What is the crowd's opinion of The Accelerating Universe: Infinite Expansion, the Cosmological Constant, and the Beauty of the Cosmos?

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So in this example you're a god, yes? I'd say the page didn't exist until god placed the dot. And the page represents higher spatial dimensions. But I'm just teasing.

The problem is that there are a number of competing theories about the creation of the universe. Some only try to explain why the starting conditions were (that is, the universal constants; ie the strength of gravity, the mass of an electron, the strength of nuclear forces, the ratio of matter to anti-matter). Some try to bring it into higher dimensions, as I mentioned before. Some say we're part of a larger multiverse and we're inside a black hole. I also like the idea of daughter universes created by very high-energy collisions, even particle accelerator experiments.

The difficulty is that we don't know of any way yet to glean any information from 'before' the Big Bang and physics as we understand it falls apart the closer back in time we get to the initial singularity. As time approaches zero, I'd expect time dilation to approach infinity, just as temperature, size and density also approach infinity. So time as we understand it didn't exist until the universe began. If time flows forward on the X-axis of a graph, then, before the universe, time flowed on the Y-axis. Hawking called Imaginary Time. When conditions along I-time were appropriate, conventional Time began.

Another thing is that the universe isn't a ball (or a dot on a page), it's the surface of the ball expanded into three spatial dimensions. The ball gets bigger and things on the surface constantly move away from each other at the same rate. We can observe that effect. However, you can't find the center of the surface of an expanding sphere, just as you can't find a corner on a circle; all points are the center. But a sphere has a measurable surface area just as the universe has a measurable volume (well, it's an estimate since the observable universe is smaller than the total). However, you can go round and round a sphere if you go in a straight line. It has a finite volume, but no definable edge.

Point is, we don't know for sure if there is anything 'outside' the universe or if we're expanding 'into' anything. Again, I use quotes because the answer isn't easily definable. Any movement in a higher dimensional space would be expressible only by analogy to our own 3D mode of movement and time perhaps functioned only on the I-time scale, which I found very difficult to imagine as well. If there is no higher dimensional space, nothing has changed since the universe is self-contained. Or that higher dimensional space came into being along with the singularity so that there would be a 'space' to expand into.

I'd recommend reading The Accelerating Universe, by Mario Livio and A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking. Both books really changed how I thought about the origin of the universe and at least try to wrap my head around this question. They can probably explain it better than I. If anyone else has reading suggestions, I hope they'll post them.