I concluded some time ago that this kind of question cannot possibly be answered in a satisfactory way. I can't fathom the concept of something always existing and I think anyone who claims to understand it is lying. On the other hand the universe/God having a beginning doesn't make sense to me either because you can always ask what was there before.

The best explanation I saw so far was a theory by (Hawking?) that the beginning of time is akin to the event horizon of a black hole, that is, you can always get closer to it but you can never actually reach it. Sort of like 1/2+1/4+1/8... never really adds up to 1 but you can always get as close to 1 as you want. I'm sure there's a proper name for that, I'm neither a mathematician nor a physicist.

What I'm not sure about that explanation is if it isn't in fact just another way of saying that time strecthes backwards to infinity. As I said to a friend once, this subject gives me headaches, I guess it's just something we have to live with.

• Was it Hawking? - harvey1 - April 19, 2001 - 15:31 UTC
  • Yes, it was Stephen - aurino - April 19, 2001 - 15:51 UTC