What was before the Big Bang?

The universe had a beginning. But was it really the beginning of everything? The Big Bang describes the earliest state of the universe we can trace with modern physics, when space was unimaginably hot, dense and rapidly expanding. But if we try to go further back, the picture becomes far less certain. Did time itself begin with the Big Bang? Was there a universe before ours? Could our universe have emerged from a previous cosmic cycle, a quantum event, or something even stranger? At some point, our current understanding of physics begins to break down. And beyond that boundary, we are left with possibilities rather than answers. This documentary explores some of the leading ideas about the origin of the universe to ask: What was before the Big Bang? FOOTAGE & VISUAL CREDITS Credits: ESO | NASA | ESA | ESA/Hubble | M. Kornmesser | Mahdi Zamani | J. Depasquale | L. Calçada | Mark Garlick | N. Bartmann | NAOJ | A. Pagan | A. Riess | ALMA | Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit | GROND | K. Sahu | NRAO | P. McGill | R. Indebetouw | SH0ES team | STScI | University of Warwick | A. Filippenko | A. Levan | A. Martin-Carrillo et al. | A. Nierenberg | A. Reines | A. Roquette | A. Simonnet | Alexandra Angelich | Anthony Meilland | B. Johnson | B. Robertson | BlackHoleCam | CSA | D. Eisenstein | D. Milisavljevic | Digitized Sky Survey 2 | ESO 2.2-metre telescope | F. Millour | F. Vogt et al. | Hubble Heritage Team | HUDF 2012 Team | J. Bally | J. Banovetz | J. Dalcanton | Jordy Davelaar et al. | K. Noll et al. | L. Wheatley | LIGO | M. Rieke | M.-R. Cioni | MPG | MUSE | NSF | NSF's NOIRLab | OmegaCAM | P. Das et al. | R. Ellis | R. Sankrit | Radboud University | S. Brunier | S. Goldman | S. Steinhöfel | S. Tacchella | Sonoma State University | T. Treu | VIMOS | VIRCAM | VISTA | VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey | VLT | VPHAS+ team | VST | W. D. Vacca | Z. Schutte | Zdeněk Bardon MUSIC CREDITS Music by Kevin MacLeod — incompetech.com Additional footage and imagery used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). Some assets have been cropped, animated, reframed or captioned for this video. Additionally, public-domain material sourced from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio: svs.gsfc.nasa.gov.