I’m not exactly sure how to phrase this question, Is there a beginning of time…not in the human sense as we know it…what came before time?
The Land, of course!
Next question: What’s the first thing you know?
i should of known that from my video collection…thanks
Well, scientists usually define (or at least describe) time as the way collisions between molecules are ordered, and the way in which reality progresses. So if all the matter in the universe were located at the same point, there wouldn’t be any time. No electrons making quantum leaps, no water molecules oscillating in microwaves, no nothing.
So I guess you could say, time, at least as we know it, began with the Big Bang. I don’t know diddly about what came before the Big Bang, although IIRC Hawking posited a theory in which matter and anti-matter could be created simultaneously out of nothing. So basically, there could be important stuff before the Big Bang, but it wouldn’t really be time because of the aforementioned lack of motion and occupied space.
Which doesn’t apply if you don’t believe in the Big Bang. One reason for not believing the Big Bang is, of course, Biblical literalism, in which case, time also has a beginning, i.e. the First Day. So even then the answer is yes.
Other cosmological systems probably have endless, circular views of time, but I don’t know much about them.
As far as I’m concerned, time began the second of my birth and will end immediately after my death.
Unless I graduate to heaven.
R.J.D.
If you want to explore this and other conundra of the same boggle-osity, may I recommend the God vs. Stones thread, located nearby this one? I did my best to give the answer Boris essayed above there.
The land came before time?
I forgot.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
Ghod, I hate explaining jokes!
Reference:The movie The Land Before Time.
According to the most widely accepted Big Bang cosmology, the universe began as an infinitely dense point of matter – or at least a quantum singularity of sufficient density that its gravity produced an Event Horizon.
According to general relativity, time slows down for anything subjected to gravitational field. The stronger the gravity, the greater the slowing of ones “clock”. At the edge of a black hole (on its Event Horizon), this general-relativistic time dilation would be infinite.
Thus, it took an infinite amount of time, relative to the matter contained within it, for the Universe to expand from a quantum singularity to a size big enough and rarefied enough not to have an Event Horizon. So if time DID begin when the Universe did, this happened an infinitely long time ago.
Is that to say that fifteen billion years is an infinitely long time? Or that fifteen billion years is infinitely inaccurate?
Sure, I’ll be the one to raise hell, but: I shall maintain that before time was more time. I think time was always “here” because time is relative. Sounds weird, but oh well. At first glance you may think “This guys a looney!” but I think time is relative becuse I think there has always been life somewhere. Sure, maybe it’s life in the simplest form, but life is life, and life feeds life.
Wage, it was a coherent post, and nobody is going to think you are looney for posting it. (Compare some of the great incoherencies you can find elsewhere on the boards!)
The point Boris and I and a couple of others have been making is that for “time” to have any meaning, there has to be something against which to measure it. You cannot imagine what time is like in a completely empty universe, because by the act of contemplating that universe, you invest it with one thing, i.e., your consciousness. In a completely empty universe, space and time have no meaning, because they are the four-dimensional gridwork against which matter and energy interact. With no matter or energy, there is no space or time.
Sure, you can conceptualize that a timeline runs back to the Big Bang, and then beyond. But it will have no referent in reality. It turns into the “how high is up” sort of meaningless question.
This is another one of those mysteries that are implicit in our description of the object “universe”. The center of the universe, the edge of the universe, the beginning of time, the end of time, and all the other assignments of characteristics of individual objects to the universe itself are flawed in the most basic way. They description subsumes an entire set of facts not truly applicable to the universe.
Time is a fundamental characteristic of the universe, as is space, and also an aspect of the distortions and interactions that we see in our epoch as matter and energy. The term beginning is not descriptive of the real fact of the universe, but is an artifact of our perceptive point of view. End is similar. Edges, centers, and such are characteristics of objects, and we want those descriptions to apply to the universe as a whole.
The wanting is insufficient. The mathematics which describe the inflation of a multidimensional interaction set for the events and forces which comprise our universe do not predict a “beginning” but only a limit to their interactivity in the form we now observe. We see that limit as the beginning, because we have no words for a thing that has no spatial or temporal characteristic. The universe with an indeterminate potential for space, time, energy, matter and annoying scientists is not describable in the terms we use in conversation.
In our own epoch the value of the speed of propagation of light in a vacuum is of fundamental importance. In the epoch of universal history prior to the events that created the granulation we know of as particles there was neither light, nor vacuum. In the period of time before what is called the inflationary epoch, it is difficult to even imagine how interactions could take place between anything, since there wasn’t anywhere you could call “between” for there to be an interaction. The words which describe the objects we know, down to and including even quarks are simply not useful in any real sense to discuss events prior to “Planck Time”.
The duration of events in “modern” units might lack any meaning at all in comparison to that epoch. Without time itself there can be no before or after. But that is neither here, nor there. The real answer is that there wasn’t anything before the beginning of time, including any befores. There weren’t any heres or theres either, but that’s a whole other thing. Come to think of it, there really weren’t any things, either.
Tris
Imagine my signature begins five spaces to the right of center.
oops, try this: [Planck"]http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/planck_time.html]Planck]( [url="http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/planck_time.html) Time
Tris
Imagine my signature begins five spaces to the right of center.
Try imagining I know what the heck I am doing.
Wow, Tris.
If these real 6 or 22 other dimensions exist, how is their Planck sized scale relevant to our universe? If they are part of the universe, and they are considerably smaller than it is, then they must be somewhere. Where are they?
I presume these are not ana-kata type dimensions (i.e., supernatural), so they should be detectable and measurable, shouldn’t they?
Lib:
My understanding is that string (or superstring) theory predicts the existence of these compacted dimensions but nothing at all about their “properties”. So, while it is theoretically possible to observe them (assuming instruments capable of measuring things is finely as the Planck Length), but nobody knows “where” to look.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
Thanks, Spiritus. 
I do agree with Tris’s link, that superstring theory is disappointing because it raises more questions than it answers. It’s so hard to imagine how to apply the weird numbers.
Time, that is, the development and mutation of what is, is infinite in two directions. This is philosophically self-evident. What the physicists are actually talking about is the current structure of time, speed, and the like; the physical rules which give a particular isotope a predictable half-life, keep clocks running at a constant speed, and the like.
The current laws of time, and rates in time, may have changed; may have evolved; may even have, somewhen, begun. The possibility of change, the “forward” movement of reality, is essential, however. So, possibly, there was a time before the current governors of temporal change.
I’m a member of the Monarchist political party.
OK, fine. But another theory I heard (though I don’t necessarily believe it) was that there are actually an infinite number of universes out there, and the only thing “moving” is our souls, through a number of universes that are like still-photographs. Pretty strange, huh? If anyone has any info, I’d be glad to hear more about that particular theory, and I’m sure others would as well.