Graytown wrote:

OK, now don't kill me on this, but what I'd like to know is this:

We know the Universe started with the Big Bang. That's all fine and
good. But I just can't help thinking that time had to exist before the
bang took place and whatever that thing was that exploded had to take
shape and form much before. If so, time really goes back a long way
before the big bang and so does the Universe. And technically, this
equation could go on till Infinity... which is the real kicker because
it practically means that nobody will ever know how it all began. Am I
making sense or simply missing something?

This may really sound amateurish (if a reasonable explanation exists
and I'm not aware of it), but I can see that there are people here
that may be able to satisfy my curiosity on this one.

Thanks a lot

Rohit

First, your question is much better addressed to sci.astronomy or
sci.physics. Second, the Big Bang wasn't (according to current theory)
an explosion in the traditional sense of some large object going BOOM!
and scattering debris. There really isn't a "thing that exploded".
Instead, the "big bang" is a characterization of the early period of the
universe as being hot, with rapid expansion ("hyperinflation", where the
size is increasing faster than the speed of light.) We keep pushing back
our knowledge of the early universe, and have a pretty good idea down to
the first couple of seconds, but the physics doesn't imply the presence
(or absence) of something before the universe anymore than it does
outside the universe. It is unfortunate that the early characterization
of the Big Bang talked about the "primordial atom", or the "ylem", and
that something happened to cause it to explode. The modern view is that
the explosion occured. Other than some initial conditions, we really
can't tell about anything prior to the start of the Big Bang because the
conditions of the Big Bang pretty much wiped everything else out. In
fact, we know even less about the initial conditions than we thought,
since it appears that, due to hyperinflation, certain ratios of
particles will end up looking like they do now over a wide variety of
initial conditions.

It is contrary to "common sense", but when you get to cosmology, you're
really dealing with high-energy physics and quantum theory, neither of
which have much to do with "common sense" (which is really just our view
of how things work at the scale in which we live.) It's "common sense"
that heavy objects sink in water, but if you put an iron filing on the
surface of the water in a glass, the surface tension holds it up.

http://itss.raytheon.com/cafe/qadir/acosmbb.html has a very nice FAQ
about the Big Bang.