Not that I proclaim to have any idea how to answer any of these questions, but there is something about the question of time that I can never get past. And I feel like it's similar to what you're saying?
What happened before the big-bang? If time is a product of the big-bang, then how can it be used to provide any sort of perspective outside of the very thing that created it? (poor phrasing, sorry)
Imagine asking the question "what was @tempodox2 like before he was born?".
Moreover, our ability to perceive time shapes our way of thinking about it, potentially in ways that lead us to incorrect theories and conclusions. Simplest, although maybe worst example might be that time is actually flowing in the opposite direction that we perceive it. Isn't the direction of time just a subjective observation based on who or what the observer is? We have just happened to evolve with certain sensors that allow us to perceive time in a particular direction as a result of a subset of properties/reactions potentially exclusive to our universe.
I like this quote about this from Stephen Hawking: [1]
> "One can regard imaginary and real time as beginning at the South Pole, which is a smooth point of space-time where the normal laws of physics hold. There is nothing south of the South Pole, so there was nothing around before the Big Bang," Hawking said.
My layman's reading of that imagines if you move south, get to the south pole, and then keep going the same direction you had been going, you are still moving but no longer going "south." In this metaphor, you could go back in time, be "at" the Big Bang, keep going the direction you had been going in time, but the direction you're going would no longer be "before."
I have no idea how practical this metaphor is and how far it extends, but it's an appealing one to me. Maybe someone else could clarify.
What if our reality (and universe) is on the same journey as the one you just described? What if the North Pole is our starting point (Big Bang), we walk southward and as soon as we cross the South Pole, everything reverts back into the Big Ben (you would eventually reach the North Pole again) just to start all over again. Like a piston, or a ballon that is being inflated, then deflated and re-inflated again; our reality is just "one stroke" (or "walk", in your metaphor) of a bigger "engine".
This reminds me of some physicist I can't remember trying to refute William Lane Craig's formulation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, a classical Islamic argument for the existence of God going something like:
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe must have a cause of its existence, and that cause is God.
The issue is with the first premise. If you only understand causality from within a temporal framework, then your understanding only works from within a temporal framework. "Everything that begins to exist has a cause" presupposes the cause exists before the effect and that presupposition becomes incoherent at the beginning of time itself. If the big bang is the start of time, then nothing exists "before" the big bang because the very notion of "before" is meaningless without time. Our understanding of every event on the universal timeline is that it is linked inextricably by necessity and sufficiency to some set of prior events, and we call that causation, but attempting to use the same logic and language regarding the existence of the timeline results in paradoxical, meaningless statements.
The Cosmological argument was posited by Plato (c. 427–347 BC) and Aristotle (c. 384–322 BC). It has nothing to do with "Islam"..
It is comical to claim that some "physicist" has managed to resolve a deeply _philosophical_ question such as Creatio ex nihilo.
The existence of God is a philosophical question and not a scientific one. One can't reach for a scientific method to resolve everything; if that were the case, then we might as well throw out the entire domain of philosophy all together.
I fully recognize that this is not a very popular comment on a forum like HN, however what I dislike about "Scientisim" today, is that they claim that the entire realm of human knowledge and experience can be reduce to Science alone.
I hold that this line of thinking forces you into a very narrow and reductive line of reasoning.
I think asking "what happened before the big bang?" is to an extent the same as "where do space, time and gravity come from?", but not in the sense that they're trying to obtain an external (to the universe) perspective.
The latter isn't trying to obtain an external perspective, but rather a more fundamental perspective, somewhat like how when you dig deep enough, the weak and electromagnetic force become unified, emerging from more fundamental properties. Similarly, with space-time and gravity being so heavily associated, there may be a more fundamental mechanism at work which is responsible for the properties of both.
The former is asking something potentially similar. In the early universe, there's a popular theory that the weak, strong and electromagnetic force were unified. Similarly, if the mechanisms for the properties of space, time and gravity can be unified, perhaps we may find that the big bang itself wasn't as much of a singularity as we think, instead being the result of some more fundamental properties of the universe being in a certain state. Thinking of it like the idea of a false vacuum decay, perhaps the fundamental properties of the universe were the same before the big bang, and the 'bang' was the vacuum dropping down to a more stable state, in which case "what happened before the big bang" makes some sense.
On the other hand, if the big bang was indeed the start of all physics including time, the big bang very well can have happened because this question would be asked.
As for our ability to perceive time shaping our way of thinking about it, from what I understand, we currently believe that physics holds under simultaneous charge, parity and time reversal. The various promising theories of quantum gravity have cases that might break this rule, which I think would effectively define a physical direction of time.
Roger Penrose came up with a very plausible theory that the heat death of our universe looks like the big bang moment, from the perspective of a photon. So our universe is caught in a cycle of birth death rebirth ad infinitum.
Well, before the big bang, there had to be some environment that was such that a big bang could occur. (Just as, before the computer was turned on, there had to be a computer there to turn on.)
The question may be unanswerable from the information available in this universe (or, in the analogy, within the computer), but we know that there had to be something there.
Indeed, it could be we are just not capable of understanding it for what it really is and the best we can do is make models that we can understand that fit some parts of what we see, but not all. We try new models but with the same results. We'll never be able to get it all right because its beyond of capacity.
Or
It's just something that we haven't figured out yet, and eventually will.
What happened before the big-bang? If time is a product of the big-bang, then how can it be used to provide any sort of perspective outside of the very thing that created it? (poor phrasing, sorry)
Imagine asking the question "what was @tempodox2 like before he was born?".
Moreover, our ability to perceive time shapes our way of thinking about it, potentially in ways that lead us to incorrect theories and conclusions. Simplest, although maybe worst example might be that time is actually flowing in the opposite direction that we perceive it. Isn't the direction of time just a subjective observation based on who or what the observer is? We have just happened to evolve with certain sensors that allow us to perceive time in a particular direction as a result of a subset of properties/reactions potentially exclusive to our universe.