Poking Into Nothingness

“To study the origins of our universe is to struggle with profound chicken-or-egg questions. We know the Big Bang happened. Cosmologists can see its afterglow in the sky. But no one knows whether the laws of physics or even time itself existed before that moment. Nor can we say exactly what happened next. The order in which certain celestial objects formed during the very early universe is hotly contested.“

There comes a moment in thought - if you’re brave, bored, or simply lying awake far too long - when you ask: what lies beyond the universe? And you don’t mean stars, or dark matter, or rogue planets. You mean the edge. The boundary. The membrane beyond which there is no ‘where’, no ‘when’, no ‘what’. And when your thought reaches that point, something inside you recoils. A silent dread. As if your mind has brushed against something it wasn’t meant to. Most people turn back. Frankly, so do I. That creeping sense of cosmic vertigo always gets me. But not tonight. Tonight, I want to break that barrier. I want to step past the limit. I want to poke into the nothingness. Because if I don’t, I’m not really thinking - just loitering at the edge of the void and calling it curiosity.

What if ‘nothing’ isn’t absence, but something our language can’t yet describe? What if whatever lies beyond isn’t a void, but a field of possibilities for which we simply haven’t the words? What if the problem isn’t the question, but the limitations of the one asking it?

But enough rambling… The quote at the beginning of this blog post is from a recent article in The Atlantic titled “The Black Hole That Could Rewrite Cosmology”. It’s that bit about time not existing before the Big Bang - it didn’t sit right with me. Still doesn’t. I simply can’t reconcile it. “Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang”… My brain objects. My stomach files a formal complaint. This isn’t some sudden obsession, mind you. I’ve carried this question around for years, quietly, in the background of dinner tables, taprooms, deadlines, and domestic trivia. It’s one of those thoughts that waits until the lights are out, then climbs into bed beside you. Over time, I’ve tried to wrestle it into shape - via Tegmark’s multiverses, Susskind’s holograms, and Brian Greene’s string-theory elegance. I’ve consulted Aristotle’s Prime Mover, Nietzsche’s eternal return, and even Eco’s semiotic ghosts. None offered answers, but all deepened the ache.

These aren’t just books on a shelf. They’re fragments of a broken map, drawn by minds far cleverer, weirder, and occasionally more inebriated than I’ll ever be. And yet the map never reveals what lies beyond the edge. It stops at the moment time sparks into being, and then simply shrugs.

Trying to understand what came before the Big Bang is like trying to find the inside of a pretzel. You know it exists, at least conceptually, but the moment you reach for it, you realise the dough has betrayed you. Or maybe it’s like asking a watchmaker to build a timepiece that ticks before the mainspring is wound. He’ll stare at you, swear in French-German, and then sketch something suspiciously shaped like a Möbius strip. Some nights, I think it’s like turning up at a pub before the pub exists. The sign’s not hung. The kegs aren’t tapped. And yet there you are, pint in hand, waiting for time to begin so the barman can pour. And for some reason, there’s always a monk lurking in the shadows, muttering that fermentation precedes creation. (Brother Percival, is that you?) Even modern physics, brilliant though it is, starts to sound like metaphysical jazz. One theory claims time is emergent. Another insists it’s an illusion. A third suggests we’re all living in a projection, which is precisely the sort of thing you’d expect from someone who failed drama school and pivoted to quantum gravity.

Anyway, here’s where I stop paraphrasing scientists and start admitting what I actually believe - or rather, what my brain stubbornly refuses not to believe: I don’t buy this idea that there was nothing before the Big Bang. Not because I’m clinging to mystical comfort, but because true nothingness is impossible to imagine. Go on then, try it. Picture nothing. Not empty space. Not darkness. Not silence. Nothing. You can’t. You’ve already failed. Your “nothing” has texture. Shadow. A spatial outline. Perhaps even that creeping, devouring quality they tried to define in The NeverEnding Story. Even when we attempt to strip away all existence, we end up smuggling in atmosphere, presence, dread. And that is precisely the problem. Our minds are steeped in time and space. Everything we know—from childhood memories to calendar invites—is structured around duration and dimension. Even our thoughts arrive in sequence. Our very syntax is time-bound. So when someone says, “Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang,” I nod politely, but inside I’m screaming: Then how long did that last?

The very phrasing betrays us. The moment you ask “what was before,” you’ve already smuggled time in through the back door. But what if… just what if... there was a kind of time before time? Not our time, not the ticking of seconds or the stretching of space, but something else entirely. A proto-time. A slow brewing of causality in a kettle we simply can’t see. Maybe what we call the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning of everything, but merely the beginning of our version of everything - a boot sequence, a system clock ticking over in one peculiar branch of a much deeper metaphysical operating system. Maybe time is like flavour: it emerges depending on the ingredients you simmer. And we, unfortunately or otherwise, are the stew that bubbles forward.

I could go on steeping in analogies, but sooner or later we end up sloshing around in our own semantic soup. I’ve stirred the pot of space-time, prodded pretzels, and gestured vaguely at Möbius bartenders and yet, here I am, still unsatisfied. It’s not that I need more metaphors. It’s that I need an answer. But answers require questions, and questions demand the right lexicon. And that’s where it all collapses, because the moment I ask what came before, I’ve already compromised the whole thing with the very concept I’m trying to unravel.

Perhaps the problem isn’t just metaphysical—perhaps it’s evolutionary. As Sverker Johansson suggests in Dawn of Language, language didn’t spring forth to chart the birth of stars or interrogate the void. It evolved alongside our brains to tackle the messier business of being human: cooperation, memory, abstraction, gossip. It became scaffolding for thought, ingenious, but never neutral. So trying to interrogate the origins of time with a tool forged over millennia for survival might be like attempting quantum mechanics with a sundial. Which leads me to wonder: what would it take for language to evolve beyond mere utility? Not just to warn, persuade, or entertain, but to pierce the very fabric of reality? Could our lexicon someday stretch wide enough, deep enough, to ask the right questions? Not poetic approximations, not hand-waving metaphors, but words that actually fit the scale of the mystery? And if we ever spoke such a tongue, one built not on need but on cosmic precision, would the universe finally answer back?

…But until then, when your metaphors buckle, when your philosophers shrug, and your physicists pivot into probability fields wrapped in equations no one actually understands*, perhaps there’s only one thing left to do: you sit down across the table. Crack open a cold one. And you ask Time.

— You’re really struggling, aren’t you?
— Time? Is that you?
— Who else would it be? I’m the one you’ve been pestering for ten paragraphs. I could hear you right across the page.
— Sorry, it’s just… Anyway, I’m glad you’re here. We need to talk. I’ve got questions.
— Everyone does.
— Before the Big Bang…
— Don’t.
— …what were you measuring, exactly?
— I don’t do ‘before’. That’s your obsession, not mine.
— Right.
— (Time exhales — a sound like entropy sighing.) You lot and your ‘before’. Look, I didn’t exist the way you think I did.
— But something existed. Didn’t it? Something that gave rise to… well, this.
— Define something.
— Not nothing.
— Brilliant. Very precise.
— You know what I mean. A field? A vibration? A quantum soup with a dash of chilli-infused olive oil?
— Lovely imagery. You do enjoy those, don’t you?
— Fine. No metaphors. Was there something beyond absence?
— Now you’re talking like a theologian.
— I’m trying to talk like a human.
— Ah. Well, that’s the trouble. Your language can’t contain what came before your frame of reference.
— So you’re saying nothing came before the Big Bang?
— I’m saying your words betray you. Nothingness is a hall of mirrors. Try to imagine it, and you’ve already given it shape. A gloom. A hush. A border.
— So there was something.
— There was unutterability. That’s as close as I can take you.
— But if it was unutterable, why are we talking about it?
— (Time, smiling now) Because that’s what you do. You talk. And talk. And once in a while, you nearly touch something true… before language snaps back and smacks your wrist.
— So you were there?
— I wasn’t there. I was the there.
— …
— You see? Even your silence takes time.
— But what came before it all?
— That’s precisely the problem. You’re treating existence like a film with a few frames missing. There’s no reel. No tape. Not even a projector.
— Then how are we here?
— I told you. You smuggled something in. You always do.
— So… there was something!
— (Time, smirking): There’s always something. Even if your species insists on calling it ‘nothing’.
— Why do you feel so real, then?
— Because you are. And I’m the shape your thoughts take when they move.
— That sounds rather poetic.
— I pinched it from your monk. The one with the mead and the theological mishaps.

***

So what am I left with, after all this? Not certainty. Not clarity. But something resembling defiance - poetic, impractical, absolutely necessary.

I still don’t buy the idea that there was nothing before the Big Bang. Not because I can prove otherwise, but because I refuse to live in a universe that began as a clerical oversight. Or worse - the caprice of some unnamed phenomenon too distracted to leave notes. Time, whatever it is, did not begin with us. We are not its authors. We are its passengers. Or perhaps just its punctuation. And maybe - just maybe - there was something before. Not empty, not dark, not quiet, but simply... unspeakable. Something biding its time (as it were), waiting for a language bold, or daft, enough to try naming it.

Until that day, I’ll keep poking into the nothingness. Because even if the void never answers, I’d rather ask badly than stop asking altogether.

* “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
- The Character of Physical Law (1965), Richard Feynman.
He wasn’t being flippant; merely honest. He was highlighting the counterintuitive, probabilistic, and thoroughly undomesticated nature of quantum theory, which defies classical intuition even for those fluent in its mathematics. So yes, if it all feels like the floor shifted slightly beneath you, blame Feynman. He made it respectable to be confused.