Your original premise was that the 'big bang' theory proves that time began with the first bang. I endorsed the validity of the theory without supporting your premise that it proves a beginning point in time.
You say you accept a beginning to space, but not a beginning to time.
I don't think you comprehend the real magestry and importance of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Bear with me for a short background. Experiments at the time seemed to show that light traveled at a constant speed regardless of the relative motion of the source and receiver. Einstein showed that light indeed had to have a constant speed or there could be cause-effect paradoxes, that is to say time travel to the past.
Here's where the magesty comes in: That's really all that Einstein started with. The speed of light is constant. The genius of Einstein is that he wrote down the implications of that idea into the already existing Newton and Maxwell equations. These equations then could be manipulated algebraicly to reveal results that were fantastic. Things like time is not constant. Things like space is curved. These were not things that Einstein just thought up, these were things that he painfully teased from the mathmatical implications of his big thought, that the speed of light was a constant.
Nobody would believe these strange outcomes except that they made definte predictions. One of these was that light passing near a large mass would appear to change direction the same way it changes direction going though a lens. Another was that clocks would run at different speeds at different altitudes. This too was confirmed. Einstein didn't start out by pondering the way clocks might run in gravity fields, he just accepted the implications of the math based on the one thing he was sure of, that light travelled at a constant speed.
Those equations of Einsten say among other things that time and space are part of the same thing, and if space has a beginning then so does time. I accept that, just as I accept that time runs at a different speed in my second story bedroom than it does in my first story kitchen. I accept it because that's where the math leads, and it has passed a lot of tests, even those that seemed counterintuitive. That is what I call proof.
The implication is that whatever the universe is like, it seems to agree with Einstein's equations, which in turn are just slight modifications of Newton and Maxwell's equations, which in their turn are refinements of Galileo's equations on motion. None are the final answer, but they aren't wrong either.
There are other implications in the theory that I don't like. With an upper limit on speed, it's unlikely that people will ever be able to zip around the galaxy like star trek. I can't wish the results away no matter how much I would like to fantasize about it.
---- For time to end material and space must return to this singular uniformity allowing for zero occupation in space.
I think you are saying here pretty much "If time ends, that implies that space must end too". That's pretty much the same if time&space are part of the same thing.
I think you are saying that space may not have had a beginning, but only that it might have got real small, then big again. (The blackhole - whitehole alternating crush and explosion?).
This seems to me more of a nit-pick over the definition of "beginning". If there is not an information path from one big crush to the next big bang then it is equivalent to a new beginning.
TP |