John Page

Was trying to understand your comment "Both kinds of relationships can be thoroughly described by noting their respective coordinates, without privileging a specific coordinate."

If there are no specific coordinates, how come you can you measure things? Maybe I don't understand what you mean by "privileging".

99Percent

Franc28: Because infinite regress is impossible, there has to be an "uncaused cause". Since there are no gods, it seems the only uncaused cause possible is the universe itself. I realize that this position seems counter-intuitive, but it's the only one that is logically sound.

I've been thinking about this statement for the last couple of days and it has been bothering me greatly. I am afraid it is counter-intuitive and not logically sound

99Percent

I used to think - why not, the universe can be infinite (and without cause), after all the universe is all. But when I read this thread I realized that the universe cannot be infinite. For a photon, which is massless, time does not exist so it travels through the whole universe before finding maybe the shortest path and hitting its sensitive non-timeless target which has mass. But in order to be able to do so the universe has to be finite, otherwise the photon would never reach its final destination!

So what gives? I am baffled, to say the least.

Francois Tremblay

I think my explanation of the impossiblity of an actual infinity was detailed and clear enough. What premise do you dispute about it ? Your post is not very helpful.

[ February 28, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>

99Percent

I understand now that the universe cannot be infinite, or else existence would dilute itself into oblivion (like the present in an infinite regress), but if the universe is in fact finite then it means there is something "outside" this universe in nothingness, which makes no sense to me.

Sorry, maybe its just my foolish mind unable to grasp the significance of existence itself, now.

Francois Tremblay

There cannot be anything "outside" the universe if the universe is defined as all there is. How do you define "universe" then ?

Also, since nothingness cannot be an existant, there cannot be "a space of nothingness". Unless you mean vacuum, which is still a potentiality (ex. vacuum fluctuations). So it really depends what you mean.

John Page

Is it possible to have a universe comprising two parts, one is causeless, the other not?

Brad Messenger

Since the issue of a uncaused cause has arisen in this thread again, I would like to refresh my first post (one of the first ones on this thread) in which I wondered why the Big Bang could not be the timeless cause of the universe, according to Bill Craig's conditions. If the universe came from it, then it is not part of the universe, and since time came into being with it, it did not occur in time.

The post was simply ignored, whether for good reason or not. Does this work or not?

Bill

In my own humble opinion, it does not work "without more." The usual "more" is an eternal soure of "space/time foam" (or some such) out of which the "Big Bang" forms itself. There are new indications (way too early to call "proof") to the effect that, even if we don't return to a "Big Crunch," the eventual entropic "heat death" (when "maximum expansion" of the universe is reached) will, in some way, either repeat the "Big Bang" or rejoin with the underlying "space/time foam" or something along those lines (the theory is still being worked on, obviously).

The most truthful answer is to say "I don't know," but logic seems to demand that, if the "Big Bang" is an event, that event must have had a frame of reference within which to occur, thereby implying that there is a larger framework above and beyond merely that which we see as a consequence of the "Big Bang." It is easy to view that larger frame of reference as supplying the necessarily eternal time scale of existence.

== Bill

Jesse

I agree with tronvillian--there's no need to imagine that time actually "moves" in some ultimate sense. Think of a long film laid out on the floor--from your perspective looking down at the whole film at once, there's no motion of any kind, just a bunch of different frames with different things happening in each one. The idea of time going on forever both backwards and forwards would be no more paradoxical than the idea of space going on forever.

Interesting article relating to this subject:

<a href="http://dhushara.tripod.com/book/quantcos/alivtime/time.htm" target="_blank">Time's Arrow</a>

And here's a really excellent general page from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on what physics implies about different philosophical views of time:

<a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-bebecome/" target="_blank">Being and Becoming in Modern Physics</a>

[ March 20, 2002: Message edited by: Jesse ]</p>