What prevents scientists from being able model what was before the Big Bang?
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Perhaps looking at it in terms of reproduction of life would be a good analogy. A living being comes into existence at some point in time. What was there before that being came into existence? We only know because we can see other life forms in the process of coming into existence. We do not know specifically what that particular individual life form was before it was conceived, but we can directly observe its life from conception to death. We can see how individual life forms get conceived and conclude from those observations how life comes to be and acts as a circle of life, of sorts (life comes from life), and have a pretty reasonable explanation for how individual lives comes to be (until you go back to the first life, and that is a problem not truly solved yet).
However, we cannot see the formation (“conception”) of other universes (have not yet seen such a thing, at least as far as we know, although black holes is one idea being looked at as maybe examples of universes in creation?), and we cannot see back through to the life of this universe beyond its conception any more than we can see back through the life of an individual and know what happened before it came into existence. We can presume that there probably was something, but we cannot know anything about it because it has never been observed by us, and cannot ever be observed by us.
We cannot know because we cannot see anything that is “pre-universe” whether with our universe or by example of another universe (this is what happened to make other universes and what existed before those universes, so maybe that is what also happened to this universe).
The very act of creation erases any possibility for directly observing what existed beforehand. Without something to see, we cannot know anything. We can make guesses, and we can imagine what might have existed which could result in the universe, and we can exclude some possibilities because they cannot have made a universe like this one, but we cannot know anything for certain about how this universe came into existence.
Give us more time to think about it, and maybe we can find a likely answer by eliminating all the guesses and imaginings and leaving only a limited few that fit, that could be the pre-universe condition. But even then, we will not “know” unless we can step outside this universe to see what cannot be seen from here in this universe.
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