[pcherna]

I believe cosmologists generally refer to the Big Bang theory as the progression from the hot dense state to the modern shape. This Hot Big Bang part is very well understood in theory and very well supported in observation, with the Cosmic Microwave Background being a pre-eminent discovery supporting that.

What preceded the hot dense soup involves conditions that are a problem for both theory and experiment. For theory, those conditions involve both quantum gravity and general relativity and we don't have any accepted way to resolve those yet. And, for experiment, the hot dense soup is opaque to our observations. There are educated guesses as to what might have come before, and one guess is that it leads back to a singularity, and the popular view of the Big Bang theory is often that singularity as the kickoff, but we don't have anything resembling evidence. And whether anything came "before" even that is super speculation, even the concept of "before" may not apply.

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” -- Douglas Adams

[kulahan]

As I understand it, we’ve already started designing new instruments to see through that dense hot soup.

The biggest problem is that it gets massively more dense and hot the closer you get to the beginning (whatever the hell “the beginning even is). So the tech needed to see a few seconds after the Big Bang is unimaginably more complex than the tech needed to see a minute after the Big Bang. We would probably need to see the first microseconds in order to truly understand the event well.

I’m just a hobbyist, so others please correct me if I’ve gotten something wrong here.