It all began 14 billion years ago...Really?

Colloquially called the “big bang”, as if it were an explosion in an existing time and space, which it was not.

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

  Cosmology now says that the entire physical universe just popped up, out of nothing about fourteen billion years ago. This is not how an objective reality should behave!

The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now.

 An objective space and time should just "be", but space contracts and time dilates in our world. 

Objective things should just inherently exist, but electrons are probability of existence smears that spread, tunnel, superpose and entangle in physically impossible ways. 

However there is a growing number of respected physicists thar our physical world is a processing output, i.e. virtual. 

Gasp, splutter, hold on this is not Hollywood.  But physicists ask that one keeps an open

mind, for the virtual reality conjecture is neither illogical, unscientific nor incompatible with physics. 

If physics describes the physical world and computing describes processing, whether physicality is a product of processing is a question that those at the cutting edge of physics now are evaluating.

 Yet a complete physical universe can’t begin, as by definition there is nothing outside it to create it and to create itself, it would have to exist before it began.

Respected scientists, who naturally felt that a universe “exploding” out of nothing was highly unlikely, until Hubble found that all the galaxies are receding from a first event that occurred billions of years ago. Finding the cosmic background afterglow still visible around us sealed the deal, but left physical realism in a quandary, as a physical universe that began was either created or created itself.

Was the universe created, as a child is from parents, something outside itself did that, so it can’t be complete.

If it created itself, it had to exist before its own creation, which is impossible. 

A complete system can’t just “begin”. Yet that the universe is both complete and also just began is oddly enough what most physicists believe today. 

In philosophy “From nothing, nothing comes” but in physics it seems that from nothing can come everything, and calling this nothing “something that fluctuates” (Atkins, 2011) doesn’t help. 

Physicists speculate that the first event was a “quantum fluctuation of the vacuum”, but that event also began our space, so if matter just popped out of space, what did space pop out of? 

A better story is needed than that nothing exploded from a dimensionless point to create everything. To the question “What was there before the big bang?” the current answer is that there was no time before the big bang, so the question is invalid, but “defining away” a question like this is a cop out. 

A universe that began must be dependent, so what it depends on is a valid question. If nothing comes from nothing, how did the entire universe come from nothing?

 Or if our time and space were created then, could they equally suddenly be stopped today? The questions are:

 1. How could the physical universe begin, with no time or space to begin in? 

2. How could space begin, with no “now” for it to start in?

 3. How could time begin, with no “there” for it to flow in?

 That the physical world created itself is impossible, and that it arose from nothing is more than impossible, it is inconceivable. Our universe can’t be a massive quantum fluctuation still adjusting because that would need a space and time that didn’t exist before the big bang. In contrast, a virtual reality needs a “big bang”, to start up not only its programs but also its space and time. Every virtual world comes from nothing, in that world, and before it began there was indeed no time or space, in that world. In this model, the “big bang” was simply when our universe booted up