{
  "id": 7818138,
  "title": "Was there a 'before' the Big Bang? Jim Al-Khalili on the mind-bogglingness of time",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/16/was-there-a-before-the-big-bang-jim-al-khalili-on-the-mind",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-09-16T15:56:08.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Live Science",
    "slug": "live-science",
    "url": "https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/was-there-a-before-the-big-bang-jim-al-khalili-on-the-mind-bogglingness-of-time"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Time has a complex relationship with our perception. It can slow down, speed up, or sometimes even move backwards. This is evident in the way our brain cells can distort our sense of time when we're tired. In physics, time becomes even more complicated and is incorporated into theories of relativity and entropy. Quantum mechanics also suggests that time can move both forwards and backwards within quantum systems.\n\nHowever, there's an alternative cosmological theory known as eternal inflation. In this scenario, our universe is just a tiny bubble in an infinite space that has been undergoing inflation forever. The Big Bang, instead of marking the beginning of time, is seen as an event that took place at some moment in time. Our region of space suddenly stopped inflating and began to expand at a more sedate pace. This means that there could be other Big Bangs happening elsewhere, creating other universes that are forever separated from each other and driven apart by the expanding, rapidly inflating space outside of them.\n\nOther theories include conformal cyclic cosmology, which suggests that our universe goes through an infinite series of lives or epochs, each starting with a Big Bang and ending with a universe in thermal equilibrium. Paul Steinhardt's ekpyrotic universe model, derived from string theory, proposes that our universe is a 3D brane floating in a higher-dimensional space. The Big Bang occurs when this brane collides with a neighboring brane, creating tremendous heat and radiation and setting off the expansion of our space. Another model, the mirror universe theory proposed by Neil Turok, suggests that there could be a mirror universe on the other temporal side of the Big Bang, evolving in a direction we would consider towards the past. This could potentially mean that there was no beginning of time at the Big Bang.",
  "summary": "In this excerpt from \"On Time: The Physics That Makes the Universe Tick,\" author and theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili examines the possibility of time starting before the Big Bang, with the cosmological theory of eternal inflation.",
  "key_points": [
    "Time's relationship with perception is complex, slowing, speeding up, or moving backward",
    "Mirror universe theory proposes a temporal side of Big Bang with evolving universe"
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}