Before the Big Bang

Again i've not read all of the posts, so ignore this if it's repeating something already said... The problem with us humans trying to understand the universe is our severe limitations posed by language. Our concept of time leads us to think of time as something totally seperate to anything else, and something totally linear. We percieve some sort of eternal line, and events are hung on this line. The problem comes when our concepts don't match up with reality, so we come up with questions that don't actually make sense.With time, it isn't linear and it isn't seperate from the universe. It is as ingrained a part of the universe as anything else. There really is no meaning to the term "before the universe" as far as our models of the universe go. Imagine a man stood on the north pole and asking the local polar bear which direction north is. The question can't be answered, because every direction is south. There is no "north".I have heard of theories in which time does extend before the big bang, but I have no idea how scientific they are or what evidence there is for them. Unfortunately they are likely unfalsifiable.

The thing is time is no different to distance, it is just a degree of freedom in spacetime. When spacetime is reduced to a singularity then there is neither distance nor time. There are no degrees of freedom, no way to move position in space or time. The only things that are man made are the arbitrary division of space and time that we use, not the property that they measure.

The problem is that we are bound by our common sense, our preconcieved views of what the universe is like. We're only able to directly experience a very small part of it, and its just really hard to imagine things that we have no way to directly experience. There's a wealth of things that go completely against what we would expect. There are likely 11 dimensions to the universe, but I honestly have no idea how to visualise more than 3. Thankfully maths doesn't care about things like that.Whats more, the topic you picked has no definte answer yet anyway. The point of the bigbang defies current understanding because Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are as yet incompatible. In most cases that is irrelevent because gravity has no effect on the quantum level, but at the point of the big bang the gravity is so strong that you can no longer ignore it. The best scientists in the world dream of uniting the two