There's an interesting paper up at the Philosophy of Science Archive. The paper is on classifying universes in modern cosmology. In particular it deals with the problem of "a beginning" and how to avoid the paradoxes involved with such a notion. The paper is "Time before Time" by Rudiger Vaas. The traditional problem is, of course, that General Relativity breaks down at the small scales near the big bang. When you bring in quantum relativity though you have several different approaches such as superstring theory or quantum loop theory. None of these are fully understood yet and none have any empirical testing done on them. One could well argue that they are more philosophy than science in certain ways. As Vaas points out, as do others, the problem resembles pre-Socratic philosophy in many ways. Indeed the collection of philosophical analysis of attempts at grand unified theories, Physics Meets Philosophy at the Planck Scale, includes a paper called "Pre-Socratic Quantum Gravity."
The reason I bring up the paper is because it ends up arguing that there was "a time before time or a beginning of time in time." However he cautions in his conclusion that
It seems unlikely that philosophical considerations alone can answer the question whether there was a beginning of the universe or not, and in what sense. It is also premature, however, to ignore such questions, e.g. for Kantian reasons. On the other hand, it is not to be expected that some unambiguous empirical results (e.g. from the gravitational wave background, dark matter relics, or some traces in the cosmic background radiation) will ever solve these questions. Empirical research might at least constrain cosmological theories which could and should be based on current and/or future and more advanced fundamental theories of forces, particles, space and time, e.g. M-theory or quantum geometry. It is an open question whether the dream of such a "final theory“ or "Theory of Everything“ will ultimately explain the origin of our universe (or even the whole multiverse) and address the finiteness or infinity of space and time – or even reduce space-time to something more fundamental.
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Blogged by Clark Goble