From the article it sounds like this is just a normally expected thing, that time runs more slowly near a massive object, and shortly after the big bang everyth

From the article it sounds like this is just a normally expected thing, that time runs more slowly near a massive object, and shortly after the big bang everything was relatively close to a lot of other mass, so from our point of view it looks like time was slower then. I wonder... if the Big Bang started with an explosion of matter from a specific point, and the closer we get to that moment the slower time goes, then might it be correct in some sense to say that the big bang happened an infinite amount of time ago? Maybe it's a meaningless thing to say, without a suitable frame of reference from which one could observe the big bang from "outside"? Thinking about this made me wonder why the big bang didn't just immediately collapse into a black hole. One answer to that, apparently, is that the universe was too uniform. It was very dense, but with ever spec of matter (or whatever it was the early universe was made of) being pulled equally in all directions at once, there wasn't an opportunity for a black hole to form. I wonder if it's like that for time, too? If you're being pulled strongly in all directions equally, does it cancel out and cause time to run at a "normal" rate, or does time run super slow because all the gravitational forces add together? In the former case, I guess it's possible that time ran normally at the very beginning and then slowed down as the universe differentiated itself.