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Professor Stephen Hawking has delved into the science of time in a brand new interview with famed physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that aired on the National Geographic Channel.

Hawking stated on the show Star Talk that before the Big Bang there was nothing.

“The boundary condition of the universe...is that it has no boundary,” he said.

Universally considered one of the experts on time , Hawking's answer has become a common one to this particular question.

He believes that the Big Bang, which occurred roughly 13.8 billion years ago was the formation of what we now regard as time. The Big Bang was a singularity that caused the laws of physics to break down and so anything that preceded it cannot be applied to our notion of existence.

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The closest he has come to explaining it is using the concept of Euclidean space-time, which is measured in four dimensions.

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Imagine a horizontal line, with past on the left and future on the right. Now, add a vertical line and that becomes what Hawking calls "imaginary time" and is what was around before the Big Bang. In essence, there was no conceivable boundary of time.

"It is not the kind of time we normally experience," Hawking said.

(Image: Pablo Carlos Budassi)

Such a state of being is almost impossible for us to get our heads round - but it's akin to travelling round the Earth as many times as you want. The surface of the planet is finite but because it's round, you'll never run into any kind of boundary or edge.

As well as discussing time, Professor Hawking has been vocal about the dangers of artificial intelligence and the need to find another planet to sustain human life .