Time and The Big Bang
Stephen Hawking in particular has addressed a connection between time and the Big Bang. In A Brief History of Time and elsewhere, Hawking says that even if time did not begin with the Big Bang and there were another time frame before the Big Bang, no information from events then would be accessible to us, and nothing that happened then would have any effect upon the present time-frame. Upon occasion, Hawking has stated that time actually began with the Big Bang, and that questions about what happened before the Big Bang are meaningless. This less-nuanced, but commonly repeated formulation has received criticisms from philosophers such as Aristotelian philosopher Mortimer J. Adler.
Scientists have come to some agreement on descriptions of events that happened 10−35 seconds after the Big Bang, but generally agree that descriptions about what happened before one Planck time (5 × 10−44 seconds) after the Big Bang are likely to remain pure speculation.
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Famous quotes containing the words time and, time, big and/or bang:
“By Time and Age full many things are taught.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
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—George P. Fletcher, U.S. law educator. With Justice for Some, p. 6, Addison-Wesley (1995)
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—Jules Feiffer (b. 1929)
“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)