Our modern view is that we have been able to push the frontiers of science to an enormous extent. Somehow, we have precise predictions about the beginning of the universe, which was presumably set into motion by the Big Bang that occurred approximately 13.8 billion years ago. Stephen Hawking described the Big Bang as a consequence of the laws of gravity, which did not need any help from a divine being. But what happened before that primordial blast? Does physics have anything to say about that?
Some scientists are pragmatists, saying that since this question cannot be the subject of experiments or applications, we should, therefore, ignore it. Other scientists have tried to think about this seriously, and Hawking was prominent among them. He raised the question: Can the universe arise from nothing, without any intervention? It turns out that there is a mathematical formalism, in the context of quantum gravity, which gives meaning to this statement. Hawking, together with James Hartle, drew up a quantum description (or wave function) of the universe, consisting of a path integral that sums up all possible past histories that could lead to a cosmos in the current state from nothing! The result of that analysis, and those of other physicists who have taken up this problem, suggest it is conceivable that this glorious universe–the only home we have ever known–could, in fact, have come from nothing!
