We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

Gödels incompleteness theorem.

In that case, we know for sure that we will never find a list of complete and consistent axioms for all mathematics. We do not need omniscience for this, it’s something we know for sure we will never learn.

I think there are more examples, I remember one of my professors mentioning off the cuff he believes P vs NP will never be proven one way or another because it’s most likely one of those problems that simply don’t have a solution. Or, maybe the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is another example. We know for sure there are limitations on the knowledge we can have.

I don’t think it’s unfair to imply a limit to our knowledge. I’m not saying the universe’s beginning necessarily falls into this category, I honestly don’t know. But there are for sure classes of problems that by their very nature cannot be known, or cannot be known with certainty.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the Big Bang. The Universe is a metric space. The "metric" part here is deliberate, specific and technical. It really means that given two points the metric can tell us what we call the "distance" between them. Abstract maths deals with spaces that do and don't have metrics.

The best explanation I've heard of the Big Bang is not that the Universe originated from a single point but rather the metric between all points in the Universe at the time of the Big Bang was 0.

There's an open question about whether the Universe is finite or infinite. I mean the actual Universe not the observable Universe. This is almost a metaphysical question since we'll probably never know.

We don't really know how gravity and space acts in such extreme environments but with black holes (that we also don't understand at the quantum level) we have plenty of examples of admittedly less extreme but still exxtreme corollaries. It is kind of mind-bending though. One description I read says that time acts like space and space acts like time within the event horizon. As in, you can see light entering the black holes behind you but that's the past and we can view the past all around us (eg distant galaxies are us viewing the past). Towards the singularity is the "future" and we can no more see that than we can see any future.

We, as sentient beings, have a difficult time comprehending things beyond our existence. What I mean is that before we were born, we didn't exist. After we die, we don't exist. We can't really comprehend that intuitively because our perception of the world is predicated on our cognizance. The past is easier. Stuff happened before we were born. But now we do exist. So at some point in the future we won't exist. How can you comprehend your own lack of existence?

I feel in some ways similar about the Universe. Our observations are predicated on concepts like "time" and "space" that at some point didn't exist. How do you reason about the lack of existence of space let alone time when everything we know is predicated on that?

Still, I too feel like the author is too pessimistic about how much more we can learn here. Assuming we aren't extinguished in the next few centuries (which is actually more difficult than it sounds at this point) we are going to be here for an inconceivably long time. Given our understanding of the Universe, that's likely to be >10^100 years. That's a long time to figure stuff out.

Roger Penrose's Cyclic Universe theory is quite intriguing to me, but unfortunately still doesn't answer the question if there was an initial created universe or an infinite amount of prior universes (aeons).

Is it something you have personally verified and found to have been the case as you established the principles in play, or is it (at the other end of the spectrum) that a science paper says such-and-such and you read a summary on HN?