Quarks and electrons act like they're actually points. Nobody can be totally sure, but the standard math says they are, and nobody has managed to smash them apa

Quarks and electrons act like they're actually points. Nobody can be totally sure, but the standard math says they are, and nobody has managed to smash them apart into something smaller or measure them as anything other than "smaller than anything we can measure." They might be small loops of energy instead (this is part of string theory), but if they are, they'd be so small it would be beyond known science to prove it. It's easier to prove something has a size (by measuring it) than to prove the opposite. Every instrument has some margin of error, so you'd never be able to exclude there being some size. The weird thing about the Big Bang is that it's really all of space that banged, and to a first approximation, space and time as we know it didn't exist before a singularity at the beginning of the expansion. It's very possible that's wrong (there may have been a "parent universe" or a "big bounce") but to a first approximation it seems to be that there may not have been a "before" the Big Bang. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe