Here's a quote from Tolstoy's "War and Peace" that aptly describes modern physicists and cosmologists, as well as the military strategist intended there:

". . . [he] was one of those theorists who love their theory so dearly they lose sight of the aim of all theory, which is to work out in practice. He was so much in love with theory that he hated all practice and didn't want to know about it. He positively rejoiced in failure, because failure was due to practical infringements of his theory, which went to show how right the theory was."

General relativistic cosmology is clearly nonsense. But too many careers (publication credits, etc.) require that the Big Bang myth continue to be perpetuated. It will turn out to be just another "Big Boat" explanation, again by the contemporary priestly caste, this time with numbers. But "don't hold your breath!" I'm sure Tolstoy must have also said someplace.

{If our brane is but a small slice of a much larger cosmos, however, the "dark matter" might be nothing but ordinary matter trapped on another brane. Dark matter is no longer some mysterious unknown, but the force at the heart of the brane-brane interaction. With the brane model the universe goes through an eternal cosmic cycle over a vast timescale of attraction, bounce with a spread out bang, springing apart, and expansion until attraction (gravity) takes over again. Such a shadow world, Hawking speculated, might contain "shadow human beings wondering about the mass that seems to be missing from their world."}
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/01/there-was-no-big-bang-worlds-leading-experts-say.html

This organised structure of energy, matter, space & time could have taken about 14 billion earth-years to reach this point.
However, if the overall cosmic structure is arranged like an operating system, then booting up the universe could have taken far less time to unfold.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(computing)#Software_bootstrapping

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Big_Bang
http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/cern/ideas/bang.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics

"Co-author with Stephen Hawking of the best-seller Brief History of Time, Leonard Mlodinow..."
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2010/09/15
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~len/books.html