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[Makbeth]

It gets wierder.  There is a possibility that time doesn't work the way we percieve it to be working.  About the only difference between past and future as far as physics is concerned is that entropy is less in the past and greater in the future.  Entropy was pretty much at zero at the big bang (all energy in one place), and at the other end, entropy is infinite (sometimes referred to as the heat death of the universe, when energy becomes so evenly distributed that the entire universe is nothing but a featureless cold sea of individual particles indistinguishable from the ones that appear and disappear all the time (but always summing to zero, can't break the first law of thermodynamics) due to random quantum fluctuations (that's another unintuitive thing about the universe but the evidence is very strong that it actually happens)). 

Anyway, it's possible that we percieve time in a before, after kind of way because that's the only way our brains can make sense of it.  If true, there is no past or future.  It's as if the universe is like a film.  Everything the actors ever do in a film is already on the tape, but you view it one frame at a time and in a specific order.  Everything that will happen or has happened in the universe is already "on the tape", but since we can't comprehend the entire thing at once, we experience it as a sort of playthrough.

But, hard to know for sure.  I figure that even if that's true, I might as well treat time in day-to-day life as I always have, since that's how we're equipped to deal with it.  Doesn't make much of a difference unless we figure out how to rewrite parts of the tape.  I don't expect that to happen, but who knows.  Kinda interesting to think about the possibility that parts of the tape (us) are rewriting other parts and that the tape could be recursively rewriting itself. 

The closest analogy I have to the nature of the universe as I understand it is that it is similar to a recorded sound, specifically the sound of an explosion or earthquake or the pluck of a guitar string, any sound that has a sudden beginning and a long drawn out fade to nothing, and the universe itself is that sound.  While the universe seems a lot more complex than a sound, remember that a sequence of binary digits contains all the data needed to describe your dwarf fortress worlds and the means to create them.  Sound is just as capable of carrying information as binary code.  I'm not saying that's what the universe is, but it's a halfway decent analogy.  Sudden beginning, long, drawn-out fade, with most of the interesting stuff happening in the early middle.

Amusingly enough, this is not far from some creation myths.  I've found that sometimes if you dig far enough into any given subject in science, you realize that the theory somewhat echoes the mystical ideas that first attempted to describe it.  Some ancient cultures believed that the magma erupted from volcanoes was a result of fire, hot air, and water merging below the earth.  Turns out that one of the major causes of mantle or crustal material melting to form magma is the addition of high-pressure water and dissolved gases to hot rock.

These are some of the reasons I find the discoveries of science to be more wondrous than the creation myths.  The data and equations reveal things that almost no one would normally imagine on their own.

I suspect my intentions in writing some of the above will be misread.  I am not saying that science shows the myths are true or that God exists.  I'm saying science can be just as poetic, often more so, and many of the myths contain a shadow of the truth.  I don't expect humans to be capable of finding all the answers as they are now, but I don't think that means the unknown can only be explained by having a God be responsible for it.  The history of science is saturated with instances of both the poorest and greatest minds giving up and attributing some mystery to God, only to have someone else come along later with a solution they hadn't thought of.  I expect that every time we find ourselves stumped, there will always be a rational answer, even if some of those answers can never be verified by experiment.  I expect there is either a final answer for everything, or a continuous chain of ever-more-slightly accurate approximations.

Even with all that, It's still possible that there could indeed be a God at work, but I am certain it would not be the God or Gods described by the religious texts and artworks that we have come up with.  I therefore believe that there is no point in tying oneself to the Christian God, Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, or any of the other thousands of Gods that we have invented.

Some say that by not choosing and worshipping a God, I am making a reservation in Hell.  My reply is this:  If one of those Gods truly does exist and wants us to worship it, and only it, on penalty of damnation, then that God is not deserving of worship.  The reason that God is not worthy of worship is that it gives no clear way to distinguish it from the others as the true God and indeed, went to great effort to make the world appear not to be created by any God at all. 

Take fossils for example.  They say fossils were created to confuse us.  That means God intentionally is trying to deceive us into eternal damnation, which makes him the most evil bastard in history.  Or, they say the fossils were created by the Devil.  So God is so powerless that he can't keep the Devil from creating the fossils or making them disappear?  The guy created the universe, according to you.  What's the Devil, or a bunch of fossils, to him?  If any of these arguments were true, God would have to be either an asshole, powerless, or a retard.  None of those options suggests that anyone should worship him.

Besides, why is belief and worship in God so important to him?  Shouldn't he care more that I'm a law-abiding citizen who tries to do good work and not introduce misery into the lives of others if I can help it?  Don't the good things I've done count?  I'm no saint, certainly, but I've done things for others when I didn't have to and there wasn't anything in it for me.  If God wants my belief so bad, all he's gotta do is let me know in some form other than books or the words of other people.  Actually, you know what?  Even books or the words of other people would work.  They just have to not be obviously full of shit of the kind similar to what I described in the above paragraph. 

If it did turn out that God irrefutably existed, you know what I'd do?  I'd believe in Him/Her/It/They/x.  So would any scientist worth the name.  Ours is the study of what is verifiable, and if God were verifiable, then God would be part of science.  However, the Gods you believers follow simply aren't verifiable.  No matter how strongly you believe, it doesn't count as evidence.  And as long as you bring flawed, unverifiable arguments or evidence to support your case, they will not be found acceptable as hypotheses or proof.  The burden is on you.  I gaurantee the person who proves God exists will get the Nobel Prize, as it would be the greatest discovery in history.  So, prove us wrong.  You'd be doing us a huge favor, because nothing moves science forward like our best ideas getting proven wrong.

That turned out... longer than I thought it would.  Thanks for your patience if you've gotten this far.  It kind of meandered.

[Micro102]

Why does there have to be a time 0? We gave time a value. Just as we did numbers. 1,2,3. But that doesn't end. It goes on forever. The universe simply always existed.

It's nice that you have your own point of view on the matter of cosmogenesis, but the currently accepted theories do not allow for the separately existing time frame.
See, that guy Einstein thought up his General Relativity theory, which among other things require the time to form a 4-dimensional space-time with the three spatial dimensions. The time is tied to the space, and neither can exist separatedly.
It's a weird concept, true, but the theory seems so far quite good at making predictions, and no experimental evidence exist so far that would disprove it, so it's only sensible to assume that all of it's assumptions about the stuff of the Universe are at least not terribly far off the target.

For your view to gain weight, you'd have to disprove the GR, or form a brand new theory, involving separate temporal and spatial frames, which would be at least as good at predicting "stuff" as the old man Einstein's one.

I don't see how my theory conflicts with GR. Space and time both always existed.

And you really can't say that a baseless theory is wrong by using another baseless theory.

[Astramancer]

I think you're making the classic mistake:  Scientific Theory does NOT equal theory.

A Scientific Theory can be used to predict the future.  And when it's predictions are wrong, you're supposed to come up with a new Scientific Theory to account for those bad predictions.  It's a refinement process.  No scientific theory's are baseless.  The very definition precludes that.  A Scientific Theory is a way of laying down a chain of thought (usually in math) that allows one to predict the sorts of things you've already observed.  And, if you're really smart, you can predict the sorts of things you haven't observed using what you have observed.

Regular old theory is "I bet this is why that happened" or "it could be happening because of this" and then you go test it.  In science, this is called a Hypothesis.

Fun fact:  The Theory of Gravity says that if I jump (at less than escape velocity), I'll come back down, and my path will follow a very predictable pattern, based on the downward acceleration caused by earth's gravity, my initial impulse energy, my mass, wind, ect.  I can test this.  It works.  Every single time I've jumped, I've come back down.  If I had good enough instruments, I would find that I always game down in the way that would be predicted ahead of time by the theory of gravity.  In fact, this is why tanks can hit targets miles away, while moving.

And the theory of gravity is wrong.  Well, not so much wrong, as incomplete.

GR is not baseless.  It is based on wealth of observations, and has yet to be disproved.  I have no doubt it will be, and something more complete will take it's place.  In fact, that's the whole point of things like the LHC.

This is also why Creationism is NOT a Theory that should be taught as science.  It doesn't predict anything, so it's not a scientific theory and has no place there.

[Makbeth]

I'm pretty sure GR says space and time end at singularities.  The big bang is a singularity.  According to GR, there is no "before" the big bang. 

Any hypothesis involving something before the big bang has to be a modification or replacement of GR.

[Micro102]

Wouldn't that be a flaw int he big bang theory, and not the GR theory?

[Makbeth]

No, the big bang theory only deals with the expansion of the universe.  It doesn't have anything to say about the moment of the singularity.  We don't have a theory that describes the moment of singularity because quantum mechanics and GR don't work together.  Normally that isn't a problem because quantum mechanics is only significant for very small things and GR is only significant for very big things.  However, when the whole universe is very small, you need to describe the universe in a way that fits both theories, and you can't.  That's why it's such a big problem in physics, and why either GR, quantum mechanics, or both need to be modified or replaced.

But, the universe expanded from a dense, hot point, that much we know.

It could be that GR is wrong about there being nothing on the other side of the singularity.  But wrong or right, GR is not compatible with the idea that something exists before the big bang.

[ECrownofFire]

Time didn't technically exist before the Big Bang anyway. And according to the space-time continuum, neither did space. All just one singularity. Infinitely dense. There was NOT infinite energy or matter though (I'm not sure matter could even exist at that point (ba-dum-tish)), so it wasn't infinitely hot or anything.

Also, I'm just going to leave this here.

By the way, a black hole is also a singularity.

[Starver]

No belief in God(s), as opposed to a belief in no God(s), would be agnostics.

Even though I see immediate responses around this subject, I must butt in.

It is not...

Code: [Select]

Term:  Theist   Agnostic  Atheist
          <--------+-------->
Belief    +1       0        -1

Agnosticism concerns (put far too simply, but it'll do for this quick message) whether a person thinks there's any possibility of proof for a particular faith position.

The way I view the full gamut of this subject is as follows.

Code: [Select]

                     One Who Is Certain (not necessarily 'Gnostic')
                   ^ +1 (Knowability)
         {A}       |            {B}
                   |
                   |
                 Implicit Explicit
       Theist    Atheist  Atheist
          <--------+-------->
(Belief)  +1       |0       -1
                   |
                   |
                   |
                   |
        {C}        |            {D}
                   v -1
                    Agnostic

(There's a possibility that someone could consider themselves asymmetrically agnostic, of course.  Being convinced that there's no evidence for/against God while being happy to accept without question arguments against/for God, respectively.  I try not to do that myself, but I'm betting most people still have an underlying tendency that biases them, even those who think they are neutral, and I probably don't avoid it either.)

And you can most definitely mix and match.  At point {A} is someone who is a believer who is certain of belief, {B} a global disbeliever who knows there cannot be any deity (also often known as Strong Atheist, {C} and {D} are believers/non-believers, resectively who have a strong opinion that that their convictions cannot be confirmed or derailed in any way (c.f. the old "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"... how could anyone confirm that a 'miracle' wasn't natural; and, at the same time, even the most explainable thing could have been divinely caused for the same purpose...)

Personally, I place myself at (or near) Belief=0, Knowability=-1.  I.e. an Atheistic Agnostic (or Agnostic Atheist), being Strongly Agnostic and Implicitly Atheist.

And a third axis (not shown, but in and out of the page) representing my apatheism (living one's life without concerning oneself with religious matters[1]) at close to 0.9 unconcerned, or -0.9 worried (depending on which way you scale it).  I dock myself that 0.1 of perfection because I do concern myself in trying to 'correct' other people by explaining this particular worldview, which I find superior to the single-spectrum version that puts Agnostics purely at the zero-point of faith.  (Perhaps people mean to say "Agnosticist", and rely on some correlation between the modular magnitide (positive or negative) of faith and "knowability".)


But I've explained this before.  On many other forum, and at least twice in this thread.  Maybe I should make that 0.2 docked from my apatheism quotient.


[1] After all, if you live a good life in general and there is a judgement and suitably chosen afterlife, the All Knowing Judge at the other side of the mortal veil is going to know how well you kept to the principle.  Similarly, devoutly following religious rules while not really believing in them and doing bad things in the wiggle-room that remains is probably not an endearing thing.  And if said AKJ is picky about little things like eating seafood on a particular day of the week, 99% of people are probably stuffed regardless.  And thus, among many other arguments I could apply, I reject Pascal.

[Starver]

How can something exist "before" time? That would require the concept of time to exist before time exists.
For all intents and purposes the beginning of the universe is exactly that: THE beginning. Time 0 if you will.

Another one of my oft-used (perhaps in this thread already?  I forget) analogies is relevant here.  Imagine a sphere, the surface positions defined by latitude and longitude.  Longitude is space, latitude is time.  e.g. North pole is the earliest time and South pole is the end of time[1].  You can see the trails of thing's existence traveling generally downwards.  Surface is finite in size[2], no boundary, yet it is as meaningless to consider "before the big bang" as to ask about the location of something "north of the North Pole".  And no messy infinities in any truly relevant measurement.

This static model of the universe shows all of space (unwrap the longitude into more than one dimension, if you wish) and time as a whole, and thus, from your viewpoint outside of the Universe Globe is outside of time.  So perhaps the space you're viewing this from is itself eternal (well, boundaryless, it could still wrap around, in its meta-dimensional way) and unchanging.  This bubble-surface of a universe is sitting there, compete and as it is, always has been (if you can even consider applying a sense of meta-time, it could be similarly wrap-around, so again no need to imply infinity), and there may be other bubble-surfaces dotted around in the rest of the metaverse.  Similarly static.

"How and why" is beyond me.  Yes, could be a creator who put it there.  Or it could be the result of The Ultimate Mathematical Function.  Actually, that's just the "how".  The "why" is still beyond me, and I've said before that I don't believe in "why" at such levels of existence, at least not in that loaded sense of the word.  And while it would be interesting to find out "what it's all about", I could always adapt Godel's theories towards showing how we could never fully derive the nature of our own system from within our own system, never mind the system outside it.  Although I'm probably being rather amateur in that endeavor, so wouldn't claim it as definite, merely post the idea for your own consideration.


[1] It could be an infinitely low-hanging bell-shaped, if there is no 'end' to time and we're heading towards eternal expansion, rather than Big Crunch.
[2] Although obviously non-finite if the as-above bell shape applies.  Except that you could consider that it becomes so thinned out that the integral of the 'substance' of the universe still ends up heading towards a finite limit as t->{infinity}, et al.  YMMV.

[Andir]

...charts...

Just wanted to chime in and say I think it's odd that {A} gets 2 points, and {D} gets -2 points.    Makes it feel like being an atheist is a negative thing and being a believer is positive.  <shrug>  I find it odd to place the -1 to the right and +1 to the left.  Maybe it's just me and my damn Cartesian Coordinate upbringing.

[Starver]

Anyway, it's possible that we percieve time in a before, after kind of way because that's the only way our brains can make sense of it.  If true, there is no past or future.  It's as if the universe is like a film.  Everything the actors ever do in a film is already on the tape, but you view it one frame at a time and in a specific order.  Everything that will happen or has happened in the universe is already "on the tape", but since we can't comprehend the entire thing at once, we experience it as a sort of playthrough.

Similar to my "sphere of all time" idea.  Except that I feel that "the only way our brains can make sense of it" is a bit anthropomorphic.  Our brains, like everything else in the universe, is part of the tapestry of interconnections of that entirely[1] exhibit 'past' to 'future' events.  Much as a star can only feel the shockwave of a nearby supernova 'after' its happening, it's not so much a matter of making sense of it, as that the stability of the universe relies upon happenstances that interweave doing so with the apparent bias of Time's arrow.

Which is not to say that (as theorised, though far from proven) there aren't parts of the universe with an arrow of time in reverse.  Or some strangeness of CPT symmetry meaning that consciousness that aren't us are observing the universe in the opposite direction, upon the basis of things that we would call effects are outward-going 'precursors' of the things that we would call causes...

Just like a precisely coordinated simultaneous perturbation of the water (and other energies, air-waves, as sound, etc) in a pond could pick up a stone on its bed, send it towards the surface, exactly in time for a series of closing concentric rings of ripples to impart enough energy to chuck it out of the pond (dry, thanks to exactly tuned interactions 'unsticking' the last of the water from the stone while simultaneously stilling the pond to its 'flat' state) and into the waiting hand of some being.

Of course, the likelihood of such spontaneity, by our measure, is astronomical.  Beyond that.  It is indeed entropy (or analogues, thereof) that says that air will tend towards spreading equally out into a standard room if originally only found in half of it, and not suddenly retreat to one end when previously filling it, but that raises much the same question as the stone-throwing pond does.  And with the same higher-order of answer needed to explain it.  I'm not going to assert that there's a 'natural' universal interpretation that will allow such time-reversal.  Except that obviously it must be a stable construct.  (Again, like a self-consistent 'tapestry' of cause-effect, which could be viewed as a self-consistent 'tapestry' of effect-cause if read in the opposite direction.  At which point, one isn't even talking about time as flowing, merely all of history/future 'being', so away go all the problems.  Well, those problems.  You still have the 'being' one, of course. )


[1] Or, if proper Self-Consistent Time Loops are possibly, by some quirk of the topology of the bubble's surface, mostly.

[Starver]

...charts...

Just wanted to chime in and say I think it's odd that {A} gets 2 points, and {D} gets -2 points.    Makes it feel like being an atheist is a negative thing and being a believer is positive.  <shrug>  I find it odd to place the -1 to the right and +1 to the left.  Maybe it's just me and my damn Cartesian Coordinate upbringing.

You don't add them together.  If you want, you can take the root of the sum of the squares (just like finding the absolute magnitude of a complex number, where 1+i is as far from the centre-ground as -1-i, 1-i and -1+i).  I said with the apetheism measure that I'm either well into the positive of the apetheism-positive scale, or well into the negative of the 'actitheism' scale.  If you renamed the faith measure 'rationality' (or something less loaded, but describing such 'anti' faith) then {B} and {C} get 2 and -2 points respectively.  Ditto the scale with Agnosticism as -1 on that axis might be considered +1 for some form of logic-over-certainty scale (again, apologies for the apparent loading of terms also logic/rationality seem too similar for what are supposed to be independent variables), certainty thus becoming the -1.

In other words, I don't know of many occasions where you add the independant axes of a cartesian coordinate system together like that, and this certainly isn't one of them.  I wouldn't ever suggest that this value has any meaning in this particular example.  Although you've also made me wonder about whether there's a polar-coordinate equivalent to those cartesian directions.  Angle representing some aspect of fait0 degrees heading towards a certainty there is a provable answer, but not sure which it is; 90 degrees[1] casual strong atheism without considering the proof question; 180 degrees being certainty that there is no proof, and fence sitting (like I do); 270 degrees being blind faith without considering the proof question; before sweeping back to 360/0 degrees again); and radius being some sort of devotion or application of oneself to that ideal.  But is that any more useful, as a description of "faith-space"?  I suppose it depends if it takes more effort to be both explicitly atheist and agnostic about the concept of proof than merely one or the other, in which case the rradial measure means something.  But that's arguable, both ways, and I'm sure there are more obvious 'dead spots' in the graph, much as there are in the Political Compass for Left/Right-wing and Libtertarian/Authoritarian ideals.


[1] Assume you're not a Radians devotee.

[Andir]

It simply wouldn't make sense in polar coordinates... well, maybe.  They are good for directions and vectors, but not well suited for relational stuff.  I suppose you could relate the 0 heading to the "normal" and derive from that, but in that scale being someone who wanted to steer people from their belief would seem like it was trying to stop momentum of the norm by being off to the 180 (or pi in radian )  side of things.  This is with your "apetheism" on the 0/180 plane, and atheism/theism and belief/knowing angles would be 90 degree trajectories from that... but it still runs into the whole image of some people trying to "stop the ship" (per se) instead of steering it toward their point of view.  Of course, that coordinate system could be different for everyone, where 0°,0°,0° is your viewpoint and each angle off that is the pull of someone else... but that's a whole other plate of discussion.

Adding was simply me being goofy, and I understand your description on why you chose those values, but it's still odd to me to have the (+) to the left.  Call it being picky and dorky.  Heck, nitpicking over a graphical representation of belief is about as dorky as it gets.

[Makbeth]

Anyway, it's possible that we percieve time in a before, after kind of way because that's the only way our brains can make sense of it.  If true, there is no past or future.  It's as if the universe is like a film.  Everything the actors ever do in a film is already on the tape, but you view it one frame at a time and in a specific order.  Everything that will happen or has happened in the universe is already "on the tape", but since we can't comprehend the entire thing at once, we experience it as a sort of playthrough.

Similar to my "sphere of all time" idea.  Except that I feel that "the only way our brains can make sense of it" is a bit anthropomorphic.  Our brains, like everything else in the universe, is part of the tapestry of interconnections of that entirely[1] exhibit 'past' to 'future' events.  Much as a star can only feel the shockwave of a nearby supernova 'after' its happening, it's not so much a matter of making sense of it, as that the stability of the universe relies upon happenstances that interweave doing so with the apparent bias of Time's arrow.

Which is not to say that (as theorised, though far from proven) there aren't parts of the universe with an arrow of time in reverse.  Or some strangeness of CPT symmetry meaning that consciousness that aren't us are observing the universe in the opposite direction, upon the basis of things that we would call effects are outward-going 'precursors' of the things that we would call causes...

Just like a precisely coordinated simultaneous perturbation of the water (and other energies, air-waves, as sound, etc) in a pond could pick up a stone on its bed, send it towards the surface, exactly in time for a series of closing concentric rings of ripples to impart enough energy to chuck it out of the pond (dry, thanks to exactly tuned interactions 'unsticking' the last of the water from the stone while simultaneously stilling the pond to its 'flat' state) and into the waiting hand of some being.

Of course, the likelihood of such spontaneity, by our measure, is astronomical.  Beyond that.  It is indeed entropy (or analogues, thereof) that says that air will tend towards spreading equally out into a standard room if originally only found in half of it, and not suddenly retreat to one end when previously filling it, but that raises much the same question as the stone-throwing pond does.  And with the same higher-order of answer needed to explain it.  I'm not going to assert that there's a 'natural' universal interpretation that will allow such time-reversal.  Except that obviously it must be a stable construct.  (Again, like a self-consistent 'tapestry' of cause-effect, which could be viewed as a self-consistent 'tapestry' of effect-cause if read in the opposite direction.  At which point, one isn't even talking about time as flowing, merely all of history/future 'being', so away go all the problems.  Well, those problems.  You still have the 'being' one, of course. )


[1] Or, if proper Self-Consistent Time Loops are possibly, by some quirk of the topology of the bubble's surface, mostly.

I'm not sure I understand you correctly.  Are you saying that time's arrow points the way it does because that's the direction entropy increases in, and not because of the way we perceive it?  Yes, I agree, and it's a point I would have made if my post hadn't already gone on too long.  I like the stone-throwing pond example.

But my post (at least that part of it) was mostly concerned with how we perceive time, and how our perception of time misleads us into thinking of the future as something that hasn't happened yet.

[Andir]

But my post (at least that part of it) was mostly concerned with how we perceive time, and how our perception of time misleads us into thinking of the future as something that hasn't happened yet.

Personal opinion/feeling here which can't really be tested, but I imagine the universe as a huge "Game of Life" (if you will) where things happen because of what happened previous.  This atom pushed this other atom and now it is here.  This atom lost it's cohesion and spun off to bind with this other one.  You can make a guess on which direction it will go, and you can try to manipulate that and change the future, but only if you can somehow calculate the infinite possible outcomes to said "bump."

Saying that the future has already occurred just doesn't make sense to me and it feels a bit like someone searching for a reason to believe in time travel and/or an entity that can surpass all time (ie: someone searching for God or a way to break the rules and in doing so prove that those rules were created and flawed.)  We may be able to look back through time by traveling fast enough away from Earth and looking back at it's past (with a really huge telescope), but IMHO, interacting with said images (if possible) only changes how someone further away sees that image.  I also would imagine that that image would become distorted the further away we got.

It would be like taking a picture of a group of people, putting that picture on a train and then riding a horse fast enough to catch that train and change the photo.  The people at the other end of the rail will think something else happened, but the people at the first station will not have changed because you edited the picture.

Nothing against you or the idea, but I think the time travel and "future having already taken place" rhetoric is a waste of... time.  Yes, we can apply a formula to a point in this time line and say it's Jan 3, 2038 but that doesn't mean we can manipulate that formula and change all.  We can't know what will happen until we can analyze, predict, and corroborate all the particular atomic particles in our point in space and do that enough times, faster than the particles themselves.  (Which I also think is reaching.  That would mean you found a way to make computers faster and more complex than real life.)