Yazata:
You're right, though, that many (perhaps most) cosmologists are not satisfied with this. This is why some speculate that there are physical laws and principles that operate beyond the bounds of the space and time that we find in an individual universe. Some suggest that our universe might, in fact, be part of a much larger "multiverse" consisting of many separate universes. Perhaps the "other" universes are like ours, or maybe they differ in various ways (e.g. in the values of certain "fundamental" constants of nature, perhaps).
This is all speculation. Even the idea that time began at the big bang is speculative, because our current theories can't say for sure what happened in the earliest epochs. Maybe time is somehow continuous, in a sense. Stephen Hawking in his Brief History of Time, suggests, for example, that "imaginary time" (where "imaginary" is used in a technical, mathematical, sense) might link consecutive instances of an oscillating universe.
Speaking personally, I do not believe that the elements of mathematics exist in some kind of ideal realm, separately from the human beings who think about them. But that's just my personal opinion. From my point of view, while mathematics is amazingly useful, the further we dig into physical reality the harder it seems to be to apply our mathematics to describing it. Things get mathematically messy very quickly as we drill down. There's not a perfect match between neat maths and neat physics. In fact, I'd say that we put certain strains on our mathematics when we use it to describe certain kinds of physical phenomena, to which it perhaps is not well suited.
Obviously, if time itself ceases to exist in any form once we rewind to the big bang, then the notion of causality also vanishes at that point. In that case, asking "What caused the big bang?" is kind of like asking "What is north of the North Pole?"But... if we believe in the 'big bang', and if we believe that the 'big bang' was the origin of the entire space-time-matter universe, such that it was the origin of time as well as matter and spatial extension, suggesting that there could have been no 'before' prior to that singular event, since that's where pastwards time just... stops, then it would seem to be implied. It also renders the whole origin event inexplicable by science, since causes and explanatory principles would seem to have been ruled out by theoretical fiat. My feeling is that kind of idea leaves many cosmologists unsatisfied (for obvious reasons).
You're right, though, that many (perhaps most) cosmologists are not satisfied with this. This is why some speculate that there are physical laws and principles that operate beyond the bounds of the space and time that we find in an individual universe. Some suggest that our universe might, in fact, be part of a much larger "multiverse" consisting of many separate universes. Perhaps the "other" universes are like ours, or maybe they differ in various ways (e.g. in the values of certain "fundamental" constants of nature, perhaps).
This is all speculation. Even the idea that time began at the big bang is speculative, because our current theories can't say for sure what happened in the earliest epochs. Maybe time is somehow continuous, in a sense. Stephen Hawking in his Brief History of Time, suggests, for example, that "imaginary time" (where "imaginary" is used in a technical, mathematical, sense) might link consecutive instances of an oscillating universe.
We don't necessarily have to dispense with physical reality. A multiverse model, for example, still has lots of physical "stuff" in it - perhaps uncountable "bubble" universes, which might pop up for a while then die off again several billion years later (sometimes much quicker, sometimes not so quick). If our own universe is just one "bubble", there's no need to invoke metaphysical Platonic forms to explain it. We only need to throw out the idea that our observed universe is in some sense special in containing space, time, matter and energy.Hence the 'something from nothing' speculations and their inevitable problems of circularity. They seem to me to typically depend on some theoretical physics style mathematical update of the eternal Platonic forms possessing ontological priority to and a 'higher' sort of reality than physical reality and the space-time-matter universe. Hence the mathematical equations (of quantum mechanics in this case) that theoretical physicists scrawl on their chalkboards can still be appealed to as explanatory principles even in the absence of physical reality and (arguably) can still serve as an explanation for the latter.
Both physicists and mathematicians differ in their personal points of view on this question. Valenkin, seen in the video in the opening post, appears to be (perhaps) a believer in eternal Platonic forms, or something like that, though it's hard to tell from what he says there. Others agree with him. On the other side of the fence, though, I think you'll find equal numbers of physicists and mathematicians who regard mathematics as a human-created descriptive tool. There remains some mystery about why mathematics applies just as well as it does to describing our physical world, because there's no a priori reason for us to assume that should be true.(Theoretical physicists often seem to me to believe that their mathematics is more real than physical reality, which in their view simply illustrates the underlying mathematics.)
Speaking personally, I do not believe that the elements of mathematics exist in some kind of ideal realm, separately from the human beings who think about them. But that's just my personal opinion. From my point of view, while mathematics is amazingly useful, the further we dig into physical reality the harder it seems to be to apply our mathematics to describing it. Things get mathematically messy very quickly as we drill down. There's not a perfect match between neat maths and neat physics. In fact, I'd say that we put certain strains on our mathematics when we use it to describe certain kinds of physical phenomena, to which it perhaps is not well suited.
Newton was a Christian, convinced that the bible held arcane secrets etc. Einstein, on the other hand, claimed to believe in "Spinoza's God", by which he seems to have meant the total impersonal collection of fundamental physical principles etc. Einstein's statements about the "mind of God" and the like can be read as talking about the principles of the natural world; "God" was just a shorthand for nature's laws, for him.I suspect that Isaac Newton would have agreed with that. Einstein is said to have spoken of physics 'reading the mind of God', though he may have meant it figuratively.