Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d have to say time is the exception. Matter, space, and energy are physical, while time is perceptual.
… may I just note that I find it amusing over there in that Great Debates forum how many people who seem to be “science-worshippers” who debunk religion at every turn have no difficulty throwing around terms like “nothing” and “infinite,” terms that, to me, are just as mind-blowingly incomprehensible and mystical as a Holy Trinity.
What is the medium in which our universe exists? For something to expand, doesn’t it have to be expanding into something? A vacuum? Have some things (i.e., the matter that formed into our universe) always been? How is that possible? Doesn’t everything have a creative origin of some kind?
Yes, at the moment of the Big Bang everything in our Universe was concentrated in a single point. That includes all “space” as well, so that why it said that the Big Bang happened “everywhere” and there is no “Center of the Universe”. If the Big Bang didn’t happen “everywhere” then we wouldn’t see the uniform cosmic background radiation in the way that we have measured it. This is pretty standard Big Bang theory, nothing new really.
With the exception perhaps of the inside of a black hole the Universe is the ultimate closed system. There is no way to observe or perceive what is “outside” the Universe from our position inside it. The Multiverse idea that our Universe is but one of a multitude of other universes (with different laws of physics) is a pretty interesting thought but I really don’t think that there will ever be a way that we will be able to scientifically test its existence.
A couple of things:
Thanks mrblue92 for the elaboration. There is just one thing that bothers me. You refer an outside observer with a stopwatch. Time is defined only within the universe and even within the universe, two observers may not agree on duration. In your second paragraph I would replace “If you were an outside observer to that universe” with “If you and your stopwatch were somehow transported to that time”.
Milossarian, I resent the term “science-worshippers”. I don’t worship science. Science and logic provide plausible answers to many of the fundamental questions I have. “For something to expand, doesn’t it have to be expanding into something? A vacuum?” No. Since the universe is all that there is (and a vacuum is part of the universe), there is nothing to expand into. “Doesn’t everything have a creative origin of some kind?” I would say no. But, for the sake of argument, let us suppose that everything must have a creative origin. Let us name the creative origin of the universe G. Then, by supposition, G must have a creative origin, meta-G. Where did meta-G come from? Meta-meta-G, and so on. By supposition, the sequence cannot end. Where does the sequence, G, meta-G, meta-meta-G,… come from? Your supposition leads to infinite regress within infinite regress. It is simpler and more elegant to suppose that the universe just is. Any speculation as to a cause is not science but rather religion. And we wouldn’t want to confuse science with religion, would we?
I’ve gone through very similar territory before with a friend of mine. The problem with placing the observer inside a frozen universe is it becomes confusing what the limitations of an “observer” are. I suddenly picture in my mind a guy in a spaceship with a stopwatch–and therefore the frozen universe is interrupted because the guy can move inside the universe, run laps inside his ship, and measure his lap times.
While I realize frames of reference apply to time, and we know there is no such thing as “absolute time” within a universe, I can imagine an observer standing outside the fishbowl of a particular universe and recording an absolute time from a external, multiverse perspective. This kind of thought experiment attempts to avoid the problem of an observer disturbing what he is trying to measure, ala the Uncertainty Principle.
In the same way that I refuse to readily presume the full nature of the universe can be extrapolated from our very limited perspective, I also must refuse to presume the laws of physics outside our universe must necessarily coincide exactly with the laws inside it.
Alas, my general physics background is strong, but my cosmology background is weak. I’ve not really done a detailed objective analysis of the theory. Suppose I’ll have to do some reading on my own.