Even though cosmologists can be fairly certain of events a few
seconds after the Big Bang, they will probably never know what
preceded it. While most scientists agree that an unimaginably
huge explosion “created the universe” somewhere between
13billion and 20billion years ago, there is no particular reason
either to support or refute the idea that anything existed
before it. The theories are affected by whether you believe the
universe to be finite (closed) or infinite (open). It is known
to be expanding at a fantastic rate, and it therefore follows
that billions of years ago it was far, far smaller. In fact, it
is believed that at the moment before the Big Bang the universe
was infinitely small, with all the galaxies we now know
massively condensed into a space tinier than a quark — the
smallest particle of matter known to man. The distance between
two points was zero, as was the volume of the entire universe,
while the density of matter was infinitely great. Some believers
in a finite universe think that t