Before the big bang time and space didn't exist. But that's not stopping scientists from theorizing about it ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
September 22, 2026—How can scientists study what happened before the big bang, when ... there wasn't, technically, a before? Plus, mathematics upends a longstanding myth about the Parthenon in Greece, and the current El Niño is breaking records.
—Andrea Gawrylewski,
Chief Newsletter Editor
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In a clean room at Goddard technicians gaze at the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope shortly before its launch. NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya
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Before Time
Welcome to a humdinger of a big question in science: What came before the big bang? This one has certainly kept me up at night, and I suspect the answer nudges against the limits of what humans can comprehend. But that hasn’t stopped scientists from trying (nor should it!). The big bang was, effectively, the beginning of the universe. According to human logic and because we are linear, time-oriented creatures, there must have been something before the big bang. But, technically, there is no “before” the big bang, because time did not exist until that moment.
Potential explanations: Physicists do have ways of thinking about—and even empirically studying—the beforetimes of the origin of the universe.
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No-boundary proposal: Physicists Stephen Hawking and James Hartl suggested that time and space form a closed, rounded surface: a four-dimensional hemisphere of spacetime. Imagine the universe like the globe of Earth. The big bang is the North Pole. There is no “before” it, just as there is no north of north. “Before” becomes irrelevant as a concept.
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Cyclic universe: Physicist Paul Steinhardt, after working on the inflation model of the universe, proposed a cyclic one that balloons significantly in size, as ours seems to be doing now, then shrinks a little and then starts expanding all over again. The fast transition between contraction and expansion is not a bang but a “big bounce.” Objects from previous expansions could be carried over through a contraction.
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Mirror Universe: “There’s the universe after the big bang and the universe before the big bang,” says physicist Latham Boyle, “and they’re kind of mirror copies of each other.” In the set-up he proposes, imagine two universes like the points of two ice cream cones touching each other, with their contact representing the big bang. “Time marches away from the big bang in both directions,” he says. "On our side, it goes forward; on the mirror side, it goes backward.”
What the experts say: “I think it’s completely preposterous that, in the year 2025, we should understand the beginning of the universe,” says Jean-Luc Lehners, former head of the Theoretical Cosmology group at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Germany. In the grand scheme of things, in other words, we’re still at the beginning of our journey of understanding. “Why not in the year 2,000,025 or whatever?”
Join the discussion: What do you think may have jumpstarted the universe, and do you think we'll ever answer this question? Share your thoughts here.
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Elizabeth Beard / Getty Images
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Ancient Illusion Factcheck
For years (if not centuries!), historians and tour guides alike believed that the ancient Greeks took advantage of a clever optical illusion to make the Parthenon appear to stand straighter. The structure’s main platform, called the stylobate, is curved into a subtle hill shape with its center rising about six inches above the sides. This supposedly corrects for how the Parthenon’s straight horizontal lines would appear sagging to the average viewer. But mathematician Alain Goriely from the University of Oxford just published a study outlining the evidence for why this “optical illusion” just doesn’t work.
How it works: Human eyes can detect about 1.5 to five centimeters of curve in a straight line from about 25 meters away. The stylobate’s curve reaches a maximum of six centimeters of change, so it would look curved in perfect, two-dimensional conditions (like viewing a line on a paper). But in 3D, the author says the scene is too busy with light and other shapes surrounding the lines for the human eye to get a good grip on the curvature at a distance—thus the optical illusion doesn’t work. And up close, as many tour guides will point out, the stylobate looks curved, not straight.
What the experts say: Even though the Parthenon’s curves don’t add up to an effective illusion, architectural historian Mark Wilson Jones says we can’t know if ancient Greek architects knew that. “The Greeks may have convinced themselves or suspended their disbelief... They didn’t have modern methods to prove or disprove theories such as this,” he says. —Emma Gometz, Newsletter Editor
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A controversy is brewing around OpenAI's recent announcement that its model had solved one of the million-dollar math problems which concerns the Navier-Stokes problem. Our senior reporter Joe Howlett explains that some mathematicians are saying that the AI exploited a loophole to make its solution work, rather than actually solving it. Watch his full explanation.
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Rather than toss and turn at nights this week contemplating the origins of the universe, I instead plan to deliberate my vote for this year's Fat Bear Week. The annual single-elimination voting tournament celebrates how well bears of the Brooks River region in Katmai National Park, in Alaska, have fattened up for winter. I like the looks of bear "131 Marshmallow," what a fluffy-faced chonk!
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—Andrea Gawrylewski,
Chief Newsletter Editor
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