The other questions:
* Was there anything before the big bang?
* Could ancient life have emerged in the big bang’s glow?
* What are dark matter and dark energy?
* What is the universe’s ultimate fate?
* Will the big bang become an untestable theory?
The Big Bang is a hypothesis with considerable supporting observations but it requires too many twists to make it work, dark matter can be handled, but I’ve a problem with “Inflation”. Where did it come from, where did it go, is it still around??? Silly questions but they trouble me. Cyclic universes answer the very good, “What came before?” question.
However, we have learned a lot in pursuit of answers an that’s all to the good.
ping
Who are these “Big Bang” deniers? It’s peer reviewed, it’s published, it’s “settled science.” It’s law of the universe. Just stop it already.
“After the big bang, matter should have flown apart and formed random clumps. But the CMB showed that the universe was incredibly uniform, as if far-flung regions had somehow stayed in contact during the universe’s early expansion.”
What is this nonsense? The CMB is not “incredibly uniform”, but pretty patchy, with clumps and filaments everywhere underpinning the non-uniform galactic distribution of the universe.
Been a while since I read it, but goes something like this: there resides an intelligent species outside, but inside the core of matter which made the Big Bang, These energy beings (not the Xeelee) ‘decide’ what the Universe is to be, then go dormant (while whatever they set in motion plays out) until it is ‘time’ for a new Universe to come into existence, but different from the previous one.
The whole cosmological physics was difficult to understand, but made for an interesting read. Much of the back story takes place in the first nanoseconds of creation.
My understanding is that time is motion. Every single way that we measure time involves motion. Whether its the movement of the hands on a watch or the vibrations of an atom in an atomic clock. It is all motion. Without -any- motion, there is no time. So, at the time just before the Big Bang, the universe was the size of a mathematical point—a singularity. No motion occurred inside this point (that would be impossible). Since no motion occurred at that point, time did not exist yet. Time begins once things start to move.