In article ,
says...
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

Ami and Gene did a good job of responding to you, but basically the thing
you have to do is understand that there was *no space* in which the
primordial, microscopic Universe existed at the moment of the Big Bang.
It wasn't a little tiny ball sitting in the midst of an empty expanse
waiting to be filled. All of the particles that exist in the current
Universe and all of the energy that has existed and ever will exist, nd
most importantly ALL OF DIMENSIONAL SPACE were contained within that tiny
point.

Astrophysicists call the time before we can infer conditions during the
Big Bang a "discontinuity." Nothing that we know of physics and
cosmology will allow us to infer the conditions that caused the Universe
to exist in the form we infer for its first milliseconds. There is
another thing that is considered a discontinuity -- the interior of the
Schwarzchild radius of a black hole. Nothing we know lets us infer the
conditions there, either.

--

It's not the pace of life I mind; | Doug Van Dorn
it's the sudden stop at the end... |