I was fascinated by yesterdays announcement that "old light"鈥� revealed trace evidence in the background radiation of the earliest鈥� 聽trillionth of a trillionth (and then some) of a second of the "big bang".鈥� What I don't grasp is the measurement of the timescale, if we are talking鈥� about the creation of the most elemental forces, aren't we talking about the鈥� creation of time itself too? If so how do we establish a time-scale to鈥� 聽measure what involves-among other things- the creation of the time that we鈥� are measuring by? 聽A big bang of thanks to who-ever can answer in layman's鈥� terms!
All we can really say is that if you run the clock backwards, this聽event would have happened 10^(-34) or so seconds before all our聽equations blow up (going backwards from today). 聽This is a short time,聽granted, but the equations are still valid for another factor of a聽billion or so smaller intervals, so this doesn't cause any existential聽crises for space and time.
With no relevant data probing earlier times, though, all sorts of聽things could have happened in those earlier times: the universe could聽have quite comfortably been going on forever before this event, then聽suddenly entered this new phase. Or, space and time somehow popped聽into existence and triggered this evolving universe, but the physics聽that we have carefully built up over the centuries doesn't give a lot聽of guidance for how this would happen or what it would mean. It is聽possible that there is information from this earlier time encoded in聽our universe, but that is a pretty fuzzy frontier of current research.
