Ilya Zakharevich wrote: > In pedantic mode: negative timestamps make sense with Big Bang as the > epoch as well. (AFAIU, the current way of thinking is that it was > "just too hot" before the big bang, it is not that "there was > nothing".)
If Stephen Hawking is right, the shape of the universe is such that there isn't any time "before" the big bang at all. It's like asking what's north of the North Pole. Of course, this may have been replaced with some other equally bizarre idea by now... Another thought: If the cosmologists ever decide if and when the Big Crunch is going to happen, we may be able to figure out once and for all how many bits we need in the timestamp. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
