What happened before the big bang?

It's a question that seems impossible to grapple with, but scientists won't take no for an answer. In this collaboration with Scientific American, we take on the big bang and a whole bunch of seemingly impossible questions. Guests: Rachel Feltman, host of the Science Quickly podcast; Sarah Scoles, senior contributor at Scientific American For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  Rachel Felton.

• 1:22Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 1:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  So you host Scientific American's podcast, Science Quickly.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  And I wanted to talk to you because Scientific American has this special issue out called Impossible Questions. It's out in print. It's out online as of yesterday. And when I found out about it, it was like someone put the bat signal up in the sky, like someone somewhere is talking about what scientists don't know. And I wanted to talk to you all about it. But before we get into it, for anyone who isn't familiar with Scientific American, can you just set the stage a little bit?

• 2:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Scientific American is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States.

• 2:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we're old, but we've, we've got a lot of life left in us. The magazine was founded in 1845. And yeah, we have a lot of people say, you know, like my grandfather had a subscription to Scientific American and then my dad did, and now I do, and we love it.

• 2:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, one of the last people I interviewed for the show, Hank Green, I was asking him how he got into science in the first place. And the first thing he said was, when I was a kid, my parents got me a subscription to Scientific American.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, we, we love to hear that.

• 2:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, so we're planning to do two episodes on this Scientific American issue.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  We're doing one today, one on Monday. And I wanted to kick it off with something we haven't really done too much on our show. Because we talk about unanswered questions all the time, but we don't always zoom out and talk about why they're all unanswered.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  And the Impossible Questions issue, it inspired me to make a sort of, I don't know, taxonomy of unanswered questions. It's definitely not exhaustive. I'm sure some questions aren't going to fit in perfectly here. But I came up with four big categories that helped me wrap my head around why questions are unanswered. So I figured I could run them by you.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  That sound good?

• 3:31Speaker 03

  That sounds great.

• 3:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so the first kind of bucket I came up with is really the clearest, which are the questions that we're trying to answer, but just need more research. Like, the research is hard and we're doing it, and we're not there yet. So we still kind of fundamentally don't know exactly why things smell a certain way.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  And, you know, I think about a question we talk about a lot, which is like, do aliens exist? And like, we're working on it, like, we're looking, and we just need more time.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I love that bucket because I think a lot of people sort of assume all of the questions that scientists would bother working on are in that bucket, which of course is not the case. But one that comes to mind is how acetaminophen works.

• 4:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  So Tylenol is a big one, but then in a, in a very different category of a very common drug, like most, if not all, antidepressants.

• 4:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  There is this thing where there are drugs that we know work well enough, we use them quite often, they provide immense benefit to many people, but we don't actually know definitively what the mechanism is by which they are working, which is pretty mind blowing and does seem like a question that surely must be answerable if we just get more information.

• 5:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  Intuitively, you might think, okay, unanswered questions are unanswered because they're so big or they're so far away. And even things that we're so physically close to are still hard to answer. Like, it's not just, is there an alien out there? Or is there, you know, a mysterious planet in the furthest reaches of our solar system? It's like, what's up with our nose?

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Totally, yeah. And not to like climb on my soapbox too much, but, you know, a big category of those unanswered questions are ones that, you know, mainstream science has simply not dedicated resources to. So reproductive health and, you know, endometriosis, things that are very present, very close, and we have this big knowledge gap, which thankfully, you know, we are starting to see get resolved. But yeah, you know, I think there are so many questions like that where it probably isn't that the question is so insurmountable, but someone does have to put the resources toward trying to answer it, which has not always been the case.

• 6:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so that is actually a perfect segue into my next bucket.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Oh, good.

• 6:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  In a slightly different way, but the next category I was thinking of, which is easy to miss sometimes, is questions that we really could be answering, but we might not want to. And there might actually be a good reason why we wouldn't want to. Like, these are sort of moral, ethical, should questions.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Where the best way to answer it would be to test some dangerous substance on people or to withhold something from them.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  But one thing that occurs to me in this realm, and this is why I bring this up after the endometriosis thing, is I think a lot about the fact that we know so little about what medications are actually safe for people who are pregnant.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yes.

• 6:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  And it might be hard to design an experiment for that because it would be very difficult to say, hey, you're pregnant, take this pill, we don't know how it's going to react.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, this is something that I've been thinking about a lot lately because I had my first kid not long ago. And it's such a problem, but one that, like you said, there isn't a great solution for, at least in the current paradigm, for like, our best way of studying drugs.

• 7:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, and drug companies got scared off of testing stuff on people, like people who might just even have a remote possibility of being pregnant.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah.

• 7:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  And what we've ended up with is a world where we actually just don't know a lot of impacts of medication in general on women.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I definitely think that's true. And it's so thorny to even talk about. You know, on the one hand, I think anybody with any kind of moral compass can see that the way that a lot of science was conducted in the 19th and a lot of the 20th century was not good in that respect, that, you know, a lot of unethical decisions were made. But, you know, I, I think it's good that, that scared us, but we aren't great at figuring out the nuance there.

• 8:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  And it just, it leads to this place where it's like, we're somehow okay with the fact that we just don't know how so many of these drugs.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Work on women.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Very strange.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  It is very strange.

• 8:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  So the next group of questions I've been thinking about is the questions we didn't know were unanswered because we didn't even know we could ask them.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  Like, we didn't have the tech, or we didn't have the observation, or we didn't have the right theory to even get to a place where we could ask that question. So, you know, an example I think of is how microscopes let us ask questions about microbes. And then that let us ask questions about the microbiome. And then we get to a place where we can ask questions about the impact of the microbiome on our mental health. You know, a couple hundred years ago, you couldn't sit around and be like, what is the impact of all the little bacteria in our gut on our mental health? Like, that wouldn't mean anything.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, one that I think works well for this bucket is the question of what the longest-lived animal is.

• 9:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Is this the Greenland shark?

• 9:34Speaker 03

  So yeah, for listeners who, who don't know, and I think it was 2016, researchers looked at proteins from the eye lens of a bunch of Greenland sharks.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  Almost like an organic living carbon footprint in the back of their eye and do an organic version of carbon dating, like we would do with some ancient artifact.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  And they found an average lifespan of 272 years. The largest shark that they looked at was 392 years old, plus or minus another like 100 or so years.

• 10:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's like a shark that like overlapped with Shakespeare or something.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And so that's the longest-lived vertebrate. The oldest invertebrate is a clam nicknamed Ming because she was born in 1499 during the Ming Dynasty.

• 10:22Speaker 05

  Clam shells are deposited in layers like tree rings. So if you count the layers, you can figure out how old the clam is.

• 10:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  And they didn't discover Ming's age until they returned to the lab and examined its shell under a microscope.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  It's not that we never would have asked, you know, how old is the oldest thing? But it was just like a philosophical question.

• 10:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, we wouldn't have had a way to actually get an answer.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, except, you know, maybe like looking at historical records that are like, wow, my family's been watching this one clam for centuries and it's cursed with life. So yeah, I like how that one would have absolutely like boggled the mind of scientists. So that's pretty cool.

• 11:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, the last bucket might be the biggest bucket. And this is more of the classic, big unanswered questions that people might think of when you say, oh, what are the biggest unanswered questions in science? The way I'm thinking about this bucket is like, there's some insurmountable barrier, or at least seemingly insurmountable barrier between us and the answer. Like, how did life start? Or what happened before the Big Bang? Something that seems like we could never get past.

• 11:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, there are so many questions like this. And there are several, in fact, in this print issue of Scientific American.

• 11:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  These are sometimes the most fun.

• 11:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Well, so what came up for the Big Bang is a really fun one. Because the word "before" is no longer accurate, actually. Because the Big Bang wasn't just the start of space. It was the start of spacetime. So it's also the start of time. So what does it mean for something to have happened before the Big Bang?

• 12:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  At the same time, though, you never know what kind of new tech or new theory is going to come around and give us a way in, like with the microscope and the microbiome. And, I don't know, sometimes just kind of wrestling with these questions. I feel like it could take us to some pretty fun places. So I actually want to try that with the Big Bang question. Even though it seems totally impossible, there are some very interesting theories of what could have happened before the Big Bang. And we're going to get into it after the break.

• 12:59Speaker 07

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• 14:10Speaker 01

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• 15:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  Why don't we just start with who you are and what you do?

• 15:21Speaker 06

  My name is Sarah Scholes, and I am a senior contributor at Scientific American.

• 15:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, so you wrote this great piece for the Scientific American Impossible Questions series. And it's all about what happened before the Big Bang.

• 15:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  How did you even start thinking about this question?

• 15:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, if we go all the way back to when I was a kid, I grew up super religious, but I was always an annoying kid who was like, well, if God created the universe, who created God? And then what came before that? And then when I went to college and became not religious anymore, it turned out I was still interested in the same questions.

• 15:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  The big impossible questions?

• 15:59Speaker 06

  Exactly. Still annoying. And my roommate and I would sit in our room and be like, well, if space is expanding, what is it expanding into? And if the Big Bang was the beginning, what happened before that? And now I'm a science journalist, and I thought, you know, there's probably some people thinking about this question professionally, and I could just bother them instead of my Sunday school teachers like I used to.

• 16:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, my God, this is such a great entrance into this question. I guess, how is it even possible that someone could try to answer a question like this? Isn't it, by definition, impossible?

• 16:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, I mean, it depends on how you think about it. The Big Bang is definitely a hard boundary. We can't even, like, see or gather data from the time right after it, let alone see right back to it. And so if you can't even see there, you definitely can't see before there. So I think the way that scientists think about it is maybe there are some imprints left on the universe that we can see that provide some clues for what happened before.

• 17:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so what did the scientists you talked to tell you about this question? Did they have theories for what might have happened before the Big Bang?

• 17:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the first theory is called the no-boundary proposal, which is based on this idea that if you look at the modern universe and you say, how did it get like this? You can rewind back and say, like, what initial conditions would I have needed to go from the past to the present?

• 17:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 17:26Speaker 06

  And then you can kind of go backwards and backwards and backwards forever. But that doesn't make sense, because as far as we know, the Big Bang created time. And so there cannot be a before the Big Bang, because there was no time before the Big Bang. So if this isn't making sense, that's how it's supposed to be. Because this proposal came from the fact that, like, if you do that, it doesn't make sense. Like, it sounds like gobbledygook. So in the 80s, Stephen Hawking and another physicist named James Hardle were like, this doesn't make sense, so let's try to think about it without the universe having a beginning. Let's let go of time, our concept of time in that way, and let's think of the universe as a four-dimensional spacetime sphere.

• 18:13Speaker 06

  The way that scientists told me to think about it, because like, that's not something, our brains don't encounter four-dimensional spacetime spheres.

• 18:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  Not often.

• 18:21Speaker 06

  Not often. So they said, think of it like the globe. Like, if the universe in space and time is a globe, then the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang, is the North Pole. And so asking what happened before the Big Bang is kind of like asking, what is north of the North Pole? Like, nothing.

• 18:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's almost like a Zen koan or something.

• 18:47Speaker 06

  Yes, exactly.

• 18:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  So that's not an answer to the question? That's just sort of like rejecting the question?

• 18:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, sort of. Yeah, it's a very fancy way of rejecting the question.

• 18:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay. Are there any ideas of what happened before the Big Bang that are not kind of rejecting it? That are actually taking it seriously?

• 19:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, one that I found interesting is this one called the Big Bounce.

• 19:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  The Big Bounce?

• 19:11Speaker 06

  The Big Bounce, yeah. So as far as scientists know, as far as we can see right now, you know, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. But in this cyclic universe theory, there's the idea that at some point, it starts contracting.

• 19:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  And this is not the big crunch?

• 19:30Speaker 06

  This is not the big crunch, because it doesn't shrink all the way to nothing. And it's not like a violent contraction. It kind of contracts slowly and not all the way down, and then starts expanding again. And so the Big Bang would kind of be that transition.

• 19:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  So wait, wait. This is saying that the universe expands and contracts, and the moment it switches from contracting to expanding, it looks like what we think of as the Big Bang?

• 19:59Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 20:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  But there's just stuff that's been in there the whole time? There's stuff that's been there forever?

• 20:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's my understanding. And the scientist I spoke to about it said, you know, there is some stuff from the previous universe that gets carried along into ours.

• 20:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  But I guess, like, it's not a previous universe. It just looks like a previous universe.

• 20:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, which I guess is also sort of rejecting the question, because then you have to ask, how did all of this get started? What was before the first big expansion and big bounce? So it is also not totally answering the question.

• 20:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Does this scientist have a answer to that question, or?

• 20:40Speaker 06

  Uh, no, I think that's asking too much.

• 20:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay. I mean, it is asking a lot. But both of those ideas are still kind of saying there's no big fundamental before and after here. Like, the first one says there's just no before, like, it doesn't mean anything. And the second one is kind of saying there's no real Big Bang, or it's not like as bangy as we thought. Are there any ideas out there that are like, what's before is super different from what happened after? Like, different from what we can see now?

• 21:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, so there's this one idea called a sort of mirror universe. The scientist I spoke to said to picture it like two ice cream cones, kind of pointy end to pointy end. Our universe, you know, is expanding, making this cone in one direction. Time is going forward, stuff is made of matter. And then on the other side, in the other ice cream cone, it's going the other way. The universe is running backwards. Time flows backwards. Stuff is made of antimatter instead of matter, and all of the directions are reversed. So it's a literal mirror of what is going on here. And the Big Bang is where those two things are.

• 22:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  Or is it flowing? I get, what does it mean for time to flow backwards?

• 22:08Speaker 06

  I think this is one of those things again where our human brains, because we live in a universe where time does flow forward, and as far as we know, it only flows forward for us, it just like, doesn't make sense for time to go backwards.

• 22:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  But the idea here is that like, everything in the mirror universe is flipped.

• 22:30Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 22:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  And then I guess, am I wrong in assuming that this still begs the question of what happened before that?

• 22:38Speaker 06

  Like, how did these mirror images of each other get there?

• 22:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Exactly.

• 22:41Speaker 06

  In the first place?

• 22:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  Who made the ice cream cone?

• 22:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I think, once again, we come back to the fact that the question is perhaps impossible, because these are ways of answering it in a way that just calls the question again at a different point in the universe's history.

• 22:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hmm. What are the chances that any of these theories is right?

• 23:03Speaker 06

  I think even most of the people who have come up with or work on these theories would say the chances are probably not high that any one of them is.

• 23:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 23:13Speaker 06

  Correct. I think, yeah, one of them actually said that to me. He said something like, "We're just trying to throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks, and just keep throwing ideas out there for what could make sense, based on what we see in the universe today." And in some ways, there's not necessarily definitive ways that we could decide whether any of them was the correct explanation, because you can't see before the Big Bang. And so that's frustrating to me and my inner child.

• 23:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  So, do you think it is ever going to be possible to get to a final answer on what happened before the Big Bang?

• 23:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm wary of saying never in science, because you never know what sorts of tools scientists are going to come up with. But to me, sitting here in my chair in 2026, it doesn't seem to me like it's something we could ever find out definitively. I think there's fundamental barriers to data gathering in the universe. And I also think there's probably fundamental barriers to how our brains can think about it. Like, maybe "before" isn't a concept that the universe abides by. Or, you know, I think we're stuck in our own reality that really has very little to do, perhaps, with the fundamental laws of the universe. And I don't know if our puny brains can figure that out.

• 24:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  Is there something about the fact that this feels unanswerable that is more exciting to you? Like, if you could answer this, would you want to?

• 24:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think that I think I would like to have the answer, but it is sort of reassuring to me, in a weird way, that there are things that, like, are probably beyond us, and that we get to wonder about, and people get to come up with crazy ideas, like, "The universe is a four-dimensional spacetime football," or whatever. And I think it kind of opens up a different version of maybe awe, I guess, like, not necessarily religious awe, but just, you know, cosmic awe. Like, the universe is so strange, and we have so little of it

• 25:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 06

  figured out. And I do think that's exciting. There's so much out there that we haven't discovered, and then beyond that, there's stuff we probably never will. And I think that's great. The universe should be able to keep its secrets if it wants to.

• 25:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  This was the first episode of our two-part series with Scientific American. If you want to read more about this and other impossible questions, go check out their special issue. You can find it in print or on their site at scientificamerican.com. You should check out their excellent podcast, Science Quickly, and stay tuned for the second episode next week. This episode was produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Meredith Hadnot, who runs the show. Fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. Mixing and sound design by Christian Ayala. Music from me. Our video editor is Jacob Reynolds. Our animator is Kareem Koreya. Our editorial director is Joanna Solotaroff. And Bird Pinkerton slung the guitar strap over her shoulder and headed back into the passageway.

• 26:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  She tried to retrace her steps, but before she knew it, she was lost, alone in the darkness.

• 26:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Special thanks to Clara Moskowitz, and thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Bird. If you have thoughts about the show, we would love to hear from you. You can email us at [email protected]. We read all the emails. Or if you'd like to support the show, join Vox, become a member. Just go to vox.com/members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next time with the second episode of our series with Scientific American.

• 27:18Speaker 10

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