Sorry it's taken a while for me to get back here.
Yes, and most things concerning modern findings in physics are in micro or macro cosmos and thus outside our experience.
In the direct way, yes. We don't normally see bacteria lying around us. But we can see them, if we have a microscope and a dye to stain them with (so they stand out against the background). A telescope enables one to see objects normally too far or not bright enough for the unaided eye. Similarly, quantum effects in physics can be "experienced" indirectly, via a lab setup.
Sometimes it can be fairly simple. Wave/particle duality can be demonstrated with Young's double-slit setup, done by college freshmen with an ordinary light bulb and the metal foils with the slits. Of course, it does involve interpretation - we see a banded pattern when both slits are open to the light, a pattern which disappears if one of the slits is blocked. But even our everyday experience requires interpretation. The difference is that our brain interprets the data from our natural sensors automatically.
So, we seem to "see" things, like a car on the street, effortlessly, but there's actually a great deal of computation and interpretation inside our head, to recognize the eye input as representing a car. We're not aware of what our brain is doing in vision; we just "see" the final results. Somehow, we take this sensory experience as "real," while assuming data that has to be interpreted explicitly - because we lack a built-in sensory organ for it - is "less real." But that is a bias in our thinking, to privilege information from our senses over other kinds of information, such as what we get from an instrument. The latter is every bit as real as the former.
Of course I admit that scientific interpretation can be wrong - it has been wrong lots of times. What shows it wrong, however, is a better interpretation made later, perhaps when better information is available. Eyes can be wrong, too. That shimmering lake on the street on a hot day is an image of the sky, a mirage.
1) Whatever of the meanings you take for the "Putative beginning of time" ...
2) Now, I do not understand how the concept of Causality cannot be applied to the universe as a whole when all parts of it have been caused to exist...
3) If you read the book "Cosmos", Carl Sagan claims loud and clear that the big bang caused the universe to begin.
1) I used the word "putative" since, as far as I know, no one was around back then, to rule out the possibility that time extends back forever, with no beginning to it. Even the Big Bang theory, which is descriptive rather than causal, doesn't go back to time t = 0. Instead, it assumes a beginning, but only goes back to a time t = 10E-43 seconds it calls the "Planck Era." 10E-43 seconds is indeed very short, but it's still finitely long and not zero.
2) As for applying causality to the universe as a whole: My best understanding is that a causal relation is always between two
events. If event A happens now, and then event B happens later, we say that A
might cause B, although B
cannot cause A. This is only a minimum condition, but it's the only one causal logic supplies. In other words, it's easier to
disprove a cause than to prove one.
When we go to the universe as a whole, we run into a problem. By definition, the universe contains all events that have ever occurred. So, if we call the universe B as above, then we have no outside event A to compare it with.
3) All I remember from 1980 was Sagan intoning, "billions and billions of years..." Maybe 1980 is too close to the Planck Era for me.
