“Having all the mass of the universe collapsed to a point would be the mother of all black holes, nothing would ever “bang” its way out of that.”
Bingo. The physicists have to hypothesize that if they went far enough back in time, the physical laws we have deduced from observation and experiment simply cease to function, in order to try to paper over this glaring contradiction.
However, if the physical laws are not consistent over time, then we can make NO conclusions about the past state of the universe, for we have absolutely no means to determine how those laws might have functioned except through observation and experiment. Since we cannot apply those methods retroactively to determine what the laws might have been in the past, the very postulate that they use to prop up the Big Bang theory undermines it even more!
ps... I agree with you about Halton Arp, he was definitely on to something. I’m not in agreement 100% with the Electric Universe guys, but they definitely are addressing major points that the mainstream cosmologists are myopic about.
The real question I’d like to hear one of those geniuses answer is whether or not my watch would stop working if I were to go back prior to the big bang to where time didn’t exist....