>>8091872But when you get really close to the big bang their understanding falls apart.
When you reach the electroweak scale, does the Higgs mechanism just stop working? If so there should be singularities is spacetime from when the symmetry was broken. If you think of it like a magnet going from random spins at high temperature to magnetised at low temperature, you don't necessarily have all the spins pointing in the same direction, you might have all the atoms on the left pointing up and on the right pointing down, with this domain wall between them. The same thing should happen as the universe cools and the electroweak symmetry is broken, but nobody has ever seen a cosmic string or domain wall. You then have the same problem again if there's also grand unification, and at very high energy you need quantum gravity, and we don't even know what that is in theory. The best bet is string theory, but /sci/ is well aware of the problems there.
I think the furtherest one can say we've pushed time back is something like 10^-18 seconds after the big bang, but I don't know where I got that figure from.
