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Perhaps there is no beginning (1 Viewer)
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bostonfred
Footballguy
It's meaningless to say that time always existed. It's like saying, I wonder if there's any width and height over there. It doesn't make sense. "Always" is a concept that needs time to exist for it to be meaningful. One way I imagine time is like a photocopy machine. You put a piece of paper on the glass, put the lid down, and then that light goes from side to side and copies the whole piece of paper. Why doesn't it copy the whole thing all at once? Because the photocopier isn't built to input a whole document like that. It views it one line at a time, and moves as it reads the document from one side to the other. Similarly, you aren't built to input the entirety of your life all at once. You view one line at a time, so to speak - one instant in time - and like the photocopier, you shine your light on each line of the document and move on. But just because the photocopier reads the document one line at a time, doesn't mean that the page exists in a single dimension. When the photocopier isn't viewing the document, it exists as a two (and actually three) dimensional page. The limitations of the photocopier don't define the shape of the page. Similarly, as we move in time, we can only see the universe as it exists right now, or as it existed in some point in history. But the measurement of time is no different than the measurement of height or width. There's no concept of underneath the lowest point of height, or beyond the widest point of wide, or before time.
Paper Lions
Footballguy
Fred, are these canned posts you've stashed away on your hard drive waiting for this thread? Or are you writing these as you go?
Apologies if these questions are meaningless.
Apologies if these questions are meaningless.
bostonfred
Footballguy
Writing as I go. Why?
Paper Lions
Footballguy
I think you and this thread are a match made in heaven. No, wait.
Paper Lions
Footballguy
While it didn't use the same analogy, this is more or less what I think the book I mentioned earlier was saying. My small brain has a hard time with it though.
bostonfred
Footballguy
Another useful reference:
Imagine a four inch line segment. If you lived in a one dimensional world, that line would be all you could know or understand. Like a train track, you could go from beginning to end of that line, but you couldn't go to the left or the right up past the beginning or the end. It's just a line. And you could determine where you were on the line as a meaningful position in space - you could say I'm one inch from the top or right in the middle or half an inch from the bottom.
Now imagine that you lived in a two dimensional world, and wanted to bend that line in on itself. You could turn it in on itself at each of the quarter points and create a one inch by one inch square. Now our imaginary train, sensing things in its one dimensional way, still sees this as a four inch line. It can go from beginning to end - except when it gets to the end, there it is back at the beginning again. We've folded it back in on itself. It's all very confusing to this imaginary one dimensional being, because it seems like the line just keeps going on forever.
If that line grew to eight inches, you could still curl it into a two inch by two inch square. As everything in that line's world is expanding, the line itself doesn't have an end point, because it wraps in on itself. But it's definitely bigger.
Now let's take that square, and five more like it, and we'll lay them down flat in the shape of a cross or a lowercase t. If you were a two dimenstional creature, moving from top to bottom, left to right on the surface of one of those squares, you'd perceive each square as having a size and a shape of its own. It might move from square to square, as well. But fold them up, and you can create a cube. That two dimensional creature sitting on the outside of that cube would perceive itself as sitting on top of a square, but as it went over the edge and onto the next square, it would be unaware of its movement in three dimensions. It would simply perceive itself as being on a different square. Yet if it kept moving from square to square, it would never actually get to the end, because beyond each edge is just another side of the cube.
Now let's take that cube, and stack it on top of another, and another, building a t shape. Except this time, instead of the arms of the t just sticking out to the left and right, the arms of this t stick out forward and backwards, as well. As a three dimensional being, we can imagine being inside one of these boxes - maybe call them rooms if it makes it easier to visualize - and going through a doorway from one room to the next. Now imagine walking from one end to the other of that huge t shaped building.
Now - and this is the part that's harder to visualize - now we wrap that building in on itself, just like you did when you bent the line into a square, or bent that t shaped pattern of six squares into a cube. Now as you walk from room to room, you come upon the next room, and the next, and suddenly you're right back at the first room on the other end of the building.
The universe exists in more dimensions than we can understand it, which makes it hard to picture the size and shape of it in a meaningful way. Talking about the edge of the universe is very much like talking about the ends of the line that we folded into a square, or the top room in that building that we folded into a four dimensional cube. It's not meaningful to describe the end of something that's wrapped in on itself like that.
Imagine a four inch line segment. If you lived in a one dimensional world, that line would be all you could know or understand. Like a train track, you could go from beginning to end of that line, but you couldn't go to the left or the right up past the beginning or the end. It's just a line. And you could determine where you were on the line as a meaningful position in space - you could say I'm one inch from the top or right in the middle or half an inch from the bottom.
Now imagine that you lived in a two dimensional world, and wanted to bend that line in on itself. You could turn it in on itself at each of the quarter points and create a one inch by one inch square. Now our imaginary train, sensing things in its one dimensional way, still sees this as a four inch line. It can go from beginning to end - except when it gets to the end, there it is back at the beginning again. We've folded it back in on itself. It's all very confusing to this imaginary one dimensional being, because it seems like the line just keeps going on forever.
If that line grew to eight inches, you could still curl it into a two inch by two inch square. As everything in that line's world is expanding, the line itself doesn't have an end point, because it wraps in on itself. But it's definitely bigger.
Now let's take that square, and five more like it, and we'll lay them down flat in the shape of a cross or a lowercase t. If you were a two dimenstional creature, moving from top to bottom, left to right on the surface of one of those squares, you'd perceive each square as having a size and a shape of its own. It might move from square to square, as well. But fold them up, and you can create a cube. That two dimensional creature sitting on the outside of that cube would perceive itself as sitting on top of a square, but as it went over the edge and onto the next square, it would be unaware of its movement in three dimensions. It would simply perceive itself as being on a different square. Yet if it kept moving from square to square, it would never actually get to the end, because beyond each edge is just another side of the cube.
Now let's take that cube, and stack it on top of another, and another, building a t shape. Except this time, instead of the arms of the t just sticking out to the left and right, the arms of this t stick out forward and backwards, as well. As a three dimensional being, we can imagine being inside one of these boxes - maybe call them rooms if it makes it easier to visualize - and going through a doorway from one room to the next. Now imagine walking from one end to the other of that huge t shaped building.
Now - and this is the part that's harder to visualize - now we wrap that building in on itself, just like you did when you bent the line into a square, or bent that t shaped pattern of six squares into a cube. Now as you walk from room to room, you come upon the next room, and the next, and suddenly you're right back at the first room on the other end of the building.
The universe exists in more dimensions than we can understand it, which makes it hard to picture the size and shape of it in a meaningful way. Talking about the edge of the universe is very much like talking about the ends of the line that we folded into a square, or the top room in that building that we folded into a four dimensional cube. It's not meaningful to describe the end of something that's wrapped in on itself like that.
Exactly.The current best guess is that the universe is about 14 billion years old. That doesn't mean that it had a beginning. We can squeeze an infinite series of events into a finite period of time just like we can produce an infinite series of positive numbers that has a finite sum.X = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... 2X = 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... 2X - X = (1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ...) - (1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ...) 2X - X = 1 + (1/2 - 1/2) + (1/4 - 1/4) + (1/8 - 1/8) + ... X = 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + ... X = 1 The universe is expanding, and as far as we know, always has been. That means that everything used to be closer together than it is now. If everything used to be closer together, it probably took less time for stuff to happen, since it didn't have to travel as far. If the intervals between physical events get smaller as we go backwards in time, an infinite mathematical series with progressively smaller numbers may in fact be a pretty good analogy for a universe with an infinite series of events separated by progressively smaller time-intervals, showing how the universe could have existed "forever" — with no beginning, and no first cause — even if its age is finite.
We got to "now" from "five minutes ago." It took five minutes.Suppose the universe is infinitely old as measured in minutes, and that each minute of its existence corresponds to an integer. We'll call the present T=0.There are an infinite number of negative integers. But we never have to count up from infinity to get to zero. Infinity is not itself an integer. Every specific integer is a finite distance away from zero. And every specific moment in the universe's history is a finite number of minutes away from the present. It works the same backward as it does forward. We don't have to be able to count to infinity to suppose that our universe has an infinite future ahead of it; and we don't have to be able to count from negative infinity to suppose that our universe had an infinite past behind it.If the universe has an infinite past, then every moment within it can point backward to an infinite past; but still, every moment within it is a finite number of minutes away from every other moment within it. Just like every mathematical integer is a finite distance away from every other integer.So we got to "now" the same way every other moment in the universe did — from prior moments that were finitely distant. Such as "five minutes ago."
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Jefferson the Caregiver
Rebel Without A Pause
Whatever happened, we have no ability to comprehend it. I'd rather not spend time thinking about it, my head starts to hurt and there is no payoff.
Harry Manback
Footballguy
If there was a beginning moment, what existed before that?If there wasn't, how can something exist forever with no origin?
I think you mean that every other effect has a cause. In any case, every other effect has a material cause. So the inductive argument doesn't point to an immaterial cause such as a god. If it's fair game to ignore what induction points to and postulate a material event with no material cause, then it's equally legitimate to ignore the induction and postulate a material event with no cause whatsoever.
MasterofOrion
Footballguy
That is a logarithmic equation and it never reaches one. It gets ever close but never does reach its ultimate goal. Getting it 1 is equivalent to getting to 0 (denominator is ~ x-1) You divide something by a very small number but once it reaches zero the equation blows up. Also we have other ways to determine the universe had a beginning. One is thermodynamics. The universe is winding down. Thorium and Uranium still have 1/2 lives. Also cosmic radiation and the theory of relativity both show the universe had a beginning.
When we say the universe is expanding, we mean that all the galaxy clusters in it are getting farther apart from one another. That doesn't require an edge. If the whole thing is infinite then of course there's no edge. (The universe isn't literally expanding in that case: its size is infinity before and infinity after any period of time. But every specific set of galaxy clusters is expanding, and "the universe is expanding" is a handy shorthand for that.) Even if the universe is finite, it doesn't need an edge as long as it curves back on itself. The customary analogy is a balloon being blown up. Every bit of rubber gets farther and farther from every other bit of rubber, but there's no edge — you could just go around and around the balloon forever. And in the curved 2-D space of the balloon's surface, it's not expanding into anything. It's just expanding. A finite expanding universe would be just like that, only in three (or more) dimensions instead of two.
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bostonfred
Footballguy
Imagine that you have one of those flip books - the ones where you flip the pages really quickly and it looks like the comic is moving. This one's kind of boring - it's a couple inches square, and there's just a single tree growing up in the world. It starts out as a seed, then you see a sapling, and leaves, and then it sheds its leaves for the winter, and grows buds in the spring, and slowly but surely it gets taller. Then eventually that tree dies and gets chopped down. Imagine that this whole process takes hundreds of pages in the flip book. During the time you were flipping the pages, you notices that the two dimensional picture of a tree got taller and taller and then died. Now cut all of the loose paper out of the flip book except for the tree. You've got a bunch of pictures stacked up on each other, like a three dimensional picture of a tree. That picture has shape - it's a couple hundred pages thick, and it's kind of rounded on the top, from where it starts as a sapling to it's maximum size as an adult tree. Looking at the newly chopped up flip book, you get a picture of the size and shape of the tree in three dimensions - height, width, and time. Remember that time is just another descriptor of the location of something in space/time, just like the position of something in height, width and length. It just so happens that we're constantly moving in time, so we have a hard time seeing it that way. But if you can picture the shape of something in four dimensions - like picturing the entire life cycle of that tree over time - you can describe the "shape" of that tree in space/time in four dimensions. Now, we don't talk about the beginning of height, do we? Is there some finite end of width or height from here? If the edge of the universe is 16 billion light years from here, then it it meaningful to talk about a distance of 17 billion light years away? 30 billion? Is there a beginning of width? If not, then why would there be a "beginning of time"? I think what you're picturing is not the beginning of time, but the shape of the universe in space/time. The universe has an age. There is a "beginning of the universe", such as it is. But that doesn't mean that there was a "beginning of time".
MasterofOrion
Footballguy
If you backwards per your equation you get all energy and mass into a singularity. Which means an every smaller point which approaches zero. I don't see how that makes sense.
Jayrok
Footballguy
That makes two of us. If you can't make any sense out of your own sentences, how are we supposed to understand what you're talking about?
Harry Manback
Footballguy
Woah. Thanks for that, I think I almost understood the majority of it.Thinking about time as a measurement is interesting, and does add a new perspective.
It is indeed, Scottsdale. And if you have been studying real estate prices in Scottsdale, you will be seeing another fundamental property of the universe.
Entropy.
Mister CIA
Footballguy
Which weighs more, the universe or music?
McBokonon
Footballguy
Tiny Dancer
Footballguy
I think there's probably a beginning, but it hasn't happened yet.
CowboysFromHell
Footballguy
It's also possible that the constants and properties of our universe are what drove the evolution of our flavor of life.
Ministry of Pain
Footballguy
There is no beginning or end to it for any of us in this period of time.
Black Box
Footballguy
The difference between an infinite past and an infinite future is that we are progressing into the infinite future. We are continually incrementing T and will continue to increment T, indefinitely. However, as you note, we'll never reach "infinity" as it is not an integer. T will just be incremented indefinitely. I don't see any logical inconsistencies with this notion.However, if the past is infinite, then the infinite past has already occurred. If we were to traverse into the past by decrementing T, indefinitely, we would never reach, well, anything. We would just keep going, decrementing T, indefinitely.But we are at T=0 which means we have progressed through time to this point. If there are, in fact, an infinite series of events that led to T=0, we could never reach T=0 as we would be mired in the past, indefinitely. Hence, a starting point is needed to start incrementing T in order to reach T=0, or any other point along T.
MasterofOrion
Footballguy
The universe is expanding. Now play the movie backwards. This brings all energy and mass back to a single point in time and space where all energy and mass exist. This is a singularity.By MT equation where each successive number is halved so you never reach your ultimate goal of a beginning. You just get there by ever smaller increments.That makes two of us. If you can't make any sense out of your own sentences, how are we supposed to understand what you're talking about?
Which raises the question. How do you get all energy and mass into a singularity besides a mathematical concept but from a physics and chemistry standpoint? Math is used as a tool to understand physics and chemistry. If it does not explain the phenomena it is no longer a useful tool.
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bostonfred
Footballguy
This proof assumes that time moves in one direction. But what if time isn't moving? What if we're the ones moving, at an apparently constant rate, on the X, Y, Z, and also the T axis? Imagine the universe as a sculpture, with physical size and shape, and the sculpture can be viewed from many angles. From my angle, inside the sculpture, I see things through my eyes in my location and at this time. When you read this, moments or days later, you will be seeing things through your eyes, at a different location, and at a different time. Our view of this sculpture differs because of our vantage point, just like my view of the statue of david might look like a face while yours might look like a bum. The size and shape of the universe is enormous - billions of light years across - but it still has a size and shape. It's not like there's a beginning of width or a beginning of height. If you were to go all the way to one "end" - which is meaningless if the universe wraps around on itself, but bear with me - and then all the way to the other, you would be able to say, this universe is 16 billion light years wide. But you wouldn't call the far, far, far left side of the universe "the beginning of width". It's just the furthest left point on THIS universe. Maybe there's another universe out there, even further out. Maybe the universe will continue to grow. The X axis can go on past the end of the biggest thing there is, even if there's no real reason for it to do so. Similarly, the universe is about 14 billion light years old. And if you were able to deliberately travel in time, you might be able to go back to a time before the universe existed, and a time after now, and look at it from the outside. On one end of the sculpture of the universe, you would see a big bang, and before that, you'd probably see nothing. Closer to here, you'd see the universe as it looks today. And if you kept moving to the far end of the universe on the other side, you'd be able to see the end of the universe, if it has one, and whatever is on the other side, if there is anything. So if it's possible to move in time, then when you looked at the universe, you'd see its shape in space and time, and you'd theoretically be able to continue going an infinite direction to the left, up, forward, and before, because they're all just dimensions on which we'd measure your location in space/time.
Black Box
Footballguy
Well, until we figure out how to move about in time the same way we move about in dimensional space, I'll stick with my own thoughts on this one
P.S. From an observer's vantage point outside of the universe, this might be a good way to envision the universe. But I'll note that your 3rd paragraph dangerously toys with conceding a "beginning", IMHO.P.P.S. Perhaps the "beginning of width"/"beginning of height" would be at the Big Bang, similar to time? There wasn't any width or height at the singularity, AFAIK.
P.P.P.S. I'm still trying to decide if you actually believe your ramblings in this thread, or if you're just throwing stuff out there to see what sticks
It seems to me that you have to accept that the universe has always existed, in some form.
But, time is a dimension where you can measure past, current and future.
Perhaps it is as simple as the universe exists in a constant loop, where if you look far enough into the future you would see the past, and vice versa. We obviously are not capable of looking that far, but I could buy the theory.
At some point, the universe will stop expanding and collapse upon itself, creating a big bang, which starts the universe expanding again...
But, time is a dimension where you can measure past, current and future.
Perhaps it is as simple as the universe exists in a constant loop, where if you look far enough into the future you would see the past, and vice versa. We obviously are not capable of looking that far, but I could buy the theory.
At some point, the universe will stop expanding and collapse upon itself, creating a big bang, which starts the universe expanding again...
bostonfred
Footballguy
Our understanding of physics and chemistry is based on observation and testing. We will never be able to observe a singularity, but we can observe things as they exist today. The rules as we know them today may look different from the rules in a singularity. We can't test that. We can test the things that we can observe, and we can make inferences to observe things in the past, all the way up to the very first moments just after the big bang. But a lot of those inferences could change as our understanding continued to improve. Math is not a tool for explaining phenomena, and math is not really up for discussion. You might disagree with some of the information we get when using math, but it's not the math's fault. It's the variables we input into the equations. If you add 2 + 2 and get 5, the problem is probably that one of those twos wasn't really a two.The universe is expanding. Now play the movie backwards. This brings all energy and mass back to a single point in time and space where all energy and mass exist. This is a singularity.By MT equation where each successive number is halved so you never reach your ultimate goal of a beginning. You just get there by ever smaller increments.That makes two of us. If you can't make any sense out of your own sentences, how are we supposed to understand what you're talking about?
Which raises the question. How do you get all energy and mass into a singularity besides a mathematical concept but from a physics and chemistry standpoint? Math is used as a tool to understand physics and chemistry. If it does not explain the phenomena it is no longer a useful tool.
Physics and chemistry are not tools, either, but there are tools we use to experiment. Physics and chemistry and the other sciences are the sum of our understanding of the world around us, and we improve our understanding all the time. There are phenomena we don't understand, but that doesn't mean that we should give up on trying to understand them. I often don't know the ending of a book when I start reading it, but I keep reading until I get to the end. That's how knowledge works - you continue to improve your understanding of things.
bostonfred
Footballguy
S: That's fine. For most practical purposes, your point was a very good one. PS: There is a difference between the beginning of the universe and the beginning of time. We might be able to measure the universe as we know it and say, for all meaningful calculations, the epoch (or the time we assign as T=0 in calculations) was 14 billion years ago. We might assign the epoch to a different time, like the birth of Christ, or the origin of Earth, or the birth of Henry Ford. But that doesn't mean that we've found the "beginning of time", because time doesn't have a beginning or an end. It's just a measurement.Well, until we figure out how to move about in time the same way we move about in dimensional space, I'll stick with my own thoughts on this oneP.S. From an observer's vantage point outside of the universe, this might be a good way to envision the universe. But I'll note that your 3rd paragraph dangerously toys with conceding a "beginning", IMHO.
P.P.S. Perhaps the "beginning of width"/"beginning of height" would be at the Big Bang, similar to time? There wasn't any width or height at the singularity, AFAIK.
P.P.P.S. I'm still trying to decide if you actually believe your ramblings in this thread, or if you're just throwing stuff out there to see what sticks
PPS: There was height and width at the singularity. It's just that the only thing worth measuring was very, very, very small.
PPPS: Yes, I do. A large part of what I've said so far in the thread is not my own "rambling", but a summary of concepts from people much smarter than me.
bostonfred
Footballguy
The expansion and collapse of the universe might not be an expansion and collapse at all. Picture Flatland (if you haven't read Flatland, look it up. Very interesting stuff and a short, quick read.) Imagine a bunch of two dimensional shapes living in a two dimensional world. There are triangles and circles and squares and squiggly blobs and dodecahedrons and every shape out there. Then one day, someone drops a can of pringles through their world. What would they see? Remember that they can only see in two dimensions... They would see a circle. For a while. While there's a full cylinder passing through the plane, they'd only be able to see the cross section that was in their plane at that moment, and they'd be totally unaware of the rest of it. Now imagine that you dropped a ball through the plane. What would they see? They'd see a dot, at first, as the initial point of contact. Then it would become a small circle, then bigger and bigger as the ball fell through the plane. Then, eventually, at the midpoint of the sphere, they would see the circle at the largest point it would ever be, before it began to contract back down to a smaller and smaller circle, and eventually a point, and then nothing. Maybe the universe is a big ball passing through time, and this moment, in this place, where I am typing this, and that moment, in that place, where you are reading it, are really just the intersection of a particular person in a particular location at a particular time. The big bang is nothing more than the initial point of contact with our plane. Maybe we're part of that ball, and we're intersecting a plane in which time captures our thoughts and voices and sights. Or maybe it's the other way around, and we're in the plane, experiencing the universe that's falling through.
Black Box
Footballguy
I knew "rambling" wasn't the best word to use there, but I went with it anyway. Didn't mean for it to come off as pejorative. Perhaps "musings"?Regardless, good stuff
joffer
Footballguy
might check this out
bostonfred
Footballguy
Thanks for bumping this. I enjoyed this thread.
Parrothead
Footballguy
We ARE the walking dead
TheIronSheik
SUPER ELITE UPPER TIER
In our universe. But there are theories out there where our universe is not the only one. Your reasoning in your post may one day be the equivalent to thinking that the sun revolved around the earth.
urbanhack
Fight The Power!
NCCommish
Footballguy
No because i was only talking about our Universe and everything I said is 100% accurate. Tyson even covered this on Cosmos in show 2 or 3 I think.
TheIronSheik
SUPER ELITE UPPER TIER
SacramentoBob
Footballguy
IC FBGCav
Footballguy
What I always wondered is why people think time is linear everything else in this world atom,planets and Stars everything else is circular. Light even bends.
Nathan R. Jessep
Footballguy
johnnycakes
Footballguy
I don't know about any of this crap. But I do not believe in divine intervention... higher power, perhaps, but not one that intervenes in mundane affairs. If you have explanations for the many atrocities that have taken place over time, please reconcile with the notion of a loving God. Otherwise, I think we're all a flash in the pan.
TheAristocrat
Footballguy
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