Can philosophy explain what happened before the Big Bang?
Over at the Atlantic , there ’s a fascinating audience with Tim Maudlin , one of the founders of a new field , the doctrine of cosmology . He suggests that the mystery story of the universe , including what subsist before the Big Bang , may be in part philosophical : One coarse scheme for thinking about this is to suggest that what we used to call the whole universe is just a small part of everything there is , and that we live in a kind of bubble existence , a small region of something much larger ....