AI Summary
5 min readWhat Happened Before the Big Bang? Science Has Theories (But No Answers)
The universe's oldest question might be fundamentally unanswerable. In a special "Impossible Questions" issue, Scientific American senior contributor Sarah Scoles explored what could have existed before the Big Bang—and why the answer may be permanently out of reach. "If space is expanding, what is it expanding into? And if the Big Bang was the beginning, what happened before that?" Scoles says she's been asking these questions since childhood, first in Sunday school ("If God created the universe, who created God?") and later as a science journalist who could finally bother professional physicists instead.
The Hard Boundary Problem
The Big Bang isn't just the start of space—it's the start of time itself. That makes "before" a word that might not apply. "We can't even see or gather data from the time right after it, let alone see right back to it," Scoles explains. "If you can't even see there, you definitely can't see before there."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:22) **Introducing Rachel Feltman and the "Impossible Questions" Issue** - Rachel Feltman, host of *Science Quickly*, joins to discuss *Scientific American’s* special issue on impossible questions.
- 2 (03:33) **Bucket 1: Questions Needing More Research** - The first category covers questions that are actively being worked on but require more time, data, or resources.
- 3 (06:14) **Bucket 2: Questions We Could Answer But Might Not Want To** - This category involves moral or ethical barriers that prevent direct experimentation.
- 4 (08:34) **Bucket 3: Questions We Didn't Know We Could Ask** - These are questions that only become possible after new technology or theory creates the framework to ask them.
- 5 (11:04) **Bucket 4: The Insurmountable Barrier Questions** - The classic "big" unanswered questions, like how life started or what happened before the Big Bang, where the answer seems fundamentally out of reach.
- 6 (15:06) **Meet Sarah Scoles: From Sunday School to Science Journalism** - Sarah Scoles, senior contributor at *Scientific American*, explains her lifelong fascination with the question of what came before the Big Bang.
- 7 (16:17) **The Core Problem: The Big Bang as a Hard Boundary** - Scientists can't see or gather data from the Big Bang itself, making "before" it seem definitionally impossible.
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Show Notes
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
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