In article ,
says...
(Graytown) wrote

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?

Yep, this a problem of logical regression that has been around a
long time, is not limited to scientific paradigms, and has led to
various theological excursions such as "first cause" and "it's
turtles all the way down." Modern variants are steady-state/cascading
cosmologies that have, for example, universes like ours popping out
of nowhere as a result of quantum fluctuations in some sort of
Ueberspace. But where did Ueberspace come from? Ueberueberspace?
And where... you see the problem.

Basically, nobody has a clue, and it's very hard even to imagine what
a clue concerning this problem of regression would look like.

I know this is a common-sense idea, and like all common-sense ideas it
doesn't apply well to higher mathematics and cosmology. But...

As I said in an earlier post, another example of a discontinuous
singularity in astrophysics is a black hole. Just as we can't infer the
state of the universe just before the Big Bang, we (AFAIK from the
reading I've done about it) can't really infer the state of matter,
energy, physical dimensions and time within the Schwartzchild radius of a
black hole.

Could it possible be that the Universe is the interior of a black hole?
And that each black hole we see in our own universe is another universe?
And that the "expansion" we observe is actually the *compression* of all
the particles and energy within the black hole? How could you tell the
difference between space expanding and every particle and energy particle
compressing? Isn't it a relative thing?

Has this concept been rigorously disproven?

Me, I like the turtles.

Yeah -- they have a certain charm, don't they? "Ahhh, you can't fool me!
It's turtles all the way down!"

--

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