The answer to the question “ what was going on before the Big Bang? “
The answer is:
The question itself is a false question.
And the reason for this is simple but seemingly inscrutable :
There is no BEFORE before the big bang.
This sounds weird for all people living in a world where there always exists another thing before something. So it is absolutely appropriate to keep asking “ what was going on before my birth? ”,
“ what took place before my fater’s birth”,
“ what happend to us before early human migration?”,
“ what had occured to dinosaurs before they went extinct?”,
“ what did the galaxy look like before the sun came to its existence? “…
and this chain goes on and on until it hits its very origin where there is really NULL ‘preceding’ it. And that original point is referred to as the singular point. This resembles that you trace a linked list back node by node until it hits the head: no step back any more.
All it has to do is TIME. When the universe was not born from the big bang, time has NOT yet been there. Whenever the history is queried we implicitly postulate that there is a TIME DIMENSION that we have reference to and thus are capable of using the word ‘before’ and ‘after’. Yet when the universe is not ‘created’, time is not ‘created’ either. And since there is no time ruler to tell ‘before’ from ‘now’ and ‘after’, it is in fact illegal to ask what was ( mybe ‘is’ ) going on before the Big Bang. There was no time, there was no ‘BEFORE’
Another figure I can give is regarding a common saying that “ I gave birth to you “. No matter how often this sentence is heard from parents and how correct it is from the perspective of language, it is logically a false one by itself. The reason is simple: Before the verb ‘gave’ took place, “you” did not exist. And therefore the verb ‘gave’ does not make any sense at all. When this is understood, a similar argument can be applied to answer the question in the title: before ( used temporily just for language cause ) the big bang, the universe did not exist and neither did time, so the usages of the words ‘before’ as well as ‘was going on’ at the beginning are illegal in a physical sense.
I admit there is some difference in the figure of sentence “ I gave birth to you ”. When universe has not made its apperance, nothing ( or even better NULL ) existed, at least according to the big bang theory. But if there existed an “I” as in the sentence “ I gave birth to you ” without ( not BEFORE ) the universe is beyond the boundary of nowadays science.
