Stephen Hawking Says He Knows What Happened Before the Big Bang

[Judi Lynn]

By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | March 2, 2018 04:36 pm ET

At the time of the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe was smooshed into an incredibly hot, infinitely dense speck of matter.

But what happened before that? It turns out, famed physicist Stephen Hawking has an answer, which he gave in an interview with his almost-as-famous fellow scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Hawking discusses these ideas and others on the series finale of Tyson's "StarTalk" TV show, which airs this Sunday (March 4) at 11 p.m. ET on the National Geographic Channel.

Hawking's answer to the question "What was there before there was anything?" relies on a theory known as the "no-boundary proposal."

"The boundary condition of the universe ... is that it has no boundary," Hawking told Tyson, according to Popular Science. [The Big Bang to Civilization: 10 Amazing Origin Events]

More:
https://www.livescience.com/61914-stephen-hawking-neil-degrasse-tyson-beginning-of-time.html

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Not only was there nothing before the Big Bang,

but eventually, something like 50 billion years from now, all of the galaxies in our local cluster will have merged into one giant galaxy, but all the rest of the galaxies will be so far away that light from them no longer reaches us. Astronomers in that far distant future will have no way of finding anything out side our galaxy. They will have no way of determining how large the Universe is. Scary.

[Beakybird]

2. Someone told me that the sun will engulf the earth in 7.5 billion years

But I thought the person said 7.5 million years, and I couldn't sleep for days.

[California_Republic]

6. Ha!

[ffr]

9. It won't need to get to that size, by 7.5/7.6 billions yfn, before Earth's oceans boil off

and Earth will be a hot rock in space, like Mercury. So effectively dead of all life long long before 7.6 billion years from now.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

3. What a crock!!

[Duppers]

12. Did you read the article?

According to my hubs, a PhD theoretical physicist, what he said make sense, theoretically of course.

[mn9driver]

4. Its all well and good to say that what happened before the Big Bang is irrelevant

But just because current science has no idea and no way to theorize pre-big bang, it seems logical that there was ....something. What, we will never know. But something.

[John1956PA]

5. . .

[ffr]

8. +1

Exactly.

[Kablooie]

7. What happened before the big bang was...

The Manhattan Project.

[ffr]

10. His conclusion

The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down. Nevertheless, the way the universe began would have been determined by the laws of physics, if the universe satisfied the no boundary condition. This says that in the imaginary time direction, space-time is finite in extent, but doesn't have any boundary or edge. The predictions of the no boundary proposal seem to agree with observation. The no boundary hypothesis also predicts that the universe will eventually collapse again. However, the contracting phase, will not have the opposite arrow of time, to the expanding phase. So we will keep on getting older, and we won't return to our youth. Because time is not going to go backwards, I think I better stop now. - Hawking.org

I read through a bunch of it, but I think this one paragraph is as concise as it gets.

Not sure where he is said or is purported to conclude he knows what happened before the dawn of time, other than to say that the boundary before what we know about the known 15 billion year history thus far, cannot be determined by the laws of physics.

[triron]

11. By "no boundary" I think Hawking is saying it is meaningless to ask the question

of what happened before the "big bang". There is no before because there is no boundary.
Like asking where is the end of the world (when it curves back onto itself).