00:00Imagine trying to walk north from the North Pole.
00:03The concept of north ceases to exist past that point.
00:07For decades, physicists treated the origin of our universe with that same logic.
00:12There was no before because the clock hadn't started yet.
00:15This consensus rested on the idea that absolute nothingness preceded everything.
00:20Since time itself was thought to begin 13.8 billion years ago,
00:25any earlier era was considered physically impossible.
00:28When Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxies were rushing away from each other in the 1920s,
00:33scientists realized that if you rewind cosmic history backward,
00:37the universe gets smaller, hotter, and denser.
00:40Tracing this compression to its absolute limit
00:43is how we arrived at our traditional understanding of where everything began.
00:47The math for this cosmic compression comes from Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.
00:52His equations describe a singularity,
00:55a point where all the matter and energy in existence
00:58shrink into a single dot of infinite density.
01:02At this zero point of space-time,
01:04the equations on this blackboard break down.
01:06They fail to work at extreme density.
01:09This failure is the source of the nothingness theory.
01:12The standard model simply reached a limit,
01:15leaving a gap in the record.
01:16The singularity represents a mathematical dead end.
01:20Navigating past it requires a new set of rules
01:23that allow us to see what the traditional models missed.
01:26To understand a microscopic...
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