Stephen Hawking has suggested that asking “What came before the Big Bang?” is like asking “What is north of the North Pole?” At the North Pole, every direction you walk points south, and there is no more northness. This is just a feature of the geometry of the Earth. If space-time was created at the moment of the Big Bang, then it’s possible that the geometry of space-time means that there is no satisfactory answer to the question of what came before (i.e., there is no “before”).
