QUESTION:
What was before the universe?

ANSWER from Jim Sweitzer on October 25, 1995:
First of all, I'm going to interpret this question as what was going on
before the observable universe we now know it "existed." Of course, if you
mean "Universe" with a capital "U", then the you run into lots of sticky
philosophical questions. That's because the concept of the Universe (with a
capital "U," you mean all that is, was, and ever will be) also contains the
concept of time. It then does not then make sense to ask what happened
before there was even such a thing as time.

Now, if we talk about the universe, with a little "u", namely the one
astronomers now study, then the question is not an invalid one. This is
because it is concievable that there was something going on before what we
now know about. The answer is, however, no one knows what was going on and
we are unlikely to ever know. Science cannot tell us anything about the
time before the big bang. This is because we cannot get any information
from times earlier than the instance of the big bang. Now there are
theoretical physicists who are willing to speculate on what might have been
going on before the big bang, but I don't really know much about those
speculations. Hawking's book outlines at least one of the current
speculations, I believe.

The problem with such theoretical speculations is that no matter how well
founded they seem, they cannot be tested. If you can't do an experiment or
observe information from a time before the big bang, then you really can't
be sure of what might have been going on, if anything.

It's truly a great mystery and is really beyond the ability of scientists
to give definite answers about.