The Beginning of Time

Cosmology loves origins. The Big Bang is often described as “the moment time began,” a singular point from which everything else unfolds. It is a convenient image: time has a birth, a zero, a starting line. But the metaphor is deeply misleading.

Time does not begin as a thing; it does not spring into existence like a river suddenly appearing from a mountain spring. What begins is a cut — a differentiation of potential into actual events. To speak of the beginning of time as if it were a coordinate or a pre-existing thread collapses the relational nature of temporal actuality into a static image.

Relationally, the “beginning” is a horizon of possibility brought into articulation. The past is not an inert domain waiting to be crossed; the future is not a location to arrive at. The Big Bang, understood correctly, is not the birth of time but the actualisation of a relational field of events — the first cut that instantiated a web of potential now continuously unfolding.

To reduce it to a temporal coordinate is to reintroduce a Newtonian stage under the guise of cosmology. Relational ontology refuses this illusion: there is no absolute zero of time, only the ever-renewed emergence of actuality from potential.

So the aphoristic cut is:

Time does not begin — events do.