What came before the big bang?

"The big bang wasn't a bang in the traditional sensebut it was nonetheless the start of important things: for one, space; another, time. Thirdly, it began the conditions and processes that eventually resulted in us humans, who can sit here and wonder about space and time. The big bang was, effectively, the beginning of the universe. According to the logic of human brains, it seems like there must have been something before the big bang, even if before is the wrong word because there was"

"The good news for us is that physicists do have ways of thinking aboutand even empirically studyingthe origins of the origin of the universe. Counterintuitive and impossible as it may seem, cosmologists are even making progress in determining which wild ideas might peel back the veil on that early era, even though it remains inaccessible to telescopes. For millennia, what happened before and at the beginning of the universe was not a question scientists could even scratch at. Cosmological queries were the dominion of"

The Big Bang marked the emergence of space, time, and the physical conditions that eventually produced humans capable of reflecting on existence. Human intuition suggests something preceded the Big Bang, but time itself began with that event, making "before" problematic. Physicists have developed conceptual frameworks and empirical strategies to study the origins of the universe despite observational inaccessibility of the earliest era. Cosmologists are evaluating speculative ideas and making progress in narrowing possibilities. For centuries cosmological origins were chiefly philosophical questions, but theoretical and experimental advances have shifted them into scientific inquiry.

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