specktor; Live Science

During the Big Bang, every particle of matter in existence was compressed into a single, extraordinarily hot and infinitely dense point.

But what existed in the moments preceding that event? Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking claims to have an explanation, which he shared during a conversation with his equally celebrated colleague, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Hawking elaborates on these concepts and more in the season finale of Tyson’s program “StarTalk,” set to air this Sunday (March 4) at 11 p.m. ET on the National Geographic Channel.

Hawking’s response to the inquiry “What existed before anything existed?” draws on a concept called the “no-boundary proposal.”

“The universe’s boundary condition … is that it lacks a boundary,” Hawking informed Tyson, as reported by Popular Science.

To grasp this idea, imagine using a universal remote (one capable of controlling the cosmos) and pressing Rewind. Scientists now understand that the universe is perpetually expanding. Consequently, moving backward in time causes the universe to contract. If you rewind far enough—roughly 13.8 billion years—the entire cosmos collapses to the dimensions of a single atom, Hawking explained. This tiny sphere containing everything is referred to as the singularity (not to be mistaken for the technological singularity, where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence). Within this minuscule, immensely dense concentration of heat and energy, the conventional laws of physics and time as we know them break down. In other words, time as we perceive it simply did not exist prior to the universe’s expansion. Instead, the direction of time diminishes infinitely as the universe grows smaller, never arriving at a distinct beginning point.

According to TechTimes, Hawking states during the program that before the Big Bang, time was curved—“It was perpetually approaching nothing but never actually became nothing,” per the article. Fundamentally, “there was never a Big Bang that created something from nothing. That only appears to be the case from humanity’s viewpoint.”

In a lecture on the no-boundary proposal, Hawking wrote: “Occurrences before the Big Bang are essentially undefined, because there is no way to measure what took place during them. Since events preceding the Big Bang have no observable effects, one might as well exclude them from the theory and assert that time originated at the Big Bang.”

This is not the first occasion Hawking has explored this idea. He previously gave talks on the subject and appeared in a free documentary available on YouTube. Tune into StarTalk on Sunday to hear Tyson and Hawking examine the topic in greater depth, as well as discuss whether Isaac Newton would be more thrilled to discover black holes or Tinder.