Pre-Big Bang: Who Knew?

So the concept of what was there before the before the big bang theory never occurred to me before reading the assigns on cosmic inflation. But it does make sense that something had to be there before the big bang to lead up to the big bang because as we know the big bang had to come from somewhere.

That somewhere is called inflationary universe theory. This theory states that the universe was indeed extremely small at its beginning but it grew exponentially over a matter of tens of seconds and it created a vacuum that brought in energy. All of this occurring so quickly that it overcame gravity. That energy vacuum later decayed to make up the matter the universe.

Inflationary universe theory explains many of the problems that the Big bang theory had. These problems being the horizon problem, the flat problem and the monopole problem. The horizon problem was that both ends of the universe look similar to each other, this is solved by cosmic inflation because at the beginning the universe was a lot smaller and it's ends where possibly close enough together to share the same properties. The issue of flatness of the universe is fixed by two possible situations that the rapid expansion flattened the curve of the universe enough that it just looks flat but it really is not or the expansion had occurred so quickly that it did actually flatten the universe. And finally the monopole issue is that there "should" be magnetic poles in our universe but there is not. The theory here is that during the expansion it evenly distributed the magnetic field to cover the universe.

It seems to me that such a theory makes very much sense in the questions we have in regard to the big bang theory. It answers the biggest concerns that we had. And is actually remarkable that these events might have actually occurred, the chances are so slim for all of this to have taken place, but indeed they might have.