Pre-Bang branes and bubbles

What happened before the big bang?

Cosmologists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok liken the early history of the universe to a play in which the protagonists — matter and radiation — move across the stage according to the laws of physics. Astronomers are actors who arrived on the scene 13.7 billion years too late to know what happened.

If the universe occupies a sheetlike membrane, the Big Bang may have been just one in a series of collisions, each “Big Bounce” refreshing the cosmos.