Physicist Ethan Siegel argues
Did time have a beginning? We not only don’t have the answer, we don’t have the prospect of observations that could tell us, and our current theories only tell us where our predictive power breaks down, not what the answer is. So we have the same three possibilities that philosophers and theologans have pondered for as long as history has been recorded: time is finite, time is infinite, or time is cyclical. The only thing we know is that if there was a singularity in the past, it didn’t have anything to do with our Hot Big Bang that every particle of matter-and-energy in our observable Universe is traceable to.
And unless we figure out a new way to gain information about what happened before the Universe observable to us existed in any meaningful sense, the answer may forever be beyond the reach of what is knowable.
But if time is infinite in the past, doesn’t that violate Hilbert’s Hotel? In which case, logic will tell us if physics doesn’t? Thoughts?
See also: What would the universe look like, if the past was infinite? and The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (cosmology).
Hilbert’s Hotel:
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