Is String Theory a Theory Of Everything?

[marcus]

... (time or space "before" the big bang,..).

hello abbott, and welcome to the forum
You can take the quotes off before
Time and space before the big bang are alive and well
http://arxiv.org/gr-qc/0402053
(Moreover useful, since they get rid of the socalled horizon problem, which I'm told would otherwise require some fine-tuning or hard-to-swallow assumptions about inflation)

that link is to a review article, it has a bibliography with references to
a bunch of articles about the discovery that there isn't a bigbang singularity after all---spacetime doesn't have a boundary there

popular articles for general audience are harder to find
the German science-writer Rudi Vaas has some ScientificAmerican-type articles, tell me if you would like to see them. Maybe i can find the links anyway.

Here's one
http://arxiv.org/physics/0407071

 

[abbott]

thanks for the refernce, it's giving me lots of new questions

first I'll try and explain what i think it says (I passed high school physics with a b- so a lot of the paper was sandscrit to me)

It sounds like they are looking past the big bang by inverting spacetime? and they discovered that when we look at the big bang from one perspective direction of time (backwards) it appears to be the point right before a singularity is reached. And then by inverting time its direction changes to forwards, which changes is description to a point of expansion right before a singularity is reached?

if I am right about this then what it calls to my mind is the inversion of what both directions of time seem to be about to describe. there is no square root of infinity or 1 (if 1's square root is itself, its square root cannot exist for the same reasons singularities can't exist).

anyways, so what i was thinking was if we uninvert? our description of time before the big bang doest that describe what's at the end of the "forward" direction of time. wouldn't then time become what comes out of a singularity and what goes into a singularity?