Time frozen before Big Bang

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What is time?

The universe spontaneously came into existence.

From where?

It came from nothing and nowhere, and time stops inside black holes. Incredible.

Well "the cause" would probably be that the entire-universe being packed together into something the size of a proton would make it suddenly explode out of nowhere. Then again something so large being condensed together into something so small sounds kinda far-fetched in the first place.

From where?

Possibly from the fact that 0 = (-1)+1, and that the sum of all energy in the universe (mass and energy being two sides of the same coin) being zero.

It only appeared out of nothing in the same sense that virtual particles appear out of nothing (always paired with virtual anti-particles).

It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise was that no such medium existed. The idea that space might be a kind of material substance is actually very ancient, going back to Greek Stoics and termed by them ether. Ether was firmly in Maxwell's mind when he invented the description of electromagnetism we use today. He imagined electric and magnetic fields to be displacements and flows of ether, and borrowed mathematics from the theory of fluids to describe them. Einstein, in contrast, utterly rejected the idea of ether and inferred from its nonexistence that the equations of electromagnetism had to be relative. But this same thought process led in the end to the very ether he had first rejected, albeit one with some special properties that ordinary elastic matter does not have.

The word "ether" has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum. In the early days of relativity the conviction that light must be waves of something ran so strong that Einstein was widely dismissed. Even when Michelson and Morley demonstrated that the earth's orbital motion through the ether could not be detected, opponents argued that the earth must be dragging an envelope of ether along with it because relativity was lunacy and could not possibly be right. The virulence of this opposition eventually had the scandalous consequence of denying relativity a Nobel Prize. (Einstein got one anyway, but for other work.) Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry.

It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with "stuff" that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.

A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, pages 120-121 (2005)

On the other hand, the universe could have come into existence from a singularity as well.

Not at all. It would amount to two quantities of opposite configuration, thus no zero, but oscillations where the sum is constant and unchangable. The most intriguing implication is an infinite universe.

That's just another way of saying "we don't know."

It came from nothing and nowhere, and time stops inside black holes. Incredible.

If the recent notion by Stephen Hawking is true (i.e. Black holes are not inherently black), time does not stop, it just goes very slowly.

If the recent notion by Stephen Hawking is true (i.e. Black holes are not inherently black), time does not stop, it just goes very slowly.