>>10922241>Why am I hearing that the big bang theory is being "debunked"? Because people are stupid and largely dont know what the Big Bang speaks of. The useage of the word 'debunked' is a good indicator that what you're reading is very poor quality information, as it is a tabloid term.
>Or what I also hear is that it's unclear whether there's a beginning to the universe (the two being somewhat related).This is the major problem, they aren't. The BBT tries to explain the evolution of the Universe from whatever state it was in to how it is today. It would be semantically correct to say it describes the beginning of the Universe AS WE KNOW IT, but it would be incorrect to say it describes the ORIGIN of whatever the Universe is or was.
> Can anyone help clarify my confusion?The BB theory starts with a primordial singularity with 1 Planck volume at 1 Planck second, which contains all the mass-energy in our Universe. This is a preexisting structure which we have no current way of probing because all known physical models can not be used beyond the limits of the Planck units. We need a quantum gravity theory to get a little extra information on gravitational singularities.
However, what we usually understand as time begins at the Planck epoch, and speaking of things that 'came before it' seems unusual, which is why we usually say 'time started with the Big Bang'. But time isn't a magical global function that showers the world and changes things irreversibly. That's only a macroscopic observation and fails to include the actual irreversible component, entropy.
Time is an existing dimension no different from space in substance but different in relation to the other dimensions. It's like a spatial dimension weirdly scaled by c. The primordial singularity may just be our perceived appearance of the edge of the Universe on the timelike axis. The 'passage of time' is much more complex since it describes all particles moving through this axis.
