Boy, that’s a good one! Infinity will make your hair hurt if you think about it too much. For example, there’s an infinite number of integers: 1,2,3,4,…n. But there’s also an infinate number of even numbers: 2,4,6,8…n. And odd numbers. And an infinite number of other series. Yet these infinities are contained inside the integer infinity, so they must be smaller infinities. There’s an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1: .0000…n. A smaller infinity than the others. This is bizarre.
Quantum physicists use infinity, but they don’t like it. In some equations the “Infinity Disease” rears it’s ugly head and throws out nonsensical answers. The workaround, called Renormalization, is to put in, by hand, other infinities to cancel out the ones you don’t want. This produces the desired answer, but physicists admit that they are missing something. Kinda like cheating.
If you ask a hard-boiled cosmologist what happened before the Big Bang, he will tell you that there was no “before.” Both Time and Space came into being at the moment of the Big Bang. Personally, I find this answer unsatisfactory.
So, what is the answer? Nobody knows.
Perhaps the Universe will someday collapse, and another Big Bang will occur, as it always has, and as it always will. Ad infinitum.
Of course, if that’s the way it is, it puts God out of a job.
Working with concepts like “‘before’ time began” can give you Excedrin headache #sqrt(-1).
Momotaro is right in essence. Traditionally metaphysicians have used “ontologically prior” and “…posterior” to explain cause-and-effect relationships in a non-temporal paradigm. (That sentence wins the William F. Buckley Award for Pretentious Obfuscation, but you try to rephrase it for greater clarity.)
Eternity is not identical to perpetuity. Something that “has always been and always will be” is not necessarily eternal. Eternity is the state in which all of time is viewed as equivalent, much as one gets a birds-eye view of all a county at once from a high-flying plane, or the whole planet from a satellite. It is not that God sees you reading this post with the same clarity he saw the Crucifixion and will see the year 3000 Millennium party – it’s that he sees you with the same clarity he sees the Crucifixion and the 3000 party. Think of him as the supergenius scriptwriter/director who is instantly able to adapt the plot of the movie to match the ad libs of 6,000,000,000 actors. (Assuming you accept God’s existence for the sake of argument, of course.)
In a totally “natural” world, the concept of eternity becomes a nullity; there’s no need for it. And the need for perpetuity depends on your understanding of cosmology.
I’ve always wondered if there’s any truth to the factoid, which I’ve seen several places but never in a reliable documented source, that George Cantor, the mathematician who proved that not all infinities are equal, suicided. After rereading the last few posts, I think I can understand why! :-/
If I’ve got this thread sorted out right, we seem to have some sort of consensus going that it requires the existence of matter and/or energy to have meaningful space and time. Ergo, “before the Big Bang” is as meaningful as “colder than absolute zero” – conceivable but with no meaning to the real natural world.
My post was to suggest that the idea of eternity needs to be distinguished from an infinite time track (=perpetuity), and to try to clarify that distinction.
Wally, did you ever hear the old story about the genius professor (if cartooned, usually drawn to look like Einstein) who proceeds to lecture, leaving his class behind after the first 30 seconds or so, gets about halfway through his lecture, says, “It is therefore obvious that…”, pauses, scratches his head, walks out the door, is seen sitting on the lawn, lost in thought, comes back in, says, “I was right; it *is[/is] obvious,” and proceeds on with the same arcana he had left off with.
Okay, try this analogy: to Mr. A. Square of Flatland, whom I believe we have all encountered, it is only possible to get to any point on a line by traversing the intervening points. However, the observer from the third dimension notes that the “plane” on which Mr. A. Square lives is actually a hypercrumpled surface surrounding a point which is only an infinitesimal distance from any point on the line in question. Pursuing the analogy further, the length of the line represents infinite time; the point represents eternity, to which all the points on the line are equally present.
I remember a beautiful analogy for our perception of time (I think from Borges?). If you imagine a library full of books, all of them exist at once–every part of every book all there on the shelves at the same time. To make any sense out of the information, however, we have to read just one book at a time and in a linear fashion. Nevertheless, that we must perceive the information in a linear fashion does not require that the information only exists in a linear relationship to itself.
> Is there a satisfactory scientific answer
> that explains the concept of “always?”
Yes. Read up on the unified field. You can also look into the Mayan and Aryan concepts of cyclical time as opposed to linear time.
> Is there anything that has “always”
> existed, even before the Big Bang?
There are three possibilities for the universe:
An infinitely expanding universe.
A universe that will expand, then contract and collapse.
An infinitely oscillating universe. meaning one that expands, contracts, then expands again. Thus an infinite cycle of “Horrendous Space Kablooies” (I like Calvin’s name better).
Last I read by Hawking, he favored possibility #3.
Either way, the energy for the big bang, and the matter thus created come, ultimately, from the unified field, which was not created in the big bang (at least, not according to anything that I’ve read). If I’m understanding this wrong, please correct me (as if I needed to ask).
> It boggles my mind to imagine that the
> past has no beginning, yet that’s what
> my religion teaches. Does science teach
> the same?
Read up on Quantum Mechanics. You’ll find a limitless volume of similarities between the findings of QM and the experiences and knowledge of the mystics of all flavors.
Religion and science are only at odds when one side thinks that the words used are more important than the truth they aim at and use reductionist logic to insult the other.
According to Quantum Mechanics, what we percieve exists. That which we do not perceive does not. According to our current paradigm, we see the tree because it is there for us to see.
There was a wonderful article in Discovery last year about a guy at Berkely I think, that was causing interfearence patterns with Sodium ions (that means getting them to bump into themselves) and then shining a light on them and measuring the speed they reformed into one ion. Sick thought really. If you don’t look, it can be in more than one place and more than one condition at a time, whichever one you look at, suddenly becomes the only one.
And yes, according to quantum physics, all possibilities exist simultaneously at all times and we only experience the one that we choose to perceive. If you’re worried about free will, reread that bit: it’s us that do the looking. We choose where to place our attention, thus we create the world we experience.
“The world is like a new suit of clothes; if it doesn’t fit, make alterations.”
– the old woman in Silverado
If, however, space and time are created by the existence of mass and energy, and time is directly related to entropy, then a contracting universe should experience time reversal.
Finally, re: free will, read what I said again about the difference between eternity and perpetuity. If God doesn’t have foreknowledge but just present knowledge of all times, then His knowledge no more precludes free will than my watching you tie your shoes compels you to tie them.
Polycarp, I understand from ‘A Brief History of Time’ how entropy and time relate, but I don’t understand why you say that a contracting universe would experience time backwards. Are you saying that a contracting universe would reverse entropy?
Polycarp, I hope you meant metaphysicist. Let’s please keep the doctors out of this.
As for the OP, because we have concepts of infinity doesn’t mean they exist. We attempt the explain our universe with conceptual models, but the models don’t fully fit.
As for science, you’ve only got theories.
If you really want to know, well, I guess you gotta be there.
Momotaro, I think that’s what I’m saying; this is on the edge of my conceptual capacity. But if entropy is defined as greater disorder over the progress of time, then having a universe where contracting causes greater order would imply that entropy runs backwards.
Beeruser, yep, the two terms are synonymous AFAIK. I used the “metaphysician” one to make a pun on “cure.” In other respects, you’re right – conceptual frameworks only model – are not equivalent to – reality.