Are we living in a pyrotechnic universe?

In Before the Big Bang, There Was . . . What?, Dennis Overbye of the NY Times reports on recent developments in the world of cosmology. The big question (as it has been for a long time) is where did the universe come from, or, what caused the Big Bang. Researchers are pinning their hopes on emerging theories that unify Einsteinian Relativity with Quantum Mechanics, “a unified theory of quantum gravity–two views of the world, one describing a continuous curved space-time, the other a discontinuous random one.” Currently, string theory is being pursued as the best hope for solving the convergence. Still this is an interesting article with reasonable speculations about what might have come before the Big Bang. Where did “it” all come from is something the scientists are nowhere near ready to tackle, though.