161–170 of 299 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zoroastrianism had to concept of a universe that starts with nothing and comes to an end as far back as the 6th century BCE. But I agree, adding a concrete understanding of time really helps to cement the linear narrative.
Check out Nasadiya sukta[0] in Rigveda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta
This seems different than the concept of infinite time, where prior to the big band there was something the collapsed into a ball of energy and maybe someday our universe will collapse back again (which has lost merit since we've seen matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating .. meaning in a few trillion years, atoms may be so far apart that light can't reach anything .. the event…
>> Are we sitting in a ball on some gigantic alien's coffee table? sometimes I have the same question but quite opposite. What if there are miniscule worlds right on our coffee table.
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there is an assumption the shuttlecock is the Universe and there is nothing outside to observe the object. It's not an assumption, it's explicitly part of the model. Same with "What's south of the south pole." It ignores the stars and galaxies past Earth itself. If I say "the latex in this balloon is like the surface of the earth," I'm not so much ignoring the stars & galaxies, they're just not part of the analogy. I…
> Is your point that, for an object to be curved, there must be something for it to curve into? For example, in order for a 2D surface (like the latex in the balloon) to be curved, it necessarily must be in a 3D (or higher) space? Given the context I'm guessing you asked this rhetorically, but if not: it is not true in general that a curved n -dimensional object must be embedded in a n + k -dimensional space. Curvatu…
You can take a curved object in 3D space and project it into 2D space and it remains curved?
In the examples of Gaussian curvature here https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/about-us/departmental-art/theory/... they only appear to be curved because they're 3D (an arc-section of a sphere, a paraboloid), none of them is 2D. Are the examples just weak?
Wolfram has a curious definition:
>"A curvature such as Gaussian curvature which is detectable to the "inhabitants" of a surface and not just outside observers. An extrinsic curvature, on the other hand, is not detectable to someone who can't study the three-dimensional space surrounding the surface on which he resides." (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/IntrinsicCurvature.html) //
but it doesn't make sense to me. A cylinder has no intrinsic curvature but the curvature is discoverable by travelling in one direction only to return from the other?
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> if our universe has an external superuniverse This is also meaningless, scientifically: there is nothing you can measure which is outside the universe. Things like a holographic universe are inherently untestable. I hope we continue looking for testable things, but this speculative path rapidly leads away from science and physics and into "linguistic tricks to confuse humans". It's not even philosophy at that point…
There are still ways we can reason about it. If we come up with a model of a super-universe and then find that model says that universes like ours are more likely to exist, then it can be evidence for the super-universe. We could possibly use the model of the super-universe to make predictions about our own universe.
That's not evidence FOR the superverse, just like we can inherently not rule out the idea of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon deceiving our every perception.
At best, this is untestable philosophy that's fun to debate over drinks. At worst, it's a tedious discussion about the semantics of existence and time.
Don't get me wrong! We could discover interesting things about our universe looking for holes, but there's no indication this problem is tractable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because if we have not beginning, we have no purpose. If we have no purpose, this is all really for nothing. I am not arguing whether it is or not, or whether there is a beginning, but lets look at it this way... You woke up this morning, that was the beginning of this day at night you will rest. Now, lets say there is no memory or record of 'waking up' beginning, we therefor cannot anticipate an end and everything w…
Countered the downvote because I’m interested in this line of reasoning. Could you expand on that? Why do you think having no memory of “waking up” to existence makes it less meaningful? I'm reminded of the following quote by Alan Watts from The Way of Zen : To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams; w…
This seems different than the concept of infinite time, where prior to the big band there was something the collapsed into a ball of energy and maybe someday our universe will collapse back again (which has lost merit since we've seen matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating .. meaning in a few trillion years, atoms may be so far apart that light can't reach anything .. the event…
>> Are we sitting in a ball on some gigantic alien's coffee table? sometimes I have the same question but quite opposite. What if there are miniscule worlds right on our coffee table.
Pure nothingness has no potential for creation. The laws of physics don't invent themselves, so it would seem that true "nothing" never existed. I'm not talking about the quantum soup of the vacuum of space, because that is something. If we take Hawking's idea that the universe smoothed out to a zero point where there was no time and nothing else, how does that point because laws of physics, gravity, etc? What proper…
The problem in your argument is the word 'become'. To 'become', something has to not be so and then later be so- with 'later' implying time on both sides. Hawking's argument is that there is no time on the other side. My interpretation is that the energy of the universe exists in time and space, evolving across the dimension of time. But it has an edge called 'the beginning'. That's the shape of the beast- a defined…
Actually, Hawking's proposal was that there is no "edge". In his proposal, the 4-D spacetime of the universe has no boundary, just as the 2-D surface of the Earth has no boundary. What we call the "beginning" of the universe is more like the South Pole of the Earth: we pick it out of all the other points because of a particular property we're interested in, but it's not an "edge" any more than any other point is. (Note that this analogy, which Hawking used, is referred to in the article.)
Just a theory, but one I've not fully proved, nor disproved.
Of course this would mean that the future created the past, and a bit of a paradox, but not entirely impossible.
Pure nothingness has no potential for creation. The laws of physics don't invent themselves, so it would seem that true "nothing" never existed. I'm not talking about the quantum soup of the vacuum of space, because that is something. If we take Hawking's idea that the universe smoothed out to a zero point where there was no time and nothing else, how does that point because laws of physics, gravity, etc? What proper…
In Hawking's proposed model, there is no "creation". The 4-D spacetime of the universe just is; it's a 4-dimensional geometric object with no boundary. See my response to mabbo downthread.