what was there before the big bang

Before the Big Bang, according to current scientific understanding, there was no "material" in the usual sense, such as atoms or matter. The earliest moments after the Big Bang (about one ten-thousandth of a second after) saw the emergence of protons and neutrons, the building blocks of atomic nuclei. Before this, the universe was a hot, dense soup of short-lived elementary particles like quarks, along with matter and antimatter in roughly equal amounts. These particles were constantly being created and annihilated in flashes of energy. The period before stable matter is called the "grand unified epoch," a realm of speculative physics that we cannot yet experimentally probe due to the extreme energies involved. Some theories propose that instead of a singularity, there might have been states like a "pre-Big Bang" phase dominated by exotic fields and gravitational waves, or even a cosmic bounce where the universe contracted before expanding, implying an infinite past. Cosmic inflation theory, which suggests a rapid expansion of the early universe before the hot Big Bang, posits that inflation created conditions that led to the Big Bang's energetic onset. There is also speculation about the universe being a bubble in a larger multiverse. In short, the question of what was before the Big Bang pushes the limits of our understanding. Some scientists argue that time itself began at the Big Bang, thus making "before" meaningless in the conventional sense, while others propose models of a pre-existing state or an eternal cosmic process extending infinitely backward.