[Steely Tom]

Steven Hawking said that “to ask what happened one second before the Big Bang is the same as asking what is located one mile north of the north pole.”

[NYFriend]

I was just going to post a similar line from the book STRANGE MATTERS which I read a few weeks ago. Under some models of the universe, you don’t get a “before time” or “before the universe”. It dosn’t make sense to us, because it’s outside of our experience, but so is a time where the four fundamental forces of the universe (electromagnetism, gravity, and strong and weak nuclear forces) were one unified force. It’s beyond our senses, and the only way anyone can imagine it is through the math.

[AFPhys]

For me, it is also similar to asking what the square root of -1 is, too. The answer may be a useful construct, and even necessary to explain certain things, but that does not mean it is a part of true reality.