What Happened Before the Big Bang? with Ethan Siegel

In the 1920’s, cosmologists theorized that the Universe originated from a hotter, denser state: this led to what we know today as the Big Bang. By extrapolating backwards to a variety of temperatures and times, we were able to predict a number of consequences of this scenario. But this extrapolation led to problems as well: things that were observed but weren’t predicted. Scientists couldn’t simply give up and conclude that we couldn’t figure out what came before the beginning. Ethan Siegel will share how the last 40 years of research has uncovered what happened before – and beyond – the Big Bang, and where the frontiers of knowledge are today.