John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)
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Re: John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)
#2John C. Mather is the senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Mather
Re: John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)
#3> There’s another way in which the giant firecracker idea misleads us, because even scientists often talk about the “universe springing into existence.” Well, it didn’t, as far as we can tell. The opposite is true. There is no first moment of time, just as there is no smallest positive number. In physics we have equations and laws of nature that describe how one situation changes into another, but we have no equations that show how true nothingness turns into somethingness. So, since the universe did not spring into existence, it has always existed, though perhaps not in its current form.
Or the equations are only approximations that hold under certain conditions?
Re: John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)
#4Interesting stuff, can someone recommend a good book that deals more into this subject?
Preferably a book that’s entertaining to read rather than engrossed in mathematics
Re: John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)
#5Did the Big Bang happen? --Sabine Hossenfelder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAVUvq6BE1E
Re: John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)
#6Interesting stuff, can someone recommend a good book that deals more into this subject? Preferably a book that’s entertaining to read rather than engrossed in mathematics
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli is accessible to all (no math)
Re: John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)
#7It should be called "everything, everywhere, all at once"
Re: John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)
#8Interesting stuff, can someone recommend a good book that deals more into this subject? Preferably a book that’s entertaining to read rather than engrossed in mathematics
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli is accessible to all (no math)
On a related topic, "The magic furnace" delves into the origin of the elements.
Re: John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)
#9> There’s another way in which the giant firecracker idea misleads us, because even scientists often talk about the “universe springing into existence.” Well, it didn’t, as far as we can tell. The opposite is true. There is no first moment of time, just as there is no smallest positive number. In physics we have equations and laws of nature that describe how one situation changes into another, but we have no equation…
Yeah this is kind of a laughable position in the article. I don’t mean the conclusion, which might be right, but the method. The laws of physics as we know them are just reflections of … nothing more than what we know. The fact that we have no account of what came before the big bang is not evidence of anything except that we don’t know, especially when a very plausible theory is that what came before is totally different in kind than what came after.
Being a good scientist doesn’t mean you’re a good philosopher.
Re: John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)
#10> even though there’s no first moment of time, we can still measure the age.
This seems to be a contradiction? The time that's passed since some kind of transformation, but not the age? What is the age of something that has no beginning?