Quote:
Originally Posted by dcl
...when the community of particle physicists tells us that they are confident that theory has enabled them to extrapolate physical phenomena back to 10^-43 second, I'm inclined to accept their statements at least tentatively as well-founded.
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I don't believe any particle physicist has said that, certainly not confidently. 10
-43 is the Planck Time. (Actually, it's 5.39 x 10
-44.) It is supposedly a barrier beyond which measurement cannot go, even in principle.
See
Timeline of the Big Bang. Note the caveat at the beginning of the section on the very early universe:
All ideas concerning the very early universe (cosmogony) are necessarily speculative. As of today no accelerator experiments probe energies of sufficient magnitude to provide any insight into the period. All proposed scenarios differ radically, some examples being: the Hartle-Hawking initial state, string landscape, brane inflation, string gas cosmology, and the ekpyrotic universe.