Was there anything before The Big Bang?

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Many years ago I was sitting in a field on a campsite in Amsterdam and I met a guy and we has both really high and we just started chatting about The Big Bang and his question was: was there anything before it?

I mean it makes sense to say there wasn't anything before such an event because that's when all time began but sometimes it's hard for me to believe that there wasn't anything before such an event.

What do any of you think about this?

There may have been a Big Crunch of the previous universe. Maybe universes slow down ...stop...and then fall back down, and collapse back into a singularity similar to how it started...and it just blows up again in another big bang.

That is what was known as "the oscillating universe theory".

Trouble is its now been shown that the universe is not grinding to a halt, but is actually speeding up...due to dark energy.

There was a universe before ours, but it was inhabited by a chthonic jellyfish that drifted through the cosmos consuming planets and feeding off the very essence of the dead and dying. Thankfully, it was annihilated in an explosion that destroyed that universe and created our own.

Plenty before The Big Bang …

Seinfeld , Cheers … Fraser .



Sorry couldn’t resist it

If there was, then we currently have no way of knowing.

The Big Bang is the beginning of the observable universe.

Was there anything before The Big Bang?

An accelerant and an ignition method.

The big whimper.

I've heard it said by cosmologists that it's a meaningless question. Apparently time itself is pretty meaningless at that point, therefore questions about a time before the Big Bang don't make sense. But I've also read that before the Big Bang there was the "God Bomb" which was a ball of highly compressed matter.

There's also a theory that after the heat death of the universe the whole shebang goes into reverse and we get a counter-clock world in which time runs backwards until we're back to the God Bomb, and then it all goes round again, over and over forever. I've sometimes wondered whether we'd have any way of knowing that time was running in reverse, since our very thoughts would also be running backwards.

Maybe this guy:

A good place to look for more answers might be Nima Arkani-Hamed's amplituhedron. That seems to be the largest and most well-known mathematical object 'beyond space-time' and it would probably yield signals as to why spacetime is how it is as well as whether it yields any strong evidence for whether or not we're dealing with Everett space, or perhaps better - what activity in the amplituhedron might have lead to our universe.

I heard about a modern theory that our visible Universe is inside a large black hole. The Big Bang was the creation of that black hole. According to this theory the total Universe where this large black hole exists has no outer limits and has always existed.