The article feels dated, like the study began long before the latest revelations about our cosmos have been announced. E.g., we believe the current universe is

The article feels dated, like the study began long before the latest revelations about our cosmos have been announced. E.g., we believe the current universe is > 23 billion years old, and that the 13.x bn year timeline is now out of date. Secondly, there is a growing agreement in the academic community that the big bang is just teleological fantasy at its best, and that there is no way to know what happened before inflation, just that inflation happened. So accurately we now know the universe is > 23bn years since inflation, and we have no idea what happened beyond that border, just that it "appears" to be expanding from a point. Its also very dated to perceive time as a 4th dimension. This is not academic, this is now common knowledge. 4th dimensional reality is the superposition of all objects in 3 dimensions, see the term "tesseract." Its the stuff of kindergartners to believe time is the 4th dimension. Also agree with the other comments that it sounds naive to measure things in "seconds" when there is nothing relative from which to measure time in the earliest states of the universe. The article basically sounds like it came from 1970s WASP academia, and is a few decades behind in the current academic perspectives of astrophysics and cosmology.