I'm a perpetual noob at this topic, so might be completely wrong, but: what I vaguely got from Hawking's books is that both black holes and the before-bang univ

I'm a perpetual noob at this topic, so might be completely wrong, but: what I vaguely got from Hawking's books is that both black holes and the before-bang universe have matter in some kind of quark soup, in which our conceptions of space and time just don't exist. Since our spacetime depends on the non-soup layout of matter, the spacetime can be said to exist only with the universe after the bang (and until the crunch, if it comes). That's the age of the universe that we can reason about. Curiously, Hawking still relates the hypotheses that (very roughly) calculate some kind of time that it would take for the soup to form into the proper universe—via Hilbert's spaces of configurations. I.e. these theories somehow count possible arrangements of matter in the soup, in the absence of space, and its movements from one arrangement to another, in the absence of time. That confuses me to this day.