Audie
Veteran Member
You said all that in the aphorism.
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Spacetime is Eternal and Omnipresent
- Thread starter idav
- Start date
Audie
Veteran Member
People who "know" what they seek find self deception.
Ben Dhyan
Veteran Member
Well Audie, I sincerely wish you all the best in your life's journey also, and you are not prone to self-deception I trust.
Audie
Veteran Member
We all are. The problem is for people who
arent aware of that or worse still mistake it for
a positive thing. " Faith", for example,
in something for which there is no evidence
then clinging to it when all evidences says you are wrong.
Audie
Veteran Member
If you yell the goog cloud it will yell you.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Kind of depends what one means by "eternal".
What I would say, is that the universe has always existed and will always exist.
"Always" is an easier term to define. It just means "for all of time".
And "for all of time", a universe existed.
Go back to any point in time. A universe existed then.
There is no point in time when the universe did not exist.
Hence, the universe always existed and will always exist.
"eternal"? That term is a bit to "mystical" for me.
Even the clouds ignore me.
I'm just not worthy of their attention.
Ben Dhyan
Veteran Member
I would draw the line at 'all are', there are degrees of proneness'. Best speak for yourself, it is fine to express your own opinion.
The subject of the faith, such as a reality represented by such concepts as Heaven, Christ, or God, etc. does exist in these cases. Not that I agree with the belief of some that there is no evidence, there is, but it is subjective not objective, and that is logical.
Pete in Panama
Active Member
What we observe is that the spacetime in which we exist has had a beginning (the big bang) and it will have an end (either cold or hot). Sure, you can insist that our space time came from another spacetime (or something) but there's no way to observe any evidence of it. It's pure unreasoned faith --and not a very useful faith at that.I don't believe that spacetime is eternal...i know it...
Pete in Panama
Active Member
...Why can't you?
Are we all together on the fact that the mass of our observable universe is finite, one estimate is 1.5x10^53kg. The only infinitely long piece of string possible in this universe would have to be an imaginary one.
No.
You commit the fallacy to believe that spacetime had a beginning.
That is obviously absurd, since there is no external time context to determine if spacetime had a beginning. For beginnings make sense only if there is a time context in which things happens. But spacetime itself is that context. So, you cannot possibly use it to determine its temporal status.
Therefore, your critique would be meaningful only if you assume a temporal context to which spacetime need to be subject to. For which there is no evidence, nor any need of postulation. My personal suggestion is to get a knowledge in general relativity and big band cosmology before making such rebuttals.
So, I will chalk that out as one of the many desperate attempts to still make a case for a God.
Which I sort of understand. Theists like to use cosmological arguments, or teleological arguments, or ontological arguments, or "whatever argument" that would still make their metaphysical world plausible.
Therefore I know why Christians, or believers in equally plausible religions, insist on that. They have no evidence whatsoever that would justify their particular brand of faith. Things like Jesus duplicating fish, or Mohammed get a hitch ride to heaven on a winged horse. For the simple reason that if they had it, they would not need those cosmological, teleological, and whatever cases to start with.
So, they fall back on philosophical arguments. Given the ridiculousness of their peculiar faith claims.
Just to lose on the general ones, too. Badly. Again.
Question is: why do they still insist on what they believe in, then? It boggles my mind that they still do.
Ciao
- viole
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Pete in Panama
Active Member
Look, you and I don't share "truth". All that you and I can share to talk about is our observations.
Assuming that we're looking at the same thing and also assuming that there are things that exist outside of ourselves, most cosmologists say that the observable universe had a beginning and it will have an end. However, if you're seeing something that contradicts what most folks see please share what you're looking at that leads you to disagree w/ most people.
That is nicely explained in the OP. And that is nothing more than a logical conclusion from relativity. Which entails that time flow, or the ideas of present, past and future, are illusions. They do not exist. And that is basically an increasingly popular ontology of time, aka B theory of time. Which I believe it is supported today by most physicists.
And that is why spacetime is necessarily eternal or, better, atemporal. Something that you consider in the past is not gone. It is still there, at a certain spacetime location with a very well defined distance from your current position. Same with what you consider belonging to your future. They are already there, so to speak. In fact, your future can easily be in the past of another observer, and it is therefore perfectly determined, de facto already actualized, in the same way you cannot change what belongs to your past.
For instance, what you did 1 minute ago, you are still doing it at that location in spacetime, which is approximately 18 million kilometers away from your current position.
And that, of course, does not contradict Big Bang cosmology at all.
ciao
- viole
Pete in Panama
Active Member
Those are a lot of interesting words that I'm afraid I can't follow. All through your post I what came to my mind were more questions than answers, like "what "OP"?, what logical conclusion from relativity?, what "B theory"?, how can spacetime be atemporal any more than it can be non-spacial?
Perhaps you're absolutely correct in that we should give our discussion a rest and close w/ "ciao". I do thank you for your time though...
The OP explains that spacetime is eternal. Actually, "atemporal" would be more correct, since "eternal" refers to an infinite extension of temporal things.
If we think about it for a second, that is sort of obvious, even if we know nothing about physics. Time duration is meaningful only for things embedded in a time context. But spacetime is the context, so it cannot possibly be subjected to any temporal change. So, looking for a beginning in time of spacetime is as meaningful as looking for its initial location.
This is difficult to imagine since our brain evolved to have a natural intuition of time flowing, for evolutionary reasons, so it is not so easy to make an analogy.
Probably, the closest is a movie, or a film. If you watch a film, you probably also believe that it has a beginning. With a lion roaring, possibly, or some titles, and such. However, another way to see the film is as a roll with thousands of photograms on a plastic support, or some other support, including electronic support as a file. And that roll, or file, did not begin, at least not in the same sense the movie began. That is the closest to B theory I can think of.
Same thing, here. The Universe is just that roll. What we experience as time passing is a psychological illusion.
Ciao
- viole