That's humerous enough, but why 4ft? Why not 40, 400, or 4,000?
Absolutely. The idea is to start with the observed acceleration of the stars showing space's expansion, fudge in the measured mass/energy, and figure back a start point:
Hawkings came up with a beach ball size beginning, someone else said a golf ball, and I found another guy said more like a soft ball. Anyway you cut it they got a lot of balls doing their measurements from outside of spacetime --they're using God's tape measure without even asking to borrow it. If they'd have been honest and measured while inside the universe when everything was traveling light speed, then all distances would have shrunk to zero.