Lemaître speculated that under the extreme conditions in the earliest stages of the universe, even space and time would become fuzzy and uncertain. “The notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning,” he wrote in his big bang manifesto. “Instead space and time would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original ‘quantum’ had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta,” enigmatically adding, “If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time.”
