Stephen Hawking said Sunday he believes that "nothing was around" before the so-called Big Bang that led to the beginning of the universe, USA Today reported.
The famous physicist appeared on Neil deGrasse Tyson's National Geographic show "StarTalk" when he made the comments during a conversation about space, the newspaper said. Hawking's work on the origins and structure of the universe, from the Big Bang to black holes, has revolutionized the field, Space.com wrote.
"(I use a) Euclidean approach to quantum gravity to describe the beginning of the universe," Hawking said on the program about the Big Bang, which he believes happened nearly 14 billion years ago, per USA Today.
"The Euclidean space-time is a closed surface without end, like the surface of the Earth," Hawking continued. "One can regard imaginary and real time as beginning at the South Pole, which is a smooth point of space-time where the normal laws of physics hold. There is nothing south of the South Pole so there was nothing around before the Big Bang."
Hawking had previously said that events that happened before the Big Bang "have no consequences that can be observed," so there is no way to measure what happened, according to Tech Times.
"The universe will evolve from the Big Bang, completely independently of what it was like before," Hawking said on his website. "Even the amount of matter in the universe can be different to what it was before the Big Bang, as the Law of Conservation of Matter, will break down at the Big Bang."
The Tech Times wrote that much of what is known about the Big Bang comes from mathematical models and formulas since present instruments do not allow researchers to look back at the birth of the universe.
Some on social media had another answer about the universe's origins.
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