Time and causality at the beginning of the universe

Question

I have been, quite a few times, been caught up in arguments on the internet, where my opponent posits causal events existed before the "singularity" at the "beginning" of the universe. my understanding of it is that since we do not know what happened before a few fractions of a second after the universe started to expand, it is pure speculation to think about what happened before. however, it seems more reasonable to me to think of the "singularity" as an edge in time, rather than an event before which causality could exist, since causal event happen in space-time, and space-time is the universe.
to put it simply, does it make more sense that the universe has an edge in time at what we call the "singularity" (and if so, how could time works at such a scale, even if it's for now unknowable, we probably have some hypothesis), or could causal chains exist wihtout space-time ?

JRL · Answer

Was there something before the singularity of the Big Bang? This question implies that we can make sense of the flow of time prior to the Big Bang. You reference this as an edge in time, but this also implies that we can understand what occurs on either side of that edge. While this is an interesting question to consider, it largely lies outside of the realm of true science. In all likelihood, if "reality" existed prior to the initial singularity, it would have had vastly different physical properties and such entities as time, mass and distance would be defined in very different ways (assuming that they would even exist at all) making it impossible to impose our current thinking in any meaningful way to events occurring before the Big Bang.

Answered by JRL on August 13, 2021

Time and causality at the beginning of the universe

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