To speak of time extending backward into eternity, and forward into eternity, sounds like religion to me. To speak of everything beginning from a single, small,dense point before a “big bang” occurs sounds fine, but where did the dense point come from? How did it get there (wherever that is). Where did the empty space come from that is always ready and waiting for the expansions to occur?

To say that “It aways was, and always will be” sounds as plausible, or as silly (make your own choice) as it is to say that “God always was and always will be.

What assumptions do we make with our math that our math break down at singularities? One hurdle is that math, by definitition, describes systems, that is, the relationships between multiple things. The simplest system is of two things. How do you then achieve a math of one thing? Would it be sufficient for a math to be based on one thing described at two different times? Or perhaps we must learn to be satisfied with never being able to open Einstein’s clock and simply define singularities in terms of their observable effects as we do with other quantum phenomena.

So back to the Big Bang…under what conditions does a singularity explode? Does this require we propose anti-gravitons? If there is a relationship between gravity and the three other elemental forces and if gravitons exist, then is it possible that black holes first convert all matter into gravitons and then, at a critical mass, gravitons convert to anti-gravitons which causes an explosion? Does the gravity of a black hole increase proportionally to the amount of mass entering it or does the gravity increase more than we would expect for a given amount of mass? What happens then if there is no more mass entering the black hole? Do the anti-gravitons gain the upperhand and cause the singularity to explode or evaporate? What is space? Is it sufficient to describe it as “that which isn’t particles?” If so, how does space expand? Is space “that by which we can observe that one thing is separate from another thing, i.e., that particles are in fact particles?”

In the end, we are doomed to cyclically describe one form of energy in terms of another as “to be” is described in dictionaries as “to exist” and vice~versa.
Perhaps the state of things before the big bang can be described as a state of nothing and not-nothing being unified as one “thing”… ah, the dilemma of language. (We are going to start sounding like Taoists now). Even so, perhaps future directions lie not with math but with transcending the conceptual limitations of our current languages – languages which matured within Newtonian macro-world experience. What kind of concepts and language would we have if we had been raised in a quantum world?