Okay, first, I was asking for answers to my questions.
Since you can't answer my questions, let me ask another one...
Do you agree with the statement that matter, time and space all had a beginning at some point in the past? This does not take into consideration how far into the past or anything of that nature. I am simply asking if you think those three things had a beginning.
First you have to define "beginning."
The difficult concept that people frequently fail to grasp is that space and time are co-dependent - one is another form of the other. This is the same as the relationship between matter and energy - one is another form of the other. Einstein's most famous equation, E=mc^2, shows the relationship between energy and mass mathematically, and although by itself it isn't to be applied to any and every situation, it provides the basic concept - matter can be turned into energy, and energy can become matter.
In the same way, space and time themselves are interrelated. It's easy enough to think of
space having a beginning, if you think of space as being completely separate from time. But you cannot do so - space is as related to time as energy is to matter. This leads to the following --> Our dimension of "time" does not exist if "space" does not exist.
For most of the history of the universe this isn't a problem - because most of the history of the universe can be defined as having a certain size of "space" and thus a corresponding "time" at which that size of space occurred. The problem breaks down when you get to the theoretical "singularity" that preceded the big bang. If, indeed, the entire content of the universe were converted entirely to energy, and occupied absolutely no space at all (the definition of a singularity), then no space = no time. That is, it becomes meaningless to ask "when" the universe came into being, or "when" the big bang occurred - because that event itself is the "beginning of time", as it is also the "beginning of space".
I know - that's not easy to grasp. We're very much linear creatures and we view time as being a completely separate dimension of our existence. But that's not the case. As Einstein theorized, and as has been verified empirically, time is as maleable as space is, and is entirely co-dependent on and with space.
One of the implications of this is that our temporal understanding of "cause and effect", that the arrow of time points in one direction and causes always precede effects... simply does not apply to this singularity. At a singularity, where neither space nor time exist or have any meaning at all, Cause need not precede Effect. Cause and Effect really don't even have any meaning, because time is non-existant. To ask "what caused the big bang" is not a meaningful question because that presumes that time, as we understand and perceive it, exists separately from the universe. It does not, and that's confusing and unintuitive to most people. Okay, everyone - it's just that some people are able to set aside "that's confusing".
If there
are other external factors to the universe... if there are other universes, for example, other dimensions outside of our universe, a "meta-time" that is not the same as the "time" of our universe... well, currently we don't have any way to describe or study that. The laws of physics are bound only to our universe. The laws of physics, really, only apply back in time to a certain time shortly after the big bang.
Prior to that time, a very short time indeed (about 10^-43 seconds after the big bang, if I recall correctly), the laws of physics as we know and understand them
did not exist. Or, rather, the basic forces that we know (gravitation, electromagnetic, nuclear) were entirely indistinguishable - the force between two masses would be no different from the force of attraction due to their charges, for example. Of course, at this time, matter itself doesn't appear to actually have yet existed!
But anyway - the point that I'm taking a long time to make is what Stephen Hawking stated much better, numerous times, in his books. We cannot study something that does not adhere to the laws of physics, and thus we cannot ask and answer any meaningful questions. If we ask "what was there before the universe" that is a meaningless question to science, because there
is no "before" in our framework of space, time, matter, energy. "Before" the universe is meaningless because "before" implies time already existed prior to the universe - but as I said above, it did not.
One branch of theoretical physics, from which we got string theory (and later M theory), seeks to address some of these questions. But those are relatively new and still at the stage of untested theory - about where Einstein was in his thought experiments regarding special and general relativity. It took years, decades even, before anyone could come up with ways in which to test Einstein's theories and verify their validity. These new branches of physics will likely take as long or longer.
