THE question of what came before the big bang used to lie outside the bounds of science. Now, as physicists edge closer to a “theory of everything”, they are catching glimpses of what might have been more than 14 billion years ago.
It’s familiar territory as Brian Clegg traces our understanding of the size and age of the universe, but things get more interesting with recent developments in string theory, M-theory and loop quantum gravity. We may be living inside a black hole, he says, or a giant hologram. Before the big bang there might have been a radically…
