When Did Time Begin?

Our universe is expanding, so it must have been smaller in the past. Indeed, if we rewind our cosmological movie, we see the universe shrinking back almost to a point – the big bang – some 13.8 billion years ago. Is this when time began? Alas, things aren’t so simple. 

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity tells us that the backdrop of the universe is a fluid continuum, space-time, in which neither space nor time has an absolute meaning. What’s more, at the big bang, space-time distorts into a point of infinite density called a singularity. We can’t say this is where time begins, only that it marks a rupture beyond which we cannot extrapolate.


Even so, some cosmologists believe there was a “before” the big bang. Some suggest that another universe preceded ours, and that this one contracted and then “bounced” at the big bang, resulting in the expanding era we now observe. 

More radically, cosmologist Roger Penrose has proposed that new universes can emerge from ones that don’t contract, through a dramatic “rescaling” of all space-time.     READ MORE...