show_no_mercy

Time is a product of the Big Bang in the sense that it became a concrete, measurable thing after the expansion.

Just like "3D" became meaningful term after the expansion of the Universe. If the Universe existed as a singularity at one point, then "length/width/height" had no meaning at singularity.

IanC

As I have posted in another thread, time is less of a problem than most people think.

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~lli/prof...8/creation.pdf

Im not saying this is the answer, or anything, just that it is an explanation. Also, you can be assured this is highly unlikely to be crackpottery.


Ian

Illusionist

please dont refer to him as MY God =|

Illusionist

and that looks like an interesting, though lengthy, read Ian. ill take a look at it later.

Sven

Something which apparently did not get mentioned:
The Big Bang Theory (BBT) is about the development of the universe after it "started". Is has nothing to say (and simply can not up to now) about the "beginning" itself, because the laws of physics as we know them break down at this point. We need a quantum theory of gravity to get beyond the first Planck time and to circumvent the singularity. Until now, the BBT is more like Evolution, not like Abiogenesis (speaking in biological terms).

Thesto Neroses

Why not? The story certainly doesn't belong to us.

If you are a theist (regardless of flavour) then we can refer to this postulated entity as "yours" - your figment, your ownership.

epepke

The best way to think about time is that our best models of time are all constrained by General Relativity, in which time is inextricably linked to space. So, time would not have any meaning "before" the universe; it would be almost exactly like "more north than the north pole." That's meaningless, because "north" is defined as constrained to the surface of the Earth, and all possible directions from the north pole are south. (The north pole is also a singularity, because the concepts of east and west lose their meaning at that point.) If you take north as as analogous to "backward in time," south as analogous to "forward in time," and east and west as analogous to directions in space, you get a pretty good idea of that part of the universe.

That hasn't stopped some cosmologists from positing a kind of meta-time, in which there could have been a pre-existing structure from which the universe was formed.

A god outside of time isn't an inherently ridiculous concept; it would involve the universe being embedded in another manifold in which the god resides, but there is no theory on how this could be done without some way of jumping into that manifold.

Schneibster

We are in a universe in which one of the characteristics is that there are three large spatial dimensions and one large time dimension. In this universe there are two types of "stuff," one loosely called "energy" which appears to be made up of massless particles that move through space at the speed of light and do not move through time, and the other loosely called "matter" which appears to be made up of massful particles that move through spacetime at the speed of light, most of which do most of their moving in time. As a result of being made up of such massful particles, due to our self-centric viewpoint, we perceive ourselves as stationary and time "moving past" us. Actually, what is really happening is that time is "just there" and we are moving in it, and most of the things around us are moving right along with us. When things made of massful particles move through space, they "use up" some of their movement in time to do so; we call this effect "time dilation." It is no more surprising that massful particles should do either of these things than that massless particles should move at the speed of light and not move in time, given the Lorentz transform. The really interesting question, IMO, is why do massless particles move always at the speed of light in space and why do massful particles move always at the speed of light in spacetime?

The important point for this discussion is that time does not move, any more than the other dimensions move; instead, we move in time. To speak of the "beginning of time" presupposes that time moves, and because it does not, the "beginning of time" is a non-sequitur. What we're really talking about is the expansion of time into a large dimension; whether it existed before that as a small dimension, or did not exist and was forced into being in some unknown manner, is an unresolved question that we will answer later when we have better understanding of what happened before the physics that we know became operative, that is, before things became cool enough for the EM, weak, strong, and gravity forces to differentiate. Speculation at this point is possible, because some characteristics of the universe were manifested then, but is largely footless from a formal point of view because we do not have a physics that can describe how things worked then.

HaysooChreesto!

My head just exploded.

Justin Z

Heh. Basically he's saying there's an afterglow of an explosion, and the energy remaining in the universe is a uniform, very chilly 3° Kelvin or -270° Celsius. If the universe hadn't basically exploded from a small area or single point we wouldn't be able to observe such a phenomenon permeating the entire universe.

~Justin