Why the big bang may not have been the beginning of the universe

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

PART of what turned me into a theoretical cosmology enthusiast as a child was watching the documentary A Brief History of Time and hearing about the mystery around the big bang. It showed how the equations that we use to describe space-time broke down into a singularity when we ran time all the way back to the beginning. What does this imply about the origins and history of space-time – about the ultimate cosmological tale?

When the film came out in 1991, popular science books and magazines used the term big bang to refer to the moment when our universe came …