: your statement concerning the genesis of the cosmos : seems somewhat elementary and contradictory.

Elementary, absolutely. How else do you fit the entire knowledge of the physics of the first three minutes into a few sentences without confusing people :)

: Doesn't a quantum fluctuation infer time? If there then : how does one come to the inference that an event : that requires time, begot that which is time?

My understanding goes like this, I'll happily read corrections. Before the big bang there was nothing, absolutely nothing, no spacetime, no mass, nothing. If there was then the Universe could be considered infinite which is exactly what Cosmologists shy away from.

So the evidence is, you have no spacetime, the Big Bang occurs, spacetime now exists and the laws of nature are created. Do we know any physical processes that are not time related, no - have to admit my knowledge of M-Brane theory is lacking. Some process must have occurred to create the Big Bang from nothing and create spacetime. The last I heard a quantum fluctuation (uncertainty principle or whatever) was a good candidate. Or at least one I favoured.

For what it is worth, the first 10^-43 seconds of the Big Bang and questions like, where did it come from? are not readily answerable, yet! A theory of everything or some super-symmetrical theory may provide answers but that is still a long way off.

Yelm "SU(3)U(1)" Alio