Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

Curiously,Indian philosophy also propounds that the universe has neither a beginning nor an end.

> “Asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless ... It would be like asking what lies south of the South Pole.”

Isn't Polaris Australis south of the South Pole? Was Hawking imagining an Earth-shaped space that isn't embedded in a larger space?

I think it might actually be more unique for western philosophy/religion to be building a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end - a lot of other ancient cultures seemed to see things as a cycle - for instance, we see in the Mayans that they saw the world as a series of cycles. It makes sense in early traditions to not have a beginning and end - if there's no track of "progress" in a historical fashion, it would be hard to visualize any sort of long lasting change in the cycle.

A stars position can't be defined as being south of somewhere. South exists as a logical construct of our magnetic poles. Once you lose that you have no relative measure to work with. The same is possibly true of time.

This seems different than the concept of infinite time, where prior to the big band there was something the collapsed into a ball of energy and maybe someday our universe will collapse back again (which has lost merit since we've seen matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating .. meaning in a few trillion years, atoms may be so far apart that light can't reach anything .. the eventual heat death of the Universe).

In the shuttlecock example, there is an assumption the shuttlecock is the Universe and there is nothing outside to observe the object. Same with "What's south of the south pole." It ignores the stars and galaxies past Earth itself.

There is also a theory there could be many other big bangs and universes next to our own, but they are all accelerating away from each other. We can't see the one next to ours because it's expanding itself, as is ours, and all these are moving away from each other. Imagine a room of beach balls and they're all just inflating, but also moving away from each other at the rate they're inflating. In you're inside one, it's not only impossible to see another one, but because of the speed-of-light speed limits, it's impossible to travel to another one or even provide/disprove it exists.

There are a lot of questions about what, if anything, is outside the observable universe. Are we sitting in a ball on some gigantic alien's coffee table?