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Imagine we had somehow filmed the whole history of the universe and you could play the movie in reverse. It would start off much as things stand today: a vast and elegant web of galaxies and nebulae. But as the tape rewinds, everything begins to shrink until it reaches an evanescent pinprick of energy – a point everyone knows as the big bang.
And that is where the screen goes blank. To ask what came before this is to invite the scorn of scientists and philosophers alike. It is like asking what’s north of the North Pole – a meaningless, impossible question.
Or is it? Over the past few years, a few physicists have honed a way to lift this curtain and peek at what lies beyond. It involves the realisation that, although we can’t solve the equations that describe this epoch exactly, we can sometimes do so roughly – and in many cases, that might still be informative. Eugene Lim at King’s College London, one of the foremost proponents of these ideas, says this field of numerical relativity is starting to reveal insights into previously unanswerable questions.
