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I was reading a brief history of time and hawking said that any time before the big bang occurred is irrelevant, and I'm not really sure why this is. Anyone care to explain?  

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Well it would be irrelevant to discuss in his book because his book deal with what we know.  We can't possibly know anything that occurred before the big bang so there is not point in discussing it.

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The Big Bang was not an explosion in Space-Time, it was an explosion OF Space-Time, essentially Space-Time was created in the Big Bang. Therefore, nothing existed before the Big Bang. Ofcourse this brings up the question: where the Big Bang came from if there was nothing in the first place. The only exception to this would be the Multiverse theory and the Multidemension Theory.

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1. The Big Bang wasn't an explosion at all.
2. The Big Bang is not about the origin of the universe, but about the expansion of the universe.
3. The Big Bang wasn't a creation event.
4. Note also that one cannot ask, much less answer, "What happened before the big bang?" Since no time earlier than the Planck time can be logically defined, the whole notion of time before the big bang is meaningless.
5. 'Nothing' is a meaningless term, so it cannot by definition refer to anything that exists.

Post edited at 2:08 am on June 22, 2008 by Moridin

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"The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the
shoreline of wonder" (Ralph W. Sockman)

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The Big Bang wasn't an explosion at all.

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