8 Mind-Bending Unanswered Questions About The Universe

7. What Was Before The Big Bang?

Theologians who have pondered this question have tended towards the "God created time, so there was no 'before'" tact.

Remarkably, many modern physicists would also tend to agree, but for slightly different reasons and, again, we have at least two options.

If time began at the big bang, the, like the question of what the universe is expanding into, the question is nonsense. In relativity, time is said to stop as you approach singularity, so if the universe was at the point of singularity at the big bang, then time would have been at a total standstill too.

Some physicists, however, don't like this explanation. Many physicists, in fact, don't even like the idea of singularities as they're really only representative of the theoretical point at which our mathematics falls apart, as opposed to real things. In fact, there are quantum interpretations of the history of the universe that don't include a "big bang" at all.

There are other theories that suggest that our universe was born inside a black hole in another universe (and that the black holes in our universe are, in turn, belching out their own universes), and some observations of the CMB appear to show the shockwaves form the collision of supermassive black holes before the big bang.

The truth is, though, that we just don't know (spotting a theme?).