Answers to the questions the boffins dismiss as meaningless

A TV interviewer recently asked Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, ‘What existed before the universe began?’ and was snubbed. ‘That’s a meaningless question.’ Oh no, it isn’t. Hawking may be an expert mathematician and a distinguished physicist but he evidently knows little of the uses of English and the problems of philosophy. No question is meaningless if it is prompted by a genuine thirst for knowledge. Physicists expect us to believe their claim that the whole of matter came into existence at a single instant, about 14 billion years ago, in such a way that not merely something but everything was created out of nothing, thus breaking the fundamental laws of physics. Time, space and the principle of cause and effect came into being at the same magic moment. They say that deeper and deeper probes into space by telescopes will gradually take us into remote distances, and so backwards into time, until we reach the microsecond when the Big Bang occurred, thus proving that it happened.