Matter and energy can be past-eternal

[bennyboy]

Thanks for the 15 year-old links on the basics of BBT.  I had to put my browser into forced Legacy Mode to view one of them properly.  Very useful.  However, nobody here has argued against the idea of the Big Bang.  From the start, you have been asked to support a position about whether time is past-finite or not.  I have found only one article which asserts that time is observably past-finite, but most, including your links, state that it is either a matter much debated, or one which is unknowable.

http://cmb.physics.wisc.edu/pub/tutorial/bigbang.html
-This article doesn't really mention time at all, much less whether there was anything before the BBT, but it clearly doesn't share your level of confidence: "So how did it all start? A very good question, and one that is highly debated."

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#BBB
-This article only mentions that time is undefined at t=0, and says "In some models like the chaotic or perpetual inflation favored by Linde, the Big Bang is just one of many inflating bubbles in a spacetime foam. But there is no possibility of getting information from outside our own one bubble."  So time exists before the BB, but we don't have access to it.  Hardly a resounding support for your thesis, either.

https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Guth/Guth1.html
"But the theory says nothing about the underlying physics of the primordial explosion. It gives not even a clue about what banged, what caused it to bang, or what happened before it banged."

If the writer of this article was so sure of what the "majority of cosmologists believe," i.e. had a specific view on whether time is past-eternal, he sounds decidedly unsure.


Even Hawking dismisses pre-BB time on a pragmatic basis:

"Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang. Events before the Big Bang, are simply not defined, because there's no way one could measure what happened at them."

Basically, this is your view: don't know what happened before BB, so let's say nothing happened!  Check. . . and mate!

(but then QM and string theory entered the scene, and the math starts to look a lot different. . . hence Alex' questions for you, which you dodged and then raged about for about 10 pages)

Try the following for a physical theory that was created after Internet Time was first formed: https://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantu...verse.html