This just falls completely apart when you look at the history of physics. Einstein for example is usually considered to be one of the smarter people, and even he thought it would be impossible to ever measure gravitational waves directly. He simply could not foresee the future developments of quantum mechanics, like lasers or squeezed light states. And yet here we are. Even if the author was the best physicist in the world (and if you look at her papers she certainly isn't by a long shot), you should never trust any statement like that. This is not just detrimental to science outreach (these things capture young people's imagination after all), it's also pointless to argue about them when we know that we almost certainly just lack imagination ourselves. Noone alive today can tell what will be possible in 100 years, period.

I hate this way of thinking. Einstein never thought that it's impossible to measure gravitational waves, he just couldn't imagine any way we could ever make instruments precise enough to do so.

However, measuring the state of the singularity that probably existed before inflation, or even more so, measuring anything about how that in itself came to be, is explicitly impossible given our current theories. As impossible as building a space ship that travels faster than light, or measuring the precise position and velocity of a particle.

These are not technological issues: finding a way to do them would mean a completely new paradigm in science. So any paper that attempts to prove these things without presenting a new paradigm is doomed to the "we will never know" bag.

You're falling into the exact argument trap you laid out yourself. Einstein had no clue what would be possible just 100 years later and just because we have no clue how to ever measure a singularity (which is actually not completely true, but let's not get into that) it would be very presumptuous of us to say that it will remain impossible another 100 years into the future. Just imagine if people kept listening to the guys who kept saying all the stuff we do today is impossible. Science is incremental steps - and we have to follow them disregarding of how worthwhile they might seem right now. Very rarely will someone come along and enable something directly that was thought impossible just recently. But over the long run, things work differently. Sure, we'll reach a lot of dead ends along the way while pursuing great things, but on the other hand we don't get anywhere at all by only listening to people who can't imagine anything.

Sure, but that's an example of measuring something that's happening now. It's not quite in the same category as measuring something that happened 13.7 billion years ago.

Well, first of all these gravitational wave-creating events happened billions of light years away and thus are already a way to view the universe billions of years ago. Going back and looking even further into the past is just an example of what seems impossible to us right now. But in the grand scheme of things, we have no clue what's possible as evidenced by the history of physics. On top of that, there are actually pathways towards understanding things like string theory or the big bang. Einstein by comparison was not disingenuous when he made that statement, since the theoretical and experimental work didn't even show a possible path to imagine the future. Of course that doesn't mean that these other things will pan out in the future (e.g. stuff like astronomically-sized colliders or mathematical bottom-up/top-down proof approaches), but saying that anything we do today definitely won't ever work out, no matter what, is either incredibly naive, misinformed or outright slanderous towards these areas of research.

I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don’t need to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having figured out what happened at the beginning of the universe because we can never know. This seems to explicitly exclude the possibility that there could ever be a discovery you might read about that would change that.

Well to quote user mensetmanusman: "Per thermodynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable beginning."

I think 'never' should be understood in this way—either there's something wrong or fundamentally incomplete about our theories, or we can not know certain things. Barring groundbreaking advancements in understanding akin to quantum physics and relativity theory, physics tells us so. Since the papers discussed do not establish such a new and testable theory but still go and discuss things current science cannot access, they cannot taken to be science. Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong or uninteresting. I don't think she excludes the possibility that a groundbreaking discovery could be made that changes that. But the papers were not written in a time that knows of such a discovery.

Ok, yeah maybe I could see that. But it’s kind of a confusing message - don’t read or take this research on this topic seriously, except in case some research on this topic comes that you should read and take seriously.

Per PBS SpaceTime, humanity has been able to recreate conditions 0.000001 seconds after Big Bang (arbitrary number), in particle accelerators. But to add an extra 0 would require the energy output of our universe.

The implication is that we simply don’t have enough energies to recreate similar circumstance in a particle accelerator and we cannot “see” past microwave background radiation. As such, as of now, there isn’t a straight path to understand the Big Bang further in any context.

A more charitable reading would be "appreciate that all such theories are necessarily humble and limited; unless the entire context of science and human understanding becomes fundamentally and dramatically transformed"

That’s a nice way to put it. I guess there aren’t a lot of views in making a video that says that, though.

She explicitly says that the scientific method is insufficient to give an answer to this question. So reading anything written by scientists won't give a conclusive answer. I think it's implicitly hinted that you might as well read something by a religious person, or a philosopher, or anyone with a random theory, as none of the theories can be proven or disproven by the scientific method, and so all of their answers will be equally (un)satisfying.

It's theoretically possible that we'll one day find some other method of finding out the truth (perhaps a god will descend from the heavens and tell us? or perhaps we manage to find a bug / exploit in the simulation?) but personally I find it unlikely.

She did make an appeal to simplicity, claiming that simpler is better, and she stated that religious origins are way more complicated so while they can't be proven wrong, if you accept the idea that simpler is better then religious explanations are unlikely to be true.

Yes, in the context of an example where the scientific method does / did work, and provides a simple explanation, namely evolution. Her argument is that in the case of the origin of the universe, the scientific method doesn't work, instead. That doesn't make the religious "method" better, but also not worse.

Honestly I find “it’s unknowable” to be a pretty satisfactory answer. Mostly because to me it points at something that seems almost obvious the more I’ve thought about it. Even if it were possible to see past the “Big Bang”, what possible reason is there to think that would be the end of the rabbit hole? As mind bending as it is to think that the trail is infinite, it’s even more mind bending to imagine that it’s not.

That reminds me of her article, very narrow. She seems to imply scientists, or at least scientific theories, implicate certain universal origins when really they're implying "to the best of our current knowledge". I think most everyone that's scientifically literate, and you'd think it'd be common knowledge among most of HN crowd, knows that scientific theories of universal origins aren't certain but here we have a whole article of the 'well awkshually' party-pooping you're talking about. She does seem pretty certain about uncertainty though which tells the tale that she's not beyond the paradox either.