This may be GD territory, but I thouhgt I’d try here first.
Let’s say that it gets proven that the universe is expanding, and contracting, and re-banging for all of infinity. Would it be possible to see into or go to before the most recent big bang? Maybe a manipulation of space-time or something?
Uh, it’s equally accurate to see matter and energy interacting in a framework of time and space, and to see time and space as the network created by the interaction of matter and energy. So “before the Big Bang” is about as meaningful as “colder than Absolute Zero” – conceptualizable and expressible but not physically possible. A cyclical universe would also have cyclical time, where the Big Bang is the earliest possible moment of all time – for each cycle.
With all due respect to Polycarp, I see the “there wasn’t any time yet” argument as something of a copout; let the man have his hypothesis.
However, I still see it as impossible; I believe that modern theory still has the big bang starting with a singularity, and I don’t see how a singularity can preserve the information of what went before.
According to most mainstream theories of the Big Bang, “before the Big Bang” is about as meaningful as “north of the North Pole”: There just isn’t any such. Even in the cyclical models, though, the Universe still needs to go through a singularity, or something awfully close to one, at every cycle, and there’s no real hope of “seeing” past it.
In answer to Nametag’s post: if memory serves, the spacetime singularity encountered at the Big Bang is an artifact of the coordinate system used. Transforming to an appropriate coordinate system causes the singularity to disappear. It is analogous to looking at a map of the Earth and concluding that there is a “singularity” at each pole because the map has an edge there, beyond which it seems you cannot go. “There is nothing north of the north pole.” If you do a coordinate transformation (read: use a globe instead of a map) the “singularity” disappears. For a more complete (and certainly more lucid) explanation than mine, see Stephen Hawkings “A Brief History of Time.”
Since most theorists believe that there was an inflationary period shortly after the big bang which caused space to expand faster than the speed of light you wouldn’t be able to “see” anything prior to the end of the inflation period. There are other problems as well, but this one is a show stopper.
IF the universe is a “brane” consisting of three space and one time dimension embedded in a five demensional bulk and if you assume that the fifth dimension is time-like instead of space-like (which almost no one does), then the universe would bounce before a singluarity could form. That might solve that particular problem.
I was under the impression that the one time it was OK to use a cop-out in science was when talking about what came before the big bang. I forgot who said this (Einstein? Hawking?) but I do remember reading that since time and space didn’t exist as we know it, anything we may postulate about what happened before the big bang can never be more than mere speculation (therefore hypotheses are not possible, only WAGs). In other words, I could say that before the big bang, there was gumbo, and I wouldn’t be more right or wrong than anyone else.
Since “there is no before the big band” contradicts the conditions of the question, any such answer is wrong by definition.
In the most recent cyclic universe theory, described here at the Scientific American website, the OP is a meaningful question. In that proposed model, the universe before the bang is so old, it’s become essentially featureless, so no information about the previous cycle would survive to this cycle. As for going back to the previous cycle, now you’re talking time travel which isn’t possible as far as anyone knows.
You know, that’s how I feel about alot of opening acts when I go to concerts. 
Uh… hasn’t this been proven as being impossible?
And my own personal theory, “before” the big bang is just as easy to contemplate as the word “forever”… Try it, try to truly contemplate the word “forever”, define it and attempt to understand it fully. I ended up with a terrible headache and a need for sleep after trying it last time. It can’t really be done. But then again I don’t believe in time.
Uh, forever is that period of time until which the universe dies from heat death.
Duh.
Well depending on your theory of course
::sighs::
Oh well, guess we’ll just have to wait around and see!
clayton_e, as far as I know, there is no “proof” that inflation couldn’t expand space faster than the speed of light. It doesn’t violate any current theories. The speed of light is a limit for “objects” traveling through space, but has nothing to do with the speed at which space expands.
I have trouble with the phrase “to expand faster than the speed of light”. Expansion is not a velocity. The recession velocity is proportional to the distance. For any expansion rate, there is a sphere that is receding at the speed of light and anything beyond the sphere is receding faster than light. Everything inside is receding at less than the speed of light. This is true now as well as during the inflationary period. (Assuming that the universe is infinite or, if finite, sufficiently large.)
And I have trouble with people who have trouble with a phrase that all inflationary theorists use. 
What you are referring to is the particle horizon which by definition expands at the speed of light. Perhaps I should have said that during inflation the scale factor evolves at super-luminal speeds. The whole point of inflation is that a causally connected region expands to be many times larger that the horizon.
So if the horizon is expanding at the speed of light and the space-time metric is expanding faster than that, I think it is fair to say that “space” is expanding faster than the speed of light.
Which is still a problem, if you’re talking about a flat universe. In a flat universe, the absolute definition of the scale factor is arbitrary (the meaningful quantities are things like (dR/dt)/R, where the scale doesn’t matter), and in any given epoch, there is always some definition of the scale factor such that it’s increasing at faster than c.
In a nonflat universe, the scale factor can be unambiguosly defined as the inverse square root of the Ricci scalar, but that still doesn’t help you much: It’s still possible for the scale factor to grow faster than c outside of inflation.
I just don’t know what to say.
I could post hundreds of links supporting my statement. Can you post one or two that doesn’t call the inflationary expansion superluminal or faster than light?
I just want to point out that I don’t really understand what you said Chronos. Perhaps you can explain in less technical terms.
How about this? During inflation, instead of thinking of spacetime as expanding, you could view the particle horizon as shrinking. This is what I mean by superluminal. I don’t see how a particle horizon could shrink in the current universe.