On 7/20/2010 2:41 PM, Darren New wrote:
> andrel wrote:
>> I am talking about both time and space. You know, that 4 dimensional
>> thing.
>
> I think the point that Warp is making (and I agree with) is that space
> and time is only a four-dimensional thing in our current universe with
> our current physical laws. If those laws didn't hold before the big
> bang, there's no reason to believe there couldn't be space without time
> or time without space or that the speed of light has anything to do with
> anything in whatever universe was around before the big bang.
>
>> below 0K and time before the Big Bang are both completely nonsensical
>> and for exactly the same reason.
>
> So you know about the physics of the universe before the big bang,
> enough to know that there couldn't be time of any sort before the big
> bang? How about light? How about gravity? Are those incompatible with
> "before the big bang"?
>
>> Sigh, again: Big Bang theory says that the universe started with the
>> big Bang, so time did. End of story.
>
> The theory says *this* universe started with the big bang. But that
> doesn't mean there was neither time nor space before the big bang,
> right? Or has science actually changed "we can't tell what happened
> before the big bang" to "we have actual scientific evidence that there
> was no existence of anything before the big bang"?
>
In fact, this may be more correct than one might think. There is at 
least one alternative theory about "black holes", which Hawkings is the 
one suggesting, which suggests that the concept of singularity is itself 
flawed. Basically, you can't form one, you can only get increasingly 
larger, hotter, objects, which, due to their gravitation, merely "look 
like" a singularity. I.e., since you can't reflect light of them, to see 
what is there, the physics, from the outside, still looks like a 
singularity. If true, the big bang *also* isn't likely have come from 
such an event, so the closest you could get to, "time started with the 
big bang", would be the fact that, under such gravitational conditions, 
time would be passing so, apparently, slow, that it would nearly halt, 
from the view of anything outside of it.

And, in the case of the later, since we can't see past the point where 
the speed of light, and the speed of accelerating objects from this big 
bang, become equal to each other, we *literally* can never know if there 
was something there before. The pressure wave, if you will, from the big 
bang *may have* allowed anything already there to see the event, and the 
first few billion years of acceleration, but after that, they where also 
accelerating away from us too fast to see what happened after, just as 
we can't see what happened *before*.

Worst thing about this problem is that, even the fact that it took us 
until now to see that far means that things that are beyond a certain 
distance are not lost in the wash of the speed barrier, which would have 
been visible a few thousand years ago, and more lost to it from tens of 
thousands, and more from millions, etc. We can never, from our position, 
short of finding a way past the limit of the speed of light, ever *see* 
any of those things, and given long enough, assuming the sun somehow 
survived that long, or our species did, by moving around elsewhere, 
those descendants would look up and go, "Obviously all that stuff about 
constellations they once wrote is nonsense, nothing is visible past this 
single galaxy."

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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