Interviewed on the Star Talk program, the well-known astrophysicist supports the theory that there was not a time before the beginning of time. Or rather, that the time before existed in a different form.
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What was there before the Big Bang?
A question certainly complicated and almost philosophical . Because, placed in another form, it is tantamount to wondering what was there before the beginning of Time , or at least before the moment when our definition of time began to make sense . To try to give an answer was, during the transmission Star Talk , Stephen Hawking , who in conversation with his colleague Neil deGasse Tyson has clarified his point of view on the so - called space-time continuum and especially on what happened at the turn of the Big Bang.
Basically, in Hawking's vision, wondering what was before the Big Bang is a bit like wondering what's south of the South Pole:
"There's nothing south of the South Pole , " says the scientist, "so you do not 'it was nothing before the Big Bang . "
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The explanation does not end here. And the sequel, not even to say, immediately becomes much more complicated :
"It is not easy to imagine what the boundaries of the Universe are," Hawking continues. "Simply, it has no boundaries. The space-time Euclidean is a closed surface without limits , such as that of the Earth. "
And understanding what is beyond - both temporal and spatial - of a "closed surface without borders" , as you can imagine, is anything but intuitive:
"Let's go back to the Big Bang," Hawking says . "Before the explosion, the Universe was in a so - called state of singularity , that is, all matter was folded into a dense state, a quantum foam inside a shell the size of an atom . The time , whatever it was, was part of that quantum foam " .
Already earlier, in some of his lectures , Hawking had argued that events that occurred before the Big Bang had no consequences that could be observed. Only theories , therefore, that completely escape observation and experimental verification.
What was there before the Big Bang? Probably it is not possible to find an answer , at least in the Galilean context: >"These are undefined events - Hawking argues - because there is no way to measure what has happened" .
That time existed or not before the Big Bang , in short, there would still be no clocks to measure it.