Question #23849
1 Answer
We will probably never know for sure.
Explanation:
There is no way to tell what it was like before the universe "happened" because we cannot observe it. We can only look so far back in time at incredibly distant galaxies, and if we could, we wouldn't be able to tell what was going on before the big bang anyway. However, it has practically no bearing on the universe now, and so we don't really need to know.
From Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time:
"We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us mortals. It seems better to employ the principle known as Occam's razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed."
