Will we ever figure out what happened before the Big Bang?

Is that impossible to figure out or are we going to know someday?Will we ever figure out what happened before the Big Bang?
Before I answer your question (and I DO intend to!) I would like to commend you for the way in which you asked it. It seems that so many people are simply content to ask the question: ';What happened before the Big Bang?'; as if the average person that frequents this board is somehow possessed of an almost magical degree of knowledge that far outstrips even that of modern cosmologists. The answer to that question is, of course, ';We don't know,'; and you seem to get that. Kudos. I know that it's very frustrating for somebody to be told that the answer to their question is not yet within the store of human knowledge, but to claim knowledge in that department would be disingenuous. For example, if I say that there was another universe before the Big Bang that collapsed into a singularity and then re-expanded, I am giving you pure speculation. Of course, any answer is better than ';We don't know, and may never know,'; so you can imagine which answer most people like to cling to.





But enough rambling. Will we ever know? I doubt it. Due to the very nature of the Big Bang, in which all space, matter, and energy expanded from an infinitessimally small point, it seems that anything that existed ';prior to'; this event must have been summarily destroyed by it. Some physicists detest the idea that information can be created or destroyed, but it seems clear that the laws of nature as we understand them do not apply when you cram all of existence into a space smaller than an atom. Therefore, we can't say for sure that there was ';nothing'; before the Big Bang. In fact, we can't say ANYTHING for certain. The Big Bang was very thorough in covering its tracks, and we may never be able to crack that mystery.





I hope that helps. Good luck!Will we ever figure out what happened before the Big Bang?
';Will we ever figure out what happened before the Big Bang?';





Yes.





But not with the present level of understanding.





The ';beginning'; of our universe, set at 13.7 billion years ago, is only the earliest time when we can understand how anything works.





By applying the principles of physics to the expansion of the universe, and running it backwards, we run into a small snag around that time.





The energy density (a.k.a. temperature) of the universe gets so high that -- from our frame of reference -- every single point of the universe would have been a black hole.





This means that every single point would be an event horizon. We can't understand (yet) what goes on on the other side of an event horizon. In fact, we don't even understand how time ';flows'; though an even horizon.





From our point of view, time would be seen as stopping at the event horizon.





That is why we call that moment (the Planck Time) the ';beginning'; of the universe.





For all we know, it could have been expanding from an even higher energy density forever before that. We simply do not understand what happens at higher energy densities.





At least, not yet.
The story I heard was 2 protons were traveling through the nothingness and when they hit each other, they blew up and made everything.
never say never... but right now, we don't even know if the question makes sense. if time began with the big bang, there was no 'before'.