I mean, what really exists is movement. Earth spins over itself and we call it a day, Earth circles the Sun and we call it a year, a few quartz electronic pulses are called a second, etc. We use these events to measure time.
Before Big Bang there was no movement, therefore, there was nothing to measure time with. If there's nothing to measure time with, there's no time.
I love to see the connection between science and philosophy. I used to see philosophy as useless, and in modern practice it often seems that way, but I think it's fair to say that all science has philosophical roots - in this case, what is time?
Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction?
What about space? Another dimensional abstraction? It becomes a semantic argument. A valuable one, but still - it is quite possible (probable?) that all human understanding is an abstraction of sorts. The fun part of engineering is learning to build stuff using the abstractions that we have experimented with enough for their behaviour to be predictable to some extent.
My brain doesn't like the idea of time in the context of relativity. Just because the relative (nominal?) measure of time changes as the forces of the universe may or may not cause it to doesn't mean the absolute (real?) period I wait for the train every day changes. Just because the clock stands still while you're moving away from it at light speed doesn't mean "time" hasn't been spent moving away from it.
(I use nominal and real because, oddly enough, economics is the closest thing I can relate this to.)
"Also: no evidence of Pop Tarts either." Gets 5 upvotes?
That makes about as much sense as this article.
Personally I like the idea that the big bang is a cyclical event - the universe expands until some point, then it collapses again. At some indeterminate point it expands again. Whether or not Earth gets recreated is for someone else to ponder.
There is now, now now now now now & now...
We think it's tomorrow in Australia already but it's now. I can imagine that there was 'now' before Big Bang, since Big Bang happened in the now.
How was the Big Bang triggered then?
Prove it.
It's possible there were other universes.
> there was nothing to measure time with
There was nothing inside the universe to measure time with.