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Why there must have been a beginning of time.

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Why there must have been a beginning of time.

keysersoze311
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Posted 06/14/07 - 08:44 AM: Subject: Why there must have been a beginning of time.	#1
Greetings knowledge seekers! OK, so I've studied a little bit of Philosophy at school, and have only a very basic grounding in the subject, so be nice! I've come up with an argument for why there must have been a beginning of time. Here goes. What is infinite, by definition, cannot increase. Only what is finite can increase. The total amount of elapsed time is increasing in every moment. In other words, the past is 1 day longer today than it was yesterday. Because it is increasing, the total amount of elapsed time cannot be infinite, it must be finite. Therefore, there must have been a beginning of time, a finite distance in the past. I wouldn't be surprised if other philosophers have already put forward this argument, and I wouldn't be surprised if its flaws lie in the concept of infinity, though I don't see how. On the face of it, this seems like a pretty sound argument to me. Thoughts?

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Posted 06/14/07 - 08:49 AM:	#2
The argument is circular. If the total elapsed time is infinite, then it will not be one day longer tomorrow than it is today, because infinity + 1 = infinity. DM
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keysersoze311
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Posted 06/14/07 - 08:57 AM:	#3
Is that true though? A great deal of mathematicians agree that infinity + 1 is meaningless, becuase infinity is beyond quantity. To me it seems impossible for more time to elapse, if an infinite amount has already elapsed. Yet here we are, more time elapsing with every passing moment.

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Posted 06/14/07 - 10:34 AM:	#4
There must have been a beginning of time, i.e., with the creation of the universe, because the night sky is dark. If stars, for example, have been radiating for an infinite amount of time, every line of sight would end in a star. Furthermore, the universe would be heated to their temperature. If real time did not commence with the beginning of the universe, the night sky would be as bright as the sun.
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates "The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within." - Gandhi "Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck." - Kant "It is better to do one's own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins." - Lao Tzu

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Posted 06/14/07 - 10:58 AM:	#5
Wolfman wrote: There must have been a beginning of time, i.e., with the creation of the universe, because the night sky is dark. If stars, for example, have been radiating for an infinite amount of time, every line of sight would end in a star. Furthermore, the universe would be heated to their temperature. If real time did not commence with the beginning of the universe, the night sky would be as bright as the sun. This old saw, Olber's "Paradox", has been debunked for over a century now, though it does keep coming up in new forms. It's like an astronomical zombie. There are two problems to the argument above that I will identify, not ones associated with it's historical problems. These problams are the following: a) that a beginning of time has to be an intiniftely long time ago, and b) that every null line from an emission event is one that will transmit some energy. a) Thanks to the wonders of modern geometry, we can squeeze an infinite number of events into a finite amount of time. Thus we can have an open past that is finite in extent. b) If there is a global scale factor that describes the mean distance between points and this scale factor is increasing (and there is every reason to believe that there is), then the amount of energy that light transmits is reduced according to the increase in scale factor. This means that the light emitted from a distant star may be reduced to zero after a certain point.
"Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things." - KM, V, P and P "A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish." - Jeffrey Kluger "…Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people." -Ben Stein [This is included for the irony.]

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Posted 06/14/07 - 11:10 AM:	#6
How can the arrow of time emerge from what physics describes as a time symmetrical world?

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Posted 06/14/07 - 11:15 AM:	#7
Ilya Prigogine The role of the observer was a necessary concept in the introduction of irreversibility, or the flow of time,into quantum theory. But once it is shown that instability breaks time symmetry, the observer is no longer essential. We are now able to include probabilities,chance can neither be defined nor understood. We are now able to include probabilities in the formulations of basic laws of physics. Once this is done, Newtonian determinism fails; the future is no longer determined by the present, and symmetry between past and future is broken. Einstein "Time is an illusion."

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Posted 06/14/07 - 12:26 PM:	#8
What is infinite can increase. The number of points on a line is greater than the number of whole nunmbers. There is aleph null, aleph one, aleph two, and so on. Read up on the theory of infinite sets.

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Posted 06/14/07 - 12:54 PM:	#9
There is no straight line of time.

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Posted 06/14/07 - 01:14 PM:	#10
Kwalish Kid, I am not merely forwarding Olber's Paradox, which, I should note, is not really a true paradox. We know the rate at which galaxies are moving away from us. We can predict they were very close roughly 15 billion years ago. After the Big Bang, radiation decreased with the expansion of the universe. The same radiation that was around shortly after the Big Bang still exists today. Real time began with the Big Bang. This is why the night sky is dark. There is no star in the sky that could have been shining longer than 15 billion years.
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates "The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within." - Gandhi "Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck." - Kant "It is better to do one's own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins." - Lao Tzu

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Posted 06/14/07 - 01:17 PM:	#11
The cosmos is in a state of self perpetuating chaos. The ideal of order is only a human figment.

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Posted 06/14/07 - 01:20 PM:	#12
Nietzsche The universe is "neither perfect,nor beautiful,nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. Beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to trangress.

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Posted 06/14/07 - 01:23 PM:	#13
The theory that the universe had a beginning is conducive to the agendas in philosophy that lean into theology- one is prompted to expect, and almost intuit, that a God has to exist if the universe once did not exist. Nine out of ten Christians believe that the Big-Bang theory is enough evidence for God. Not only is this not true, but it is also not the only contending theory about the origins and nature of the universe. How convenient for the consumer public to "stop at the big bang". It makes the opiate of religion more pleasant to digest.

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Posted 06/14/07 - 03:48 PM:	#14
Wolfman wrote: Kwalish Kid, I am not merely forwarding Olber's Paradox, which, I should note, is not really a true paradox. We know the rate at which galaxies are moving away from us. We can predict they were very close roughly 15 billion years ago. After the Big Bang, radiation decreased with the expansion of the universe. The same radiation that was around shortly after the Big Bang still exists today. Real time began with the Big Bang. This is why the night sky is dark. There is no star in the sky that could have been shining longer than 15 billion years. That's all well and good, but it's not an argument for the beginning of time. There are many potential cosmological models (including Friedmann-Lemaitre models), with an infinite temporal past and no problem with having a dark sky. Even the current Big Bang theory is consistent with no beginning of time (it's just that the past is finite in temporal extent).
"Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things." - KM, V, P and P "A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish." - Jeffrey Kluger "…Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people." -Ben Stein [This is included for the irony.]

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Posted 06/14/07 - 06:07 PM:	#15
It's not an argument - it's an explanation. I'm talking about real time by the way, not imaginary time. Real time commenced with the Big Bang.
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates "The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within." - Gandhi "Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck." - Kant "It is better to do one's own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins." - Lao Tzu

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Posted 06/14/07 - 06:11 PM:	#16
By real time, Wolfman, I assume you are talking about observable time. Before the Big Bang, time was not observable and that is what you are calling imaginary time, am I correct, Wolfman?
Meh

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Posted 06/14/07 - 06:14 PM:	#17
Alekhine wrote: By real time, Wolfman, I assume you are talking about observable time. Before the Big Bang, time was not observable and that is what you are calling imaginary time, am I correct, Wolfman? Yes, we can not empirically observe anything that may have happened prior to the Big Bang. Imaginary time is used as a tool in quantum mechanics to iron out gravitational singularities. Imaginary time has four dimensions rather than two.
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates "The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within." - Gandhi "Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck." - Kant "It is better to do one's own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins." - Lao Tzu

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Posted 06/14/07 - 06:30 PM:	#18
Wolfman wrote: Yes, we can not empirically observe anything that may have happened prior to the Big Bang. Imaginary time is used as a tool in quantum mechanics to iron out gravitational singularities. Imaginary time has four dimensions rather than two. How do you measure time?

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Posted 06/14/07 - 07:24 PM:	#19
TheJoker wrote: How do you measure time? You can use a clock.
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates "The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within." - Gandhi "Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck." - Kant "It is better to do one's own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins." - Lao Tzu

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Posted 06/14/07 - 07:53 PM:	#20
Wolfman wrote: You can use a clock. Really?

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Posted 06/14/07 - 07:54 PM:	#21
How do you measure the time of the cosmos in explaining a arrow of time?

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Posted 06/14/07 - 08:16 PM:	#22
Wolfman wrote We know the rate at which galaxies are moving away from us. Thaat's a brave claim! In order for us to know this we have to make some fundamental assumptions about the behaviour of the universe with (as far as I can see) no possibility of empirical confirmation. This is because the data avaialble to us always corresponds to events that have happened - we don't get to see things happening directly. Therefore we have to make assumptions about current behaviour, extrapolating from the past galaxy behaviour to the present. The picture we conjure is dependent on the details of the assumptions we make. So if it is true that galaxies were moving from us at a certain rate how confident are you that they are now moving away from us at that rate?
feeling cheerful

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Posted 06/14/07 - 09:53 PM:	#23
ragus wrote: Thaat's a brave claim! In order for us to know this we have to make some fundamental assumptions about the behaviour of the universe with (as far as I can see) no possibility of empirical confirmation. This is because the data avaialble to us always corresponds to events that have happened - we don't get to see things happening directly. Therefore we have to make assumptions about current behaviour, extrapolating from the past galaxy behaviour to the present. The picture we conjure is dependent on the details of the assumptions we make. So if it is true that galaxies were moving from us at a certain rate how confident are you that they are now moving away from us at that rate? Actually we know this through empirical observation. It's Hubble's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbles_law The velocity of other galaxies moving away from us can be found in the equation V = H x R. Velocity being proportional to the distance they are from earth. Hubble discovered this while researching the light from other galaxies. According to Hawking (2001), astronomers had learned that by analyzing the light from other galaxies, it was possible to measure whether they are moving toward us or away from us. To their great surprise, they had found that nearly all galaxies are moving away. Moreover, the farther they are from us, the faster they are moving away. It was Hubble who recognized the dramatic implications of this discovery on the large scale, every galaxy is moving away from every other galaxy. The universe is expanding... If the galaxies are moving apart, they must have been closer together in the past. From the present rate of expansion, we can estimate that they must have been very close together indeed ten to fifteen billion years ago.
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates "The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within." - Gandhi "Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck." - Kant "It is better to do one's own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins." - Lao Tzu

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Posted 06/14/07 - 10:00 PM:	#24
Ah yes, I have been contemplating this lately. One thing to point out: Time, past future, present does not exist in a sense, time is just a method that we have created to explain why something changes, like the sky becoming dark, a friend dying, an object being disintegrated over time; we need the allusion of time to deal with the way we perceive the universe, and the way it perceives us. So, given that time is not an actually entity in its self, but rather an allusion created by humanity, the parameters change. Look at the universe, we know very little about it, and can only base theories on a certain span of area that out telescopes can reach to. In order to create a reason based on how time could be infinite, you need to discard what you know, and use a certain form of thought that I believe is called a priori.... to conceive something from nothing, except in this case, controlling that power to obtain a desirable result. To me, the result is this: You can see the universe as a megalithic sphere with boundaries, or you can imagine it as an infinite entity, a way that it can be infinite is if the universe itself takes the shape of a magnetic formation, with a north and south pole. It relapses onto its self trillions on times, until the plain of the universe reaches the end; this end is not actually a stop to the expansion of the universe, but rather is the point at which time reforms its self from matter and energy, into ideas, thoughts, or highly abstract wave forms. These new converted forms are the ideas that are us, we are relapsed matter, in the form of a different level of conceptual existence. We then look into the sky, and start another stream of question, which, unknowingly to us begins as us, and recirculates infinitely, along with a semi- infinite relapse of matter. What I am trying to say, is that you cannot look from point A to point B and wonder if there is a C, D, or E. You need to understand that we are only the brain child of what we try to observe, which restrains us to its level. As a composition of a bi-product called thought or given existence, we can only look on our re-circulating level, which may hold questions like is there an infinite universe, when in the grand space of possibility, such questions may have no place and purpose, there is just a thing that cannot be described by words, given a name, purpose or anything that we can familiarize yourself with. This is very abstract, and maybe even utterly meaningless to whoever reads this, but the main point stays, how can you give a question to a observance, when what that observance is compiled of, is you, itself, the universe, and the synthesis all all combined entities to form what it is that you have looked for?
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Posted 06/14/07 - 10:20 PM:	#25
TheJoker wrote: How do you measure the time of the cosmos in explaining a arrow of time? We measure it back to the Big Bang singularity. We can consider the vertex from our perspective. Light bends as it passes through matter. Since light moves at a finite speed, we are always looking at the universe from an earlier point in time. Furthermore, since gravity is attractive, matter tends to bend light rays towards each other. The amount of matter that light passes through is sufficient enough to curve spacetime.
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates "The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within." - Gandhi "Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck." - Kant "It is better to do one's own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins." - Lao Tzu

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