What prevents scientists from being able model what was before the Big Bang?
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There was no “before”. Time begins with the Big Bang. If there is no time, there’s no before/after. Similarly, you cannot speak about what was *there* before the Big Bang because there was no space. THere wan’t *empty* space, there was *no space.* Neither time nor space existed until the Big Bang created them.
My limited understanding goes like this.
Time as we know it is cause and effect. Let’s say I pick up a ball and move it to my right by one metre. This cause could have taken one or two seconds to complete. The thing is, time only really exists when things are changed, like the balls distance for instance. Before the Big Bang, if there was “nothing” then there would be no cause to create effect therefore time never existed. This gives scientists almost nothing to work with in terms of maths as there’s no information to work with in order to form any prediction.
Modelling known unknowns with too many unknown unknowns behind the scenes are gross speculation. That’s like asking for a model of your consciousness before you were born. It becomes religion.
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.
Imagine you are locked inside a box (don’t worry, it’s a very nice box, very comfortable!)
You spontaneously came into existence in that box. You and everything inside that box have always been inside that box.
There’s no way out of the box. Nothing gets into the box. There’s no way to tell what’s outside the box in any way, and everything inside the box spontaneously came into existence inside that box.
From that point, how could you possibly know what was outside the box? You could come up with some ideas, but there’s no way to test them. You can make some observations about the shape of the box and how it’s changing, but the box is very very large and you can’t see the edges, and even if you could it only helps you guess.
Asking what was before the big bang is like asking what’s outside the box. We can make some guesses, but mostly those are confined to how the box was made, and we may simply never know what is outside the box.
The box, and the big bang, are event horizons. A point at which nothing beyond can effect the observer, and correspondingly the observer cannot see beyond the horizon.
Modern technology gives us a great way to explain this.
Imagine an entire universe has been modelled in a game called “Super Apendica Universe.” In that game, physics are different than our physics. Time runs faster. People can jump higher. Walking through a door can lead to another “level” that’s not physically connect to the room you were just in. Put on the right hat and your abilities completely change. If you die, you get reloaded. You have a *score*. Things are just *different* from what we consider to be reality, but for Super Apendica, it IS the universe. Those ARE the rules of physics. There’s not anything “outside” of the Super Apendica Universe, because that universe isn’t actually connected to our universe in any way. It’s just a concept, unto itself, and its reality IS reality to its inhabitants.
In the same way, there’s also nothing “before” Super Apendica Universe. Time in that universe began the moment the game console was powered on. What time even *is* in that universe follows a set of rules that were created and operate based on how that console and the software running on it work. Their time is not the same thing as our time. You can’t “go into” Super Apendica Universe, and its inhabitants can’t “come into” our universe.
Therefore, if Super Apendica puts on his Scientist hat and attempts to calculate what happened “before” the big bang in his universe, he’ll discover that there actually *was nothing* before the big bang. The rules that make up his universe, including time itself, did not exist until that big bang occurred. *There was no existence before the big bang.* At all.
In our universe, we’re *probably* not software (some scientists have serious scientific doubts about that), but what we currently observe calculates back to meaning “the physics of our universe, including time itself, *did not exist* until the big bang occurred.” Whatever created the conditions that made the big bang happen are not conditions that could occur within the laws of physics as we currently understand them because they cannot occur *inside* our universe.
So, whatever made the universe start was *separate from the universe* and didn’t follow the rules of the universe, including the flow of time itself. So we have no idea how to even *guess* at the nature of those conditions any more than Super Apendica could calculate why humans can’t warp to the castle entrance once we’ve visited it for the first time. He can’t even calculate what we’re like, or that we even exist. “When” we exist is meaningless to Super Apendica. Our universe is not “before” his universe. It’s separate. Even though we created his universe at some point in our own timeline, his universe still has an origin that starts at the beginning of *his* time. Just like ours does.
There was no universe before the big bang. The physical reality of it came into existence at the moment of the big bang, both in ours, and in Super Apendica Universe. In either place, you can’t model what was before the big bang, because there literally *wasn’t* a before.
At least, that’s the currently accepted view among scientists. Who knows, maybe there’s something fundamental we’ll discover that will change all of that. As for me, I’m looking forward to that Flying Hat.
Light. It moves to fast. We only see what we see because of light. We built knowledge based on what we see. That knowledge is used to verify or validate what we are seeing with tools, units of measurement, and definitions based on our understanding. We can’t understand what came before the big bang because we cannot see it. The evidence is in the stars and galaxies that are moving away from us and our position way too fast. So fast that the light from them will never reach us and too much time has passed between the big bang and now that our technology might never be able to bridge that gap.
The concept of “before the big bang” doesn’t make any sense because the big bang *created time*
You’re thinking about the Big Bang all wrong. The Big Bang was an explosion of possibilities in a high level dimension. The entirety of space, time, the multiverse, it’s all basically the fiery explosion of the Big Bang. We can’t model what came before because we have no evidence that what we call reality even existed before it did.
If you were standing in an explosion you would feel incredible heat and a massive force pushing you away from the epicenter. If you were *born* in that explosion you would think the heat and force were fundamental laws of the universe. “Yeah, reality is hot and always pushes you away from the center of things.” In this scenario you would be the swirling dust in a cloud of heat and light.
That’s literally what’s happening. You exist in a multidimensional explosion, you’re a swirling eddy of possibility in an expanding cloud of time and space. We have no idea what things could possibly be like before or outside the Big Bang because our only reference point is from within it
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