What caused the Big Bang? And what happened before it? This question made sense when we thought about the Big Bang as a specific moment when the universe was a tiny dot, the clocks all read t = 0, and things started explosively from that first instant. But now we have replaced the tiny dot with a fuzzy quantum blob (maybe small, maybe infinite), and the explosion has been replaced with inflation followed by dark-energy-fueled expansion. So the question still has meaning, but we have to first rephrase it in our new context. Instead of asking what came before the Big Bang, we should ask: Where
...more
