No evidence of time before Big Bang

Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction?<p>I mean, what really exists is movement. Earth spins over itself and we call it a day, Earth circles the Sun and we call it a year, a few quartz electronic pulses are called a second, etc. We use these events to measure time.<p>Before Big Bang there was no movement, therefore, there was nothing to measure time with. If there's nothing to measure time with, there's no time.

So what is the consensus about what time is? Is the following a valid understanding of the post title: "No evidence of stuff going on before stuff existed" ?

Penrose would be a safer bet if he hadn't written "The Emperor's New Mind". Having completely flamed out on a subject I consider myself competent enough to judge him on, I'm much less willing to bet he's right in an area where I am less confident and knowledgeable.

Given a large enough sample of random noise, you can find any finite pattern in it, akin to the infinite monkey theorem. The human mind is biased toward patterns.

The summary says they are just disputing that concentric rings of uniform temperature in the cosmic background radiation are caused by oscillations of the universe, that is, multiple big bangs.<p>That's not to say that there aren't oscillations, just that these aren't a reflection of them. At least that's what I got from skimming, didn't bother to read the whole thing.<p>It'd be a little arrogant to say with certainty what happened before the big bang. I think the headline is misleading, very misleading.

&#62;<i>"Penrose, however, thinks that the Universe's great uniformity instead originates from before the Big Bang, from the tail end of a previous aeon that saw the Universe expand to become infinitely large and very smooth. That aeon in turn was born in a Big Bang that emerged from the end of a still earlier aeon, and so on, creating a potentially infinite cycle with no beginning and no end.</i><p><i>...Penrose's idea is being challenged by three independent studies..."</i><p>Did that idea (turtles all the way down) really require a scientific challenge?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down</a>

I thought the Big Bang theory ONLY dealt with what happened right AFTER the universe was created.<p>I always thought that cosmologists have been trying to correct the popular notion that the Big Bang also describes what happened before the universe was created.

The jury is still out.<p><i>Gurzadyan dismisses the critical analyses as "absolutely trivial", arguing that there is bound to be agreement between the standard cosmological model and the WMAP data "at some confidence level" but that a different model, such as Penrose's, might fit the data "even better" " — a point he makes in a response to the three critical papers also posted on arXiv5. However, he is not prepared to state that the circles constitute evidence of Penrose's model. "We have found some signatures that carry properties predicted by the model," he says.</i><p>My money's on Penrose.

Also: no evidence of Pop Tarts either.