OK, this is a pretty simple (but not) question. What are the theories on what came before the big bang? How did the materials needed to create the universe get “there”? Where is there? I googled, couldn’t find anything besides string theory, which while I understand, still doesn’t account for the very beginning (to my knowledge)…
(Mods, I wasn’t sure which forum to post this in, move as you wish)
IANAPhysicist, but as I understand it the main theory is that we can’t possibly know what came before the Big Bang, so there’s not much point in theorizing about it. I’m not saying that won’t stop some people from making guesses.
WAG quotient of this answer: 31.4%
I think Discover mag covered this within the past 4-6 months.
That theory goes that quantum laws require something to exist, that ‘nothing’ is against quantum law, so there was always ‘something’.
You might want to get into quantum theories a little deeper because this is where is gets addressed…everything was in a quantum state…and macro laws weren’t an issue.
Quantum mechanices says that ‘nothing’ is not possible.
(man…here come the physicists!)
Question
Given the First Law of Thermodynamics: that you can’t get something from nothing. Where did all the stuff in the universe come from and how is it still a law if it was once broken?
Asked by: Rob
Answer
The law you cite, applies only to “closed systems”, i.e. where nothing can be added or subtracted from the “specimen”. Obviously if you apply the law to an empty box, then open the box and dump in a handful of sand, or quarks, or energy, you don’t expect the law to apply, because the system is not “closed”.
It is not known whether the universe as a whole is a closed system now at present. As far as conditions preceding and at the very moment of the “big bang”, we can only speculate whether the universe was closed, or open (to another, larger system), or whether the First Law (or lots of other laws) even applies under those extreme conditions.
Answered by: Grant Hallman, Ph.D., Universtiy of Toronto, 1971/1967
In the macroscopic world, the domain of ‘classical’ physics, the laws of thermodynamics are, and have always been, true.
However, on the quantum scale, it is a very different matter. Hiesenberg’s uncertainty states that there will always be a level of uncertainty when you try to make measurements of particles and other quantum scale occurrences. You can never know everything about a particle’s position and motion at any one time. This is an intrinsic uncertainty, it is not due to limitations on our measuring devices. This uncertainty of the energy of anything of the Planck scale is size allows some very bizarre phenomena to occur.
To us, vacuums appear to contain nothing at all. But, it you were to look closely, very, very closely (to the order of 10^-35m), space is actually a foaming mass of quantum activity. This quantum foam is made of particles and micro-black holes popping in and out of existence, apparently in contravention of the second law of thermodynamics, they appear out of nothing with energy, then disappear again just as quickly. The key to this is the uncertainty principle. The disturbance is permitted to ‘borrow’ a tiny amount of energy and exist for a very short length of time, and then it must return the energy and disappear again. But, the more energy it borrows, the less time it is allowed to exist. These ‘temporary’ particles, called virtual particles, are not just theoretical, they have been proven to have real effects on scientific experiment.
The only thing that prevents these virtual particles from coming into permanent existence is a lack of energy. However, it is possible to artificially supply energy to the particles therefore promoting them into reality. This could be done in a lab by creating very strong electric fields, but these fields are very difficult to create. On the other hand, intense gravitational fields could also do the job.
It is possible that during the big bang, black holes the size of a nucleus popped into existence due to the quantum foam. The interesting thing is that the smaller a black hole is, the more strongly space-time is distorted around it and distortions in space-time imply the existence of very strong gravitational fields. Stephen Hawking has shown that the gravitational field around such a hole would give enough energy to the quantum foam to promote the particles into real existence. Calculations show that in the big bang the initial extreme conditions would also have been enough to create real particles out of the gravitational energy of the rapidly expanding universe.
And as for how the universe actually came into being itself, it is believed that also in the quantum foam, virtual space-time bubbles also continually pop in and out of existence, like virtual particles, only to disappear again. However, it is possible that one of these space-time bubbles, which is actually an unimaginably small universe, could avoid rapidly disappearing again and be promoted to a full size universe, such as ours. However, for this to work some sort of repulsive force is needed, a sort of anti-gravity. Many scientists believe in the existence of such a force at the time of the creation of the universe, but as I’ve answered your question and that’s a whole other topic, I think I’ll stop before I go off on too much of a tangent.
To summarise, due to the uncertainty principle, particles and space-time bubbles continually pop in and out of existence for short times depending on their energy, without breaking the law of conservation of energy as they dissapear again. Think of it like an accountant (the universe) who balances the books at the end of every month. If someone (a virtual particle) was to borrow some money on the 4th day of the month (pop into existence)then put it back on the 8th day,(disappear again) then as far as the bookkeeper would know, nothing had gone amiss and no rules (or laws) had been broken. If a particle is to come into complete and real existence, it must take its energy from somewhere, such as a gravitational field.
Answered by: Simon Hooks, Physics A-Level Student, Gosport, UK
Of course, you are approaching philosophical issues now…
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/smith_18_2.html
**
The big gunpower keg. 
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist…)
Zev Steinhardt
There is also a theory that to say “what happened before the big bang” is a meaningless statement since time itself was started by the big bang. Its a very hard concept to grasp but there WAS NO time before the big bang.
Its kind of like saying whats smaller than the smallest object. you can keep on stating smaller and smaller things, but you can never get past the 0 mark, same way you can keep on going closer and closer to the big bang, but it is meaningless to say that there was anything before it.
A good analogy that I’ve seen Chronos use a few times here, along the same lines as Shalmanese’s “smaller than the smallest object” thing, is “North of the North Pole”. What’s there? It doesn’t exist.
Shalmanese: there might not have been ‘time’, but there was ‘something’. Sorry.
Pardon me for being dense here (and IAAPhysicist), but… how does one define “before” when one doesn’t have “time”?
If there are multiple time-like dimensions, then of course there’s no problem with asking what came before the Big Bang, except that probably we won’t be able to answer it because the singularity rather makes things difficult experimentally. But of course, having multiple time-like dimensions just requires us to ask where THEY came from and I see it more as sweeping the problem under the rug than as solving it (this is a tactic in physics, by the way, with an ancient and honorable tradition).
This old Post of the Month on talk.origins by Nathan Urban is a pretty neat overview of the range of current opinions amongst physicists on what quantum gravity might say about the “origins” of the Big Bang.
There may not have been a time before the big bang, but something “happened” to produce the circumstances leading up to it. And something happened prior (in our linear understanding of time, anyways) to those circumstances to cause them…I want to know what 
(I’m also surprised nobody’s brought in the big god gun, BTW).
I’m with Shalmanese and Achernar on this: time started with the big bang so nothing happened prior.
This would mean that there was no “cause” of the big bang. Nothing causes quantum fluctuations either (AFAIK), so the idea of an event without cause is not completely unheard of.
Yes, it’s bizarre and I can’t really wrap my head around it. That’s Quantum Mechanics for ya.
But I’m just a layman. I’ve got two questions for the real physicists. One - except for being over-simplified, are the things I’ve said above correct? Two - Is this generally accepted or are there competing theories?
It is a really hard theory to grasp hold of but the whole concept of “beginning” is absurd with this theory. English can’t explain it adequatly but it was the beginning of time. It is hard to think fo time as anything but a linear process but the big bang is not viewed as a random point on a number line of time where there is something before it an after it. the big bang generated time.
In a way, you could say that the big bang HAD to happen at that time because thebig bang is what defined time but that is a woefully inadequate way of saying it.
The only way I can allude to it is through analogy. It is still absurd to say "there might not be ‘objects’ smaller than nothing but there had to be ‘something’ ". It doesn’t work that way. The point is, the sentence “before the big bang” is an absurdity in terms.
Of course, it must be stated that this is only one of several competing theories and several are able to preserve the notion of linear time. However, I always found this to be the most elegant of theories because there is no need to ask “why at this point and no other”. It happened because this was the only point it could have happened beacuse the point of happenening defined time.
With no time, then there would be no time for something to exist. Something that exists for no amount of time, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t exist or never existed.
Disregarding the beginning of time, and hence irelevance of invoking causality, all this matter still has to come from somewhere.
This necessitates the existence of space without time, a contradiction considering that space and time are meant to be a continuum.
You could say that time is movement, started by the big bang and that way its all neat.
But what it really boils down to is: “If God made the world who made God?”.
I do not contend there was ‘time’ before the big bang, but I want to reiterate this:
Regarding ‘prior’ to the big bang…and that’s the best way I can say it in English, even though ‘prior’ inplies ‘time’…I’m not…
Stephen Hawking has shown that the gravitational field around black holes prior to the big bang would give enough energy to the quantum foam to promote the particles into real existence. Calculations show that in the big bang the initial extreme conditions would also have been enough to create real particles out of the gravitational energy of the rapidly expanding universe.
And as for how the universe actually came into being itself, it is believed that also in the quantum foam, virtual space-time bubbles also continually pop in and out of existence, like virtual particles, only to disappear again.
However, it is possible that one of these space-time bubbles, which is actually an unimaginably small universe, could avoid rapidly disappearing again and be promoted to a full size universe, such as ours. However, for this to work some sort of repulsive force is needed, a sort of anti-gravity. Many scientists believe in the existence of such a force at the time of the creation of the universe.
So, in laymens terms, while acknowledging that ‘time’ began with our universe, we can still say that events caused the big bang…and it’s only natural to think of those events on a linear time line…which is quite fine for our purposes…as the OP seeks out causes, while arguements about ‘time’ only confuse it.
Philster:
So what caused these events?
Furthermore, how can an event “happen” without the time to transpire and resolve? Its all meaningless - the big bang is the theory of a 9 yr old with the math of a 40 yr old.
Hope i’m not getting too lowbrow with this but I was having a look at Terry Pratchet’s latest book “Thief of Time” where he mentions “the tick”. He uses this term to describe “the shortest amount of time needed for something to happen”. I find this quite an interesting idea, is he drawing on physics here or is it just something he made up?
The best short answer I’ve seen is that “the universe came into being because true ‘nothingness’ is unstable.”
Those quantum fluctuations can take on a wide range of energy, maybe two separte particles interacted before they could repay their energy debt with their anti-particle and kick started the false vacuum that gave rise to everything else.
Drag,
you are just going back to what I included about “nothingness” being anti-quantum law (boy I sound smart there, eh?)
Look at your post. You said “prior”.
See, this is the problem with trying to explain quantum events…words like "prior’ and ‘before’ and ‘caused’ will drag in the time police, who destroy any English language way of explaining ‘how’ something happened to tell you that time started when the universe started.
It’s one of those things that makes discussion about quantum mechanics.
Well, something can happen without time. Maybe we need to get over that. Get over it or accept it for arguments sake. Otherwise, we can spend hours criticising the Hawkings of the world, because they theorize alot about ‘just before the big bang’.