Was the Gravitational Constant ever Variable?

Thinking about the other post on the speed of light, I wonder about other “constants”. Is it possible that gravity was weaker or stronger in the past? Might it just appear to be a constant now because at this moment that we look at it, over some thousands of years of human history, it doesn’t seem to have changed?At the time of the Big Bang, it took an awful lot of stored energy to push out all of the mass that we see in the universe today. Our science today tells us that nothing but Hawking radiation escapes from a black hole. These objects are so massive that not even the photon/waves of light can escape them.

But the object which exploded into the big bang (arguably something the size of an atom originally) had a trillion times that mass. So how could it “explode” and send mass outward at the speed of light?

(As an aside, surely that mass would be travelling slower than the speed of light, else it would itself have infinite mass. – Hmm, what does infinite mass mean in a universe the size of a grain of sand?)

It would have been much more “realistic” (to my tiny mind) for this to happen if there was no “gravitational constant” or “speed of light” that moment. Without gravity there wouldn’t have been the massive crunch of all of this matter to hold it back, and therefore it would have been a lot easier for that mass to repel against itself rather than be drawn inward while at the same time being spewed outward.

OK, so let’s assume the gravitational constant wasn’t so constant for a while. That would do something to the theories for how big the original mass (the Big Blob) was in the first place. I see nothing inelegant about something the size of a galaxy containing all of the mass of the universe prior to that big event. I sometimes thing scientists come up with these “universe in a grain of sand” theories to just hammer home a little more just how intense their thoughts are.

Going with the idea that all of the mass of the universe was in a big blob, could it have been that the trigger for the big bang was more like a Big Burp? Maybe the event wasn’t the bang itself. Maybe that was the effect of the real event which might have been a momentary failure of gravitational forces to support an object so massive. The blob released the mass and over some period of time gravity reset itself. The big question of course is whether that reset value which we now call a constant is sufficient to pull it all back together again.