Physics was my worst subject, but I liked the teacher.
On the final exam, I couldn’t even make sense of the questions. In the answer box, I scribbled something irrelevant: “Maybe electrons repel each other the same way children leave home or lovers break up — some kind of force like that.” When I got my test back, there was a note in red pen: “Your idea can be considered almost entirely correct.” He gave me 20 points.
The teacher wasn’t popular with students. He had this physics-nerd vibe, and his explanations tended toward the abstract and philosophical. Looking back, I think he must have specialized in theoretical physics.
I couldn’t follow the lessons, but I was fascinated by what went on in his head — what he thought about every day, why he spoke in such peculiar terms. For me, at least, class was kind of enjoyable.
One day he introduced the Big Bang theory — the idea that the universe began when space itself started expanding uniformly from an extremely hot, dense state. That day, he seemed more animated than usual.
He wandered into general relativity, quantum mechanics, the significance of theoretical physics. The lecture strayed far from the textbook, and most students tuned out. I only understood half of it, but I learned about something called a “theoretical model that explains and predicts observational evidence.” I remember thinking: so this is how smart people make sense of the world.
Then one of the top students raised his hand. His tone made it clear he wanted the teacher to get back on track.
“If the universe was born in the Big Bang, what was there before the Big Bang?”
The teacher looked up calmly and said, “The question ‘What was there before the Big Bang?’ transcends the framework of our universe — space, time, existence. It’s logically incoherent.”
The student who asked, and the rest of the class, looked completely lost.
“So, you mean there was nothing?”
The student pressed on. The teacher continued.
“‘Something’ and ‘nothing’ are concepts that belong to this universe. According to the Big Bang theory, space and time themselves began with the Big Bang. ‘Existence’ and ‘non-existence’ only have meaning once you have space and time. Without space, ‘where’ has no meaning. Without time, ‘when’ has no meaning. So the very ideas of ‘existence’ and ‘nothingness’ only make sense within the framework of the post-Big Bang universe. ‘Before the Big Bang’ can’t be expressed using the language and logic that emerged after the Big Bang. In other words, it’s not that there was nothing — it’s that the question ‘Was there something or nothing?’ itself has no meaning. The framework of the question doesn’t hold.”
The classroom went quiet. No one argued. No one seemed to understand, either.
Decades later, the phrase “the framework of the question doesn’t hold” still echoes quietly inside me. I retained almost nothing from physics, but I did receive something from that teacher — a way of seeing the world.
In recent years, new hypotheses have emerged that attempt to explore what came before the Big Bang: inflation theory, loop quantum gravity. If that teacher were talking about them today, I wonder what words he’d choose. I imagine he’d speak in that same calm, incomprehensible way — somewhere just beyond our reach.
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