Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang. Events before the Big Bang, are simply not defined, because theres no way one could measure what happened at them. This kind of beginning to the universe, and of time itself, is very different to the beginnings that had been considered earlier. These had to be imposed on the universe by some external agency. There is no dynamical reason why the motion of bodies in the solar system can not be extrapolated back in time, far beyond four thousand and four BC, the date for the creation of the universe, according to the book of Genesis. Thus it would require the direct intervention of God, if the universe began at that date. By contrast, the Big Bang is a beginning that is required by the dynamical laws that govern the universe. It is therefore intrinsic to the universe, and is not imposed on it from outside. - Stephen Hawking So how did everything begin? The implicit assumption in this question is that there actually was a beginning, rather than the big bang being a product of processes nobody was around to study. (Which is why only philosophy and theoretical mathematics have postulated about what happened prior and the Standard Model in physics offers no information on what it cannot empirically measure.) This presents a circular argument where the conclusion is included in the premise. This is called Begging the Question whereby the logically incoherent argument often arises in situations where people have an assumption that is very ingrained, and therefore taken in their minds as a given. The concept of an actually infinite universe is difficult to comprehend in terms of everyday things, but by all accounts, the only concrete thing that seems to be finite is energy and the matter constituted by it. The absence of information is no basis for a premise beyond the conclusion of an absence of information. The premise should be more carefully examined for clarity. Beginnings and ends are human-imposed heuristic concepts to ease communication of abstract things. Something can only be said to begin once it meets our abstract notion of what the thing needs to be in order to be the thing at all. When is a chair a chair? The chair begins its existence when we can reasonably apply the abstract concept of chairhood to an object. As far as the universe is concerned, however, that matter didnt just come into being, it just always was and always will be. Energy and the matter it constitutes are never created or destroyed, we merely change our description of their entities. Our concept of the entitys creation as a chair is not applicable to the matter itself, to do this would be a reification error whereby we mistake a concept as a real, physical, thing. It is also important to understand that time is a man-made metric to measure relative change. Without a change in the configuration of 3 or more points, it is impossible to measure change, and we cannot measure time. When the universe is in a state of singularity, composing a single point, there can be no way to impose our metric for change. Is our inability to measure something, and its progress into something we can measure, any reason to claim beginning? For there to be a moment before that lead to it, no. Without change, there can be no measurement of time, but without change, time cannot start to be measured. In analogy, if you were somehow able to continue to halve a line segment, you could do so on and on forever until you could no longer measure it. The point where it can no longer be measured is not the point at which it can no longer be divided. It can feel hard to understand that time does not exist as energy or matter do, but this has more to do with both how strongly the concept of time is tied into society and how the temporal lobes create the perception of time. It isnt covered until after second year physics because it requires a hardy foundational education for people to understand something that at first seems so contradictory to their subjective experience of reality. This lecture can help with the understanding of the construction of time: https://youtube/watch?v=I5rExaKLEoU This lecture can help with the understanding of abstraction: https://khanacademy.org/math/algebra/introduction-to-algebra/overview_hist_alg/v/abstract-ness See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_time
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:49:24 +0000
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