If, as some theories suggest, our universe started as a singularity, where was this singularity before the BB?

Question

If, as some theories suggest, our universe started as a singularity, where was this singularity before the BB?

Answer 1

According to Stephen Hawking, the famous disable physicist and - incidentally - a member of Yahoo Answers, the question can't be asked because whatever is time-wise previous to the Big Bang, doesn't belong to this universe we live in.

Answer 2

At the center of the universe, no doubt, so that distribution of matter and energy into this universe would from an omni direction.

As far as connecting to another universe, very possible. The singularity could have been tied to another universe which gave forth matter and energy.

Answer 3

finding out exactly how, where, and when the universe was created is like finding out exactly how, where, and when ice-cream was invented.

it can't be done, you pose a good question that i can predict nobody will present me with a satisfactory answer except " i don't know " . which seems to be so hard for people to say...

Spazzy has a lot of "imagining" in his answer.. of course i can imagine that, but please do not compare the universe to a piece of paper.. your analogy is horrible..

Answer 4

Who cares about the Big Bang?  Except for cosmologists and some astronomers.  Whatever happened, it happened very long ago. 13.8 Billion years ago.  It doesn't concern you.  If you want to get excited about something, M31 in Andromeda is headed on a collision course with our galaxy.  And its coming FAST.  It should be here in only 3 billion years.  Perhaps you should invest in a bomb shelter or dig a big hole in your back yard.  Make sure your life insurance is up to date.  Its never too early to start planning for this.  

Answer 5

You're essentially asking what was before the big bang.... the true answer is "Nothing" - utterly nothing - no mass, no time, nada, as our universe didn't exist.  For us, trying to refer to that time is meaningless for all intents & purposes.  

Having said that, it *did* start from something - and I've read a paper that the 17 proposed dimensions that exist in our universe today are "shadows' of many-dimensioned universes that exist (or did exist) at the time of the big bang. And that the big bang was some sort of event in our from one or more of those universes, that formed ours.

The simple way of looking at is brane-theory:  Our universe was the result of a collision of several branes, forming not only our universe, but time as well.  

Answer 6

I like to think of it this way... Imagine the universe is a piece of origami paper; more specifically an origami crane. Now, If I unfold the crane and fold a turtle, a smart observant person could deduce the piece of paper was once a crane by the fold marks on the sides. This is just like the way we understand the past by observing the world around us and the evidence (folds) within the world.

Now, imagine I take that turtle, rip it up, burn it, reconstitute the ashes into another piece of paper, and fold it into a tiger no one no matter how observant will be able to know what shape it had been before that extreme event. Similarly we cannot know what the universe was like before the Big Bang because it was unbelievably extreme compared to the events we see going on around us.

*in response to other answers*

Some others are saying absolutely nothing and I don't know if most cosmologists agree with this, but just seems more likely to me that instead of creation out of nothing there was something that went through such an extreme process we can't find any evidence of what it was like. Who knows? Maybe I'm the first one to have this idea... its the Patent Office I should talk to right?

Answer 7

the 'some theory' you are talking about is not compaitible with the big bang theory.

Big bang theory says that the universe started from a primiveal ATOM and NOT from singularity. it also says that the universe is finite.

but the theory about singularity says, that the universe started from infinity (from something with dimensions 10^ - infinity units) and will go on expanding to the dimension --- 10^ infinity.

so, u cannot blend two intercontradictive theories.

Answer 8

My son and I were having the same conversation yesterday. Where was it before, and into what is the universe expanding? The protoverse? The magnaverse? Another dimension? I would like to say nothingness, but then you slip into the religious and away from the scientific.  

Answer 9

You can't say 'where' because there was no space before the Big Bang!

Answer 10

God only knows.