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They are the biggest questions that science can possibly ask: where did everything in our universe come from? How did it all begin? For nearly a hundred years, we thought we had the answer: a big bang some 14 billion years ago.But now some scientists believe that was not really the beginning. Our universe may have had a life before this violent moment of creation.Horizon takes the ultimate trip into the unknown, to explore a dizzying world of cosmic bounces, rips and multiple universes, and finds out what happened before the big bang.Neil Turok, Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, working with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton, has proposed a radical new answer to cosmology's deepest question: What banged?Answer: Instead of the universe inexplicably springing into existence from a mysterious initial singularity, the Big Bang was a collision between two universes like ours existing as parallel membranes floating in a higher-dimensional space that we're not aware of.One bang is followed by another, in a potentially endless series of cosmic cycles, each one spelling the end of a universe and the beginning of a new one. Not one bang, but many.Sir Roger Penrose has changed his mind about the Big Bang. He now imagines an eternal cycle of expanding universes where matter becomes energy and back again in the birth of new universes and so on and so on.

"Has the cosmos existed forever, or did something bring it into existence? Time to grapple with the universe's greatest mystery"

TED Talks In Part 1 of his lecture at the University of Sydney, cosmologist Sean Carroll gives an entertaining and thought-provoking talk about the nature of time, the origin of entropy, and how what happened before the Big Bang might be responsible for the arrow of time we observe today. (Don't miss Part 2 of this talk!)

On October 11, 2010, Laura Mersini-Houghton appeared in a BBC programme What Happened Before the Big Bang (along with Michio Kaku, Neil Turok, Andrei Linde, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin and other notable cosmologists and physicists) where she propounded her theory of the universe as a wave function on the landscape multiverse.[11] The programme referred to three observational tests of her theory's predictions, which makes it the only theory on the origins of our universe ever to offer predictions and have them successfully tested. Mersini-Houghton's work on multiverse theory is discussed in the epilogue of a recently published biography of Hugh Everett III.[12