Gravitational Time Dilation (wikipedia) Quote:
Gravitational time dilation has been experimentally measured using atomic clocks on airplanes. The clocks that traveled aboard the airplanes upon return were slightly fast with respect to clocks on the ground. The effect is significant enough that the Global Positioning System needs to correct for its effect on clocks aboard artificial satellites, providing a further experimental confirmation of the effect.
Gravitational time dilation has also been confirmed by the Pound-Rebka experiment, observations of the spectra of the white dwarf Sirius B and experiments with time signals sent to and from Viking 1 mars lander.
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At singularities where density is infinite (0 volume + any mass) such as the big bang theorizes as the origin of the universe, time has no real meaning in any sense that we can grasp from our perspective.
This realization of the nature of the universe is UTTERLY non-intuitive. It is the result of looking at space/time with a desire for understanding the nature of all things. It turns out that the universe is quite different at the extremes than the life we experience. Our little chunk of space and experience on the earth is within a realm of accelerations that do not make these effects apparent.
This illustrates that the notion of "before" the beginning of the universe as nonsensical. Whatever time is and whatever space is, it has the properties expressed in the theory of general relativity as quoted here.
This observable fact about the universe makes deist arguments and first cause arguments gibberish. Causality has no meaning at a singularity nor is our language really capable of describing this notion of a singularity and the behavior of time around it. Instead we meet with the anthropocentric notion that time is persistent around all phenomena. The notion of an event that has no "before" is something that we CAN NOT GRASP.
Whatever the nature of the universe, we know that first cause is NOT something useful when trying to understand what the cosmos is about. It is a product of our anthropocentric minds on our little pale blue dot.