Ziggy Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 Hi I am new here so i hope this is not addressed on some other discussion. There is no scientific proof of God - OK But are there not many other things that Science cannot explain? Can anyone offer any understandable answers to these questions; 1 - Time - The universe cannot have a start 'date' can it? Or if it did it came after something else which does not have a start 'date'.. Can Science actually prove that there could have been 'absolute nothing' in which time itself does not exist? 2 - Space has no confines. So how can science explain something that can never end (and i mean never)? I'm not a scientist but i like science and am all for scientific proof. At the moment i think that if we ONLY think about the world in terms of scientific proof we are missing something important. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouroboros Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 1 - What is time? Isn't it just merely a measure of cause/effects of physical laws and particles? Relativity comes to mind. A watch shows time based on laws of weak/strong forces in the particles. If no particles existed, would the watch still tick? 2 - Actually space is confined. Our universe as it is of now does have an outer limit, or border. It does not go on infinitely in all directions. Space is framed by the outermost particles or photons. Space is limited but expanding. Do we know how much it can expand? No. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NorthenSun Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 1 - Time - The universe cannot have a start 'date' can it? Or if it did it came after something else which does not have a start 'date'.. Can Science actually prove that there could have been 'absolute nothing' in which time itself does not exist? 2 - Space has no confines. So how can science explain something that can never end (and i mean never)? Robert, Welcome to the forum!! As to your questions, there are lots of popular physics books in the library written by professional physicists and mathematicians. I have yet to read one of them that provides an answer to these questions, but I agree that they are still fun to read. Some of the people on this forum are pretty smart, but I don't think anyone here can answer them either. Stephen Hawkins answers the question "What was God doing before he created time?" with the answer: "He was creating a hot place to put people who ask this question." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kryten Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 You could ask the same questions about God. Where did he come from? Where is the outermost edge of his reach or influence? Trying to answer tough questions about our existence by introducing a god who brings the same questions is flawed. When you get to the answers about god-- i.e. "he always was" then why can't we use the same answers for this universe? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouroboros Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 Stephen Hawkins answers the question "What was God doing before he created time?" with the answer: "He was creating a hot place to put people who ask this question." That is funny. What's even more strange is how can a hot place be hot without time? Time and space is required for heat to exist, so heat didn't exist either before time. Yo, all science buffs, isn't that right? You could ask the same questions about God. Where did he come from? Where is the outermost edge of his reach or influence? Trying to answer tough questions about our existence by introducing a god who brings the same questions is flawed. When you get to the answers about god-- i.e. "he always was" then why can't we use the same answers for this universe? Very true. But the big question is... what is the universe? Now with the theories of dark matter or dark energy, who is there to say, or can prove that this energy is not consious of some kind or aware? (If this dark-matter/energy exists of course) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NotBlinded Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 You could ask the same questions about God. Where did he come from? Where is the outermost edge of his reach or influence? Trying to answer tough questions about our existence by introducing a god who brings the same questions is flawed. When you get to the answers about god-- i.e. "he always was" then why can't we use the same answers for this universe? Very true. But the big question is... what is the universe? Now with the theories of dark matter or dark energy, who is there to say, or can prove that this energy is not consious of some kind or aware? (If this dark-matter/energy exists of course) Indeed. I hit reply to reply to this also, but my answer wasn't nearly as well structured as yours. It was more smart-elecy, so I hit the back button. Then I read your answer. I'm glad I didn't post it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouroboros Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 Hehe... I was faster than you... nya nya nya... Next thing to think about, if there's parallel universes, what are the odds there is a planet (or whatever) in a parallel universe with beings that are pure energy, or have thoughts and powers way beyond ours? I know this is really sci-fi, but it's the scientists that opened the door to these thoughts with M-theory, brane theory and 9 or 11 dimensions etc. Our universe, and our space and time, started with big bang. Our universe and our time did not exist before. But other branes or universes maybe did exist and does exist outside our time and space... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skankboy Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 I've done some reading on this and actually had the honor of sitting in on one of Dr. Hawking's seminars. The universe is finite, but boundless. The theory is that it's much like traveling around the world. You can keep going on and on and nothing will "stop" you (no end) but the amount of space if finite. This is a bit confusing until you take into account that space/time is curved. Eventually you would come back on yourself. As for time at the beginning of the universe, this is a bit trickier. See, time as we know it couldn't have existed at the big bang. Dr. Hawking proposes "imaginary time" as a way for us to consider causation w/out "Time" as we know it. There may well have been time before the big bang, just as there is now, but because it didn't exist in between there's no way for us to access those events. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Samurai Tailor Posted January 14, 2006 Share Posted January 14, 2006 1 - Time - The universe cannot have a start 'date' can it? Yes: t=0 Or if it did it came after something else which does not have a start 'date'.. No idea. Planck time is about as far back as our current equations get us. Can Science actually prove that there could have been 'absolute nothing' in which time itself does not exist? That does not accurately describe any scientific theory that I am familiar with. 2 - Space has no confines. So how can science explain something that can never end (and i mean never)? It depends what you mean by "explain." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ziggy Posted January 14, 2006 Author Share Posted January 14, 2006 Skankboy - This is a bit confusing until you take into account that space/time is curved. Eventually you would come back on yourself. Does that mean you could travel in one direction for 100,000 Trillion years or whatever and eventually arrive back at earth at the same time you left it ! And some people claim to understand this! I can't get my head around that one but then I am a simple person working with computers To my mind time exists IF something exists. Hansolo said if particles did not exist would the watch tick ? No.. but then how can there be absolute nothing and from which comes a big bang that eventually creates all we know today? There must be something there to make the Bang happen? The classical philosophers Socrates / Aristotle etc asked this same question... How can something come from nothing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouroboros Posted January 14, 2006 Share Posted January 14, 2006 To my mind time exists IF something exists. Hansolo said if particles did not exist would the watch tick ? No.. but then how can there be absolute nothing and from which comes a big bang that eventually creates all we know today? There must be something there to make the Bang happen? The classical philosophers Socrates / Aristotle etc asked this same question... How can something come from nothing. All our thoughts and ideas are bound by how this world and this universe works. We don't know if something else beyond cause-and-effect exists. That's how we see it, because that's how we are. To say that something must have caused Big Bang, is reducing the event to our terms of understanding. And what we see as time and space came to existence at that point, so whatever was "before" did not have our time and space. For our human minds it is just as hard to understand infinity in time and space. We can't really imagine the infinite. I remember that from being a kid and it kept me awake at night, until I just accepted infinity. But then if you have borders, what is beyond? The way I visualize the Big Bang is like how a computer is turned on. The CPU clock doesn't start ticking until the power is on, and the CPU time didn't exist before it was turned on. It wasn't negative, it was constantly zero. Of course in that case I would be the cause for it to turn on. But does the computer "understand" my space and time the way I do? And another problem is if something can not come from nothing, where did that something come from? What was before Big Bang leads to the question what was before that, and before that, and before that... I think we just have to take an agnostic view of many of these things, and just realize that we don't know and we can't know and we can't understand. We can speculate and have fun with sci-fi ideas or possible religious fantasies, but we can't really know. *edit* And yet another problem, how can something create something out of nothing? We can't, we haven't, and we don't know how to do that, so why can we claim something could if we can't see it happen? We demand cause-and-effect, because that's what we understand and see, but we have not problem to go from "nothing to something" as long as "Something" is involved too. Why is that? If a super power God is required to go from "nothing to something", why can't the Big Bang be that Something? Replace the word "God" with "Big Bang", and the formula is solved just as easy. With or without religion. Side note, here's a quote from Aldous Huxley: You know the formula: m over nought equals infinity, m being any positive number? Well, why not reduce the equation to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by nought? In which case, you have m equals infinity times nought. That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity. Doesn't that demonstrate the creation of the universe by an infinite power out of nothing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spamandham Posted January 15, 2006 Share Posted January 15, 2006 1 - Time - The universe cannot have a start 'date' can it? According to currently popular theory, the universe does not have a start date, yet it is also bounded in age. To comprehend this requires that you understand that time and space are intertwined into spacetime, and that the universe is not distinct from spacetime. If you could travel backward in spacetime, you would never reach the singularity of the big bang, yet if you estimate the age of the universe from our current perspective, it is finite. This is not an actual paradox, it just seems that way, because it is not really valid to measure the age of the universe from our current perspective. e'.. Can Science actually prove that there could have been 'absolute nothing' in which time itself does not exist? Of course not, but it does raise an interesting philosophical dilema. If there wasn't anything that existed, then there wouldn't be anything to prevent everything from existing. 2 - Space has no confines. So how can science explain something that can never end (and i mean never)? The inifinte can only be represented symbolically. Reality is under no obligation to conform to our ability to comprehend it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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