If I don’t communicate these thoughts, I’ll go insane. Even having done so, I still might.
Space and Time. These philosophies are hardly novel, especially as set forth by me. But, I believe…
Space can never end, right? There must always be something beyond what may be considered as “the end.” Even nothingness is something.
Time. There was no beginning; something always had to exist before the perceived beginning, right? Again, nothing is something.
I think I’m so constrained in my thinking that it is troublesome, maddening, to contemplate something seemingly without beginning or end.
Someone please relieve the pressure. Help me to reconcile these two abstracts. Explain to me the end of space and the beginning of time, and what exists (existed) beyond and before; help me cope with endlessness and the absence of beginning, which is essentially endlessness in reverse.
How can there be no beginning and no end!? Gaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!
The way I think of it, nothing is not something. In absolute nothingness, there is no space, no time, no existence. You cannot even conceive of “nothingness”, as there is nothing to conceive. I often wonder if such a nonexistence can “exist”, because it doesn’t exist. In a way, it is comforting, because something does exist, and to my mind, you cannot have both.
Since this is MPSIMS, and not GQ, the answer would be that only the god of your choosing knows and she/he/it will reveal this knowledge to you if you pass some sort of test by living your life right. Or maybe not, because that me be the rules of some other diety.
There is one god that says he has always been there, so there is no before, but he makes no statement on how much later Jack Torrence became caretaker of the Overlook.
See, I always have thought that neither space nor time have a beginning or end. It sounds ridiculous I know, but our human brains are wired for start and end points. But what if, what if, space is infinite and time is too. Why should there be a beginning? Why should there be an end? Perhaps the universe is infinite.
But seriously, perhaps we expect all things to have a beginning and an end because that’s our perception of reality. Maybe some things have never had a beginning nor will ever end. Why isn’t this theory plausible?
This is what I believe the cosmologists and astrophysicists with all the credentials believe. I do not understand it, though. It hurts my head to try to deal with those notions.
I’m more like the OP in my limitations of thought. Just the Einsteinian notion of curved space and how that affects (or causes) gravity is beyond my understanding.
I’m one of those people still mystified by the thermos bottle.
IANA physicist, so it’s a difficult concept for me to grok, let alone explain. I saw an illustration, probably going on close to ten years ago, that showed time as a cone with its apex at the singularity that spawned the Big Bang. Time and space started at that point; and as was obvious from the illustration, there could be no time or space existing outside of the ‘cone’. Of course the illustration had the page behind it. So one could ask, ‘Where was the singularity?’ But the idea of ‘where’ is meaningless if there’s nowhere in the universe it could exist. I get the idea that people imagine a point in the universe from which the universe exploded like a bomb. But in this universe, there is no ‘there’ there.
It seems kind of pointless, if you ask me. We’re born, we reproduce, and then we die. Our progeny do the same. But in five billion years the Sun will be running out of fuel. It will swell to a red giant that will engulf the inner planets. It will blow off its shell and become a white dwarf. Eventually the white dwarf will cool. No more energy. The she;; that was blown to the universe may eventually be used to make new stars. Eventually those stars will burn out, leaving only dark cinders. In zillions of years there will be no more stars. They’ll have all been used up, and their remains recycled to nothing. And the universe will keep expanding so the cinders get farther and farther from each other. Maybe the universe will stretch so far it will pop like a soap bubble, blinking out of existence.
So all of our striving, all of our struggles and joys all come to naught.
If you think about a much shorter time, far before the Sun expands to the point where our planet is burned up, or the far far far more likely scenario of our destruction is much closer and is of our own doing… But that is a moot point in my argument, far far far closer than that even…
You’re going to die.
One way or another, you are going to die.
All of your struggles and joys will come to naught.
But you still play the game. There doesn’t have to be a point to it… No win, all lose in the end. But you still play.
But wait a minute. I have no real problem with the idea of an infinite universe… what I’m not clear on is whether there’s infinite matter in that infinite universe, and whether it’s possible for all that matter to have been contained in the Singularity.
Again, it’s probably an artifact of the human mind, conditioned to the notion of scarcity; but I have a harder time with infinite matter than with infinite time or space.
It’s been popularly likened to the question ‘what’s north of the north pole?’, the reasoning being that saying ‘since every moment after the ‘beginning’ of time has a moment before it, there must be a moment before the beginning of time’ is just like saying ‘since every point south of the north pole has a point to the north of it, the north pole must have a point to the north of it, too’, which is more easily recognizable as fallacious.
To everyone struggling with the concepts, I can only recommend the essay ‘What Happened Before the Big Bang?’ by Paul Davies – it gives a good overview of some lines of current thinking.
