Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (24164)	6/30/2006 1:12:17 PM
From: one_less	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

None of the information you linked to provides proof, as you claimed, about a beginning of time. The closest thing are comments by Einstein inferring that God had a kick off for the first tic. Is that what you meant by proof? The articles were interesting though so thanks for the links. In the classical sense ‘time’ is useful in recording and predicting phenomenon, but there is little or no agreement on much else. ============== “Einstein, after all, in his later years loved to talk about how much choice God had at the beginning of the universe (not a personal God but an underlying order).” aip.org ===================== www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk Plato argues in the Timaeus that the creator:- “... sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fullness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heavens, he made this image eternal but moving, according to number, while eternity itself rests upon unity; and this image we call Time. “ There is an argument, claims Aristotle, to say that time does not exist, for the past no longer exists and the future does not yet exist. Having looked at this argument, he rejects it and defines time as motion which can be enumerated. Newton began by defining time as:- “... absolute, true, mathematical time, [which] of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external. “ ”Although we are far from understanding the notion of time today, the 20th century saw a revolution in the study of time. We may not understand time, but we know that Newton's absolute time cannot provide the answer.” Einstein decided that time was the whole key to understanding the universe, see [14]. He wrote:- My solution was really for the very concept of time, that is, that time is not absolutely defined but there is an inseparable connection between time and the velocity of light. Einstein wrote:- ... there is something essential about the "now" which is outside the realm of science. In fact all relativity seems to have done is to make us realise that time is a much more difficult concept than Newton's absolute time. However it has made no contribution to answering the fundamental question "what is time?". The result for Milne's cosmology was a stationary universe with an infinite past age which, of course, acted as a precursor to the steady-state theory. It also meant that there were an infinite number of particles in the universe, a result Milne felt was untestable. Milne interpreted this as meaning there were two "realities" each following a different time scale and that any questions dealing with "reality" were scientifically illegitimate. There are ways that quantum theory time appears to contradict relativity time, and this is worrying. The idea was first put forward by Einstein, together with Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky in 1935 and it is known by the initials of its proposers as the EPR experiment. Bell's inequalities were violated and so the quantum interpretation held rather than the classical one. The implications are, however, that when one particle is tested and chooses a particular state, its partner must chose the complementary state at the same instant. This violates the basic principle of relativity that no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light. The implications for "time" are still not fully understood. Hawking has presented some ideas concerning imaginary time; see for example [7] and [4]. He writes in [7] about a model for time/size of universe as a sphere:- ... with the distance from the North Pole representing imaginary time and the size of the circle of constant distance from the North Pole representing the spatial size of the universe. The universe starts at the North Pole as a single point. As one moves south, the circles of latitude at constant distance from the North Pole get bigger, corresponding to the universe expanding with imaginary time. ... Even though the universe would have zero size at the North and South Poles, these points would not be singularities. ... The laws of science will hold at them ... The history in real time, however, will look very different... After describing the real time appearance as beginning in a singularity he then wonders which is the "real" time:- This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end in singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. so maybe what we call imaginary time is more basic, and what we call real time is just an idea we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is really like. Penrose, in [6], takes a different approach but reaches similar conclusions about our perception of time:- The temporal ordering that we 'appear' to perceive is, I am claiming, something that we impose upon our perceptions in order to make sense of them in relation to the uniform forward time-progression of an external physical reality.