What ends up happening is that the atheists in question are often emulating the religious proselytizers who drive them crazy (often their own parents/relatives) and really just being big old hypocrits about the whole thing.
I think it's a big misconception that evangelist proselytizers drive atheists crazy because they proselytize.
Evangelicals drive me crazy because they are wrong and are trying to influence public policy on the basis of their wrong beliefs. I could give a shit that they proselytize. I'd love to be proselytized by an evangelical knocking on my door.
What ends up happening is that the atheists in question are often emulating the religious proselytizers who drive them crazy (often their own parents/relatives) and really just being big old hypocrits about the whole thing.
I think it's a big misconception that evangelist proselytizers drive atheists crazy because they proselytize.
Evangelicals drive me crazy because they are wrong and are trying to influence public policy on the basis of their wrong beliefs. I could give a shit that they proselytize. I'd love to be proselytized by an evangelical knocking on my door.
It's a fun diversion for a few minutes until they get flustered and leave.
Darkchampion3d on
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence --Thomas Jefferson
I don't completely understand what you are getting at here. I don't really see how you can go about equating something like the way our minds interpret "touching" something to beliefs about meaning and purpose. To put things into the terms you are using, I would say that the underlying physical reality and the simulation are both meaningless as there is no greater purpose for them to serve. However, as individuals we give them a sort of false meaning because it makes life more enjoyable.
I was responding to the idea that any meaning or purpose we derive from the universe is illusory because it's all just richocheting quarks and electrons or whatever. The so-called "underlying reality" has no purpose.
Touch, similarly, is an "illusion" created by our brains adapted to dealing with the underlying reality, which is atoms repelling each other over empty space.
Both meaning and the sensation of touch exist in our brains. They do not exist in so-called "underlying reality" of quantum wavefunctions. However, that doesn't mean the universe is "objectively" meaningless or that touch "objectively" doesn't exist. It just means that meaning and touch exist on certain levels of reality, but not others.
What ends up happening is that the atheists in question are often emulating the religious proselytizers who drive them crazy (often their own parents/relatives) and really just being big old hypocrits about the whole thing.
I think it's a big misconception that evangelist proselytizers drive atheists crazy because they proselytize.
Evangelicals drive me crazy because they are wrong and are trying to influence public policy on the basis of their wrong beliefs. I could give a shit that they proselytize. I'd love to be proselytized by an evangelical knocking on my door.
It's a fun diversion for a few minutes until they get flustered and leave.
I had a great go with one of the crazy yelling guys on campus once.
We was yelling about intelligent design that die, so I said to him "look, I'll accept, for the benefit of the doubt, that your god is an infallible being. I'll also accept, for the moment, that this infalible being designed and created me. So tell me, how did he manage to mess up my eyes? If I was designed by an all-knowing, infalible God, then why do I need glasses to see right?"
He started stammering, and then eventually cme back at me with something about original sin. I cut him off saying "So you're calling me a sinner? You have no idea who I am or what i do. Without knowing me you have absolutely nothing to go on in that angle."
I think I may have misused the word "create". I was thinking in more the sense that due to the big bang, the universe exists in the way that it does now, not in a sense of "bing bag = matter from nothing". I know that the big bang was basically the transition from super super super dense matter to the process of the ever expanding universe, though more complex then just that.
If the universe is in an infinite cycle, wouldn't that by definition mean that there is both a Pre-spacetime and a post-spacetime, though pre-spacetime was the previous universe before it shrank back to super dense then went through the big bang again to our current spacetime?
I'm still not quite getting the answer I'm looking for though. In that simply how do we know there was no pre-big bang? As far as pre-big bang time goes, it obviously wouldn't be what our current concept and understanding of what time is. Time may not have existed pre-BB, if there was a pre-bb.
Also, correction on mine. Last thing you quoted should say "it does explain where our current everything came from", which by saying this I mean at the very least our current itiration of the universe before it goes through the hypothetical cycle of shrinking, condensing, and then Big Bang again.
I also wasn't asking if it always existed or came from nothing, I was asking how, or well, if it's even possible to know how at this point.
Another question, is it possible that space time more or less funneled into and then back out of the big bang? Either in a way that time was seperate and during the inital moments of our universe at the Big bang point, time fused with space to become spacetime? Kind of like, and really the first thing I could think of, you have hydrogen and oxygen but when combined into h2o you have water? Maybe a bad analogy, but I dunno what else to use.
I'm just full of fun questions, last one for this post. How do we know nothing exists out of our spacetime?
I don't completely understand what you are getting at here. I don't really see how you can go about equating something like the way our minds interpret "touching" something to beliefs about meaning and purpose. To put things into the terms you are using, I would say that the underlying physical reality and the simulation are both meaningless as there is no greater purpose for them to serve. However, as individuals we give them a sort of false meaning because it makes life more enjoyable.
I was responding to the idea that any meaning or purpose we derive from the universe is illusory because it's all just richocheting quarks and electrons or whatever. The so-called "underlying reality" has no purpose.
Touch, similarly, is an "illusion" created by our brains adapted to dealing with the underlying reality, which is atoms repelling each other over empty space.
Both meaning and the sensation of touch exist in our brains. They do not exist in so-called "underlying reality" of quantum wavefunctions. However, that doesn't mean the universe is "objectively" meaningless or that touch "objectively" doesn't exist. It just means that meaning and touch exist on certain levels of reality, but not others.
Other than the bit about different levels of reality, which just strikes me as being a bit too vague, that doesn't necessarily contradict or invalidate what I have said so far. I also question whether or not ideas about meaning and the sensation of touch exist in the same manner within our minds, but admittedly my knowledge regarding the mechanics of these thing is far from complete.
I'm still not quite getting the answer I'm looking for though. In that simply how do we know there was no pre-big bang? As far as pre-big bang time goes, it obviously wouldn't be what our current concept and understanding of what time is. Time may not have existed pre-BB, if there was a pre-bb.
The problem is that your question is essentially nonsense. It's like asking how many sides a square triangle has.
I'm still not quite getting the answer I'm looking for though. In that simply how do we know there was no pre-big bang? As far as pre-big bang time goes, it obviously wouldn't be what our current concept and understanding of what time is. Time may not have existed pre-BB, if there was a pre-bb.
The problem is that your question is essentially nonsense. It's like asking how many sides a square triangle has.
Why is the concept of pre-big bang, and thusly pre-spacetime so nonsense? Obviously it does not fit into anything we can currently understand, but is there anything at this point that shows evidence to support that no pre-spacetime existed in any possible form?
I don't completely understand what you are getting at here. I don't really see how you can go about equating something like the way our minds interpret "touching" something to beliefs about meaning and purpose. To put things into the terms you are using, I would say that the underlying physical reality and the simulation are both meaningless as there is no greater purpose for them to serve. However, as individuals we give them a sort of false meaning because it makes life more enjoyable.
I was responding to the idea that any meaning or purpose we derive from the universe is illusory because it's all just richocheting quarks and electrons or whatever. The so-called "underlying reality" has no purpose.
Touch, similarly, is an "illusion" created by our brains adapted to dealing with the underlying reality, which is atoms repelling each other over empty space.
Both meaning and the sensation of touch exist in our brains. They do not exist in so-called "underlying reality" of quantum wavefunctions. However, that doesn't mean the universe is "objectively" meaningless or that touch "objectively" doesn't exist. It just means that meaning and touch exist on certain levels of reality, but not others.
I think you are using perception and reality pretty interchangibly here.
I don't completely understand what you are getting at here. I don't really see how you can go about equating something like the way our minds interpret "touching" something to beliefs about meaning and purpose. To put things into the terms you are using, I would say that the underlying physical reality and the simulation are both meaningless as there is no greater purpose for them to serve. However, as individuals we give them a sort of false meaning because it makes life more enjoyable.
I was responding to the idea that any meaning or purpose we derive from the universe is illusory because it's all just richocheting quarks and electrons or whatever. The so-called "underlying reality" has no purpose.
Touch, similarly, is an "illusion" created by our brains adapted to dealing with the underlying reality, which is atoms repelling each other over empty space.
Both meaning and the sensation of touch exist in our brains. They do not exist in so-called "underlying reality" of quantum wavefunctions. However, that doesn't mean the universe is "objectively" meaningless or that touch "objectively" doesn't exist. It just means that meaning and touch exist on certain levels of reality, but not others.
I think you are using perception and reality pretty interchangibly here.
I'm still not quite getting the answer I'm looking for though. In that simply how do we know there was no pre-big bang? As far as pre-big bang time goes, it obviously wouldn't be what our current concept and understanding of what time is. Time may not have existed pre-BB, if there was a pre-bb.
The problem is that your question is essentially nonsense. It's like asking how many sides a square triangle has.
Why is the concept of pre-big bang, and thusly pre-spacetime so nonsense? Obviously it does not fit into anything we can currently understand, but is there anything at this point that shows evidence to support that no pre-spacetime existed in any possible form?
"Pre" implies time. So you're asking what things were like at a time before time.
Grid System on
0
Podlyyou unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered Userregular
I'm still not quite getting the answer I'm looking for though. In that simply how do we know there was no pre-big bang? As far as pre-big bang time goes, it obviously wouldn't be what our current concept and understanding of what time is. Time may not have existed pre-BB, if there was a pre-bb.
The problem is that your question is essentially nonsense. It's like asking how many sides a square triangle has.
Why is the concept of pre-big bang, and thusly pre-spacetime so nonsense? Obviously it does not fit into anything we can currently understand, but is there anything at this point that shows evidence to support that no pre-spacetime existed in any possible form?
"Pre" implies time. So you're asking what things were like at a time before time.
Or, alternatively, what Being was like before beings.
I think I may have misused the word "create". I was thinking in more the sense that due to the big bang, the universe exists in the way that it does now, not in a sense of "bing bag = matter from nothing". I know that the big bang was basically the transition from super super super dense matter to the process of the ever expanding universe, though more complex then just that.
The big bang was the initial condition. So yes, the procession and end state of a system are dependent on the initial condition. But when we're talking about the universe as a whole, you get into wacky territory like "does time exist?"
I mean, a lot of the difficulty here is that time, when you think about it, is weird. What does it mean to say that time progresses and has a "beginning"? What does it mean to say that time is part of the same fabric as space? Hawking suggests that we experience time in a "forward" direction because of entropy. The chemical processes in our brain—the processes that make our consciousness emerge—arose around the physical process of entropy, which in turn causes us to experience time in the same way that entropy moves.
In any case, it's incorrect to think of the big bang as a "transition," because that assumes there is a time when something exists in some other form before the big bang. There might be, but there might not be, and there's no reason to think there is. It looks like time itself doesn't go back any earlier than the big bang, in the same way that the direction of "north" doesn't go any further north than the north pole.
If the universe is in an infinite cycle, wouldn't that by definition mean that there is both a Pre-spacetime and a post-spacetime, though pre-spacetime was the previous universe before it shrank back to super dense then went through the big bang again to our current spacetime?
Okay. Pretend that the surface of the Earth is the universe. The Big Bang is the North Pole. When you travel "south" you are moving forward in time.
Now, keep on traveling south/forward in time. Moving towards the equator, the universe will expand (the circumference of the earth gets fatter). Then the universe will start to contract. Then, at the south pole, there will be a "big crunch." Then a reverse big bang as you start going north again. And so on.
This is a huge simplification, the actual universe is obviously not shaped like the 2-d surface of a sphere, and we also have no idea if the universe oscillates like this or what. But that's how it would work. There isn't a time "before" the universe in the same way that there isn't a direction "north" further north than the north pole.
I also wasn't asking if it always existed or came from nothing, I was asking how, or well, if it's even possible to know how at this point.
Mostly Occam's razor at this point.
Another question, is it possible that space time more or less funneled into and then back out of the big bang? Either in a way that time was seperate and during the inital moments of our universe at the Big bang point, time fused with space to become spacetime? Kind of like, and really the first thing I could think of, you have hydrogen and oxygen but when combined into h2o you have water? Maybe a bad analogy, but I dunno what else to use.
That's kind of the problem. All of the analogies you could used are based on the concepts of space and time. A funnel takes up space. The act of funneling occurs in time. These things only exist within the universe.
I'm just full of fun questions, last one for this post. How do we know nothing exists out of our spacetime?
Well, part of it depends on how you define "exist."
To take an example within our universe—quantum particles: do they exist? If you take a photon (that's a particle of light), it exists at any moment as a cloud of probability. You can't say where a photon is or how fast it's traveling with any amount of certainty, because there is no answer to the question. According to quantum mechanics, the photon only has a probability of existing at any given point in spacetime, until it interacts with something else.
So does the proton actually exist before it interacts with something else? That's a tricky question—it only has a probability of existing. Does the wavefunction—that is, the mathematical equation of the photon that describes all of its possible states and positions over time—exist? I don't think so. At least, it doesn't exist in the sense that most people mean when they say the word "exist." Rather, existence—in the sense most people use it—is defined as interactions between quantum particles that produce quantum decoherence, collapsing the wave function.
Similarly, do mathematical concepts and laws "exist"? Does a triangle? Do the numbers 1, 0, π, e, and i exist? They aren't made of spacetime or matter and energy, which is how most people define "existence." And yet, our existence seems to obey mathematical laws.
I honestly don't know. I'm tempted to think that our universe—including the big bang and everything that happened afterwards, and all the laws that govern the behavior of physics, chemistry, biology, and philosophy—is simply a subset or a special case of mathematics.
I'm still not quite getting the answer I'm looking for though. In that simply how do we know there was no pre-big bang? As far as pre-big bang time goes, it obviously wouldn't be what our current concept and understanding of what time is. Time may not have existed pre-BB, if there was a pre-bb.
The problem is that your question is essentially nonsense. It's like asking how many sides a square triangle has.
Why is the concept of pre-big bang, and thusly pre-spacetime so nonsense? Obviously it does not fit into anything we can currently understand, but is there anything at this point that shows evidence to support that no pre-spacetime existed in any possible form?
"Pre" implies time. So you're asking what things were like at a time before time.
So, I think I'm circling back to something previous now, but how do we know that there was no time, in seperate time from space or in some form of space time, in any moment leading up to the big bang?
I doubt it will serve me any real purpose, but I can go against the analogy of a movie for a bit. Sure, the movie it self does not actually happen before the beginning of a movie. If you're sitting down to watch a movie, there is no movie before the first frame. I would call pressing play the big bang, as that is the moment everything begins, and from there the movie (universe) unfolds. The problem with this is that there is existence outside and before a movie that is entirely detatched from the movie. In such a way, how is it not possible that something (god or even a pre-big bang big bang sort of event) was more or less acting as the we do when we push the play button. It was more or less the trigger that set off the beginning of the universe, spacetime, and all of the known existence.
If my understanding of time is correct, mass and energy can, if great enough, interfere with time. Then, with the amount of mass of the initial matter during the first billionth of a second of the universe, is it possible that the energy and mass both combined at that single point was enough to destory, alter, or something change a previous spacetime and thusly start what is our spacetime continuum?
Why is the concept of pre-big bang, and thusly pre-spacetime so nonsense? Obviously it does not fit into anything we can currently understand, but is there anything at this point that shows evidence to support that no pre-spacetime existed in any possible form?
"Pre" implies time. So you're asking what things were like at a time before time.
So, I think I'm circling back to something previous now, but how do we know that there was no time, in seperate time from space or in some form of space time, in any moment leading up to the big bang?
So, I think I'm circling back to something previous now, but how do we know that there was no time, in seperate time from space or in some form of space time, in any moment leading up to the big bang?
Einstein proved that time and space are the same thing—spacetime.
If you look out at distant parts of the universe, you are seeing light from billions of years ago. We know this because light only travels so fast, and so it takes a lot of time to get to Earth from faraway.
Looking at such distant lights, we've seen that all galaxies are speeding away from each other. This means that the fabric of space, itself, seems to be expanding at a knowable rate.
The Big Bang is simply what you get if you take this expansion and run it backwards, until you get to a single point—the "singularity." Scientists have done this and it's consistent with a whole bunch of other stuff we've seen. The physical processes early on, miliseconds after the Big Bang when everything was just a super-hot soup of energy, are also consistent with a lot of the stuff we've measured from quantum mechanics. So we are almost positive that all of space was once just a single point—the "Big Bang."
Going back to Einstein, what happens to space also happens to time. They don't exist apart. So you can't say that all of space collapses to a point in the Big Bang but time proceeds as normal.
I doubt it will serve me any real purpose, but I can go against the analogy of a movie for a bit. Sure, the movie it self does not actually happen before the beginning of a movie. If you're sitting down to watch a movie, there is no movie before the first frame. I would call pressing play the big bang, as that is the moment everything begins, and from there the movie (universe) unfolds.
The problem, again, is that your analogy here deals with things that involve space and time—a play button, pressing a button, moments, etc.
There's no evidence that there is anything outside the movie. There's no VCR, no finger, no flow of time in which a button can be pressed. There's not even a tape on which the movie exists. It's just a movie, and that's it.
If my understanding of time is correct, mass and energy can, if great enough, interfere with time. Then, with the amount of mass of the initial matter during the first billionth of a second of the universe, is it possible that the energy and mass both combined at that single point was enough to destory, alter, or something change a previous spacetime and thusly start what is our spacetime continuum?
I don't think that's how it would happen—but a lot of people have proposed a "multiverse" where our universe is one of many and there are/were/have been many Big Bangs. But if this is the case, it just pushes the problem back a step. You're still stuck with explaining where the first universe in the multiverse came from.
But how do we know there was no time before the big bang? Spacetime as we know it began at the big bang, but how do is it knowable that no form of space or time existed before the big bang?
Because with the big band came "things." Time is a relationship between things. If there is no relation between things, there is no time.
I only made it about 7 pages in before I replied but anyway.
We are still in a hunter gatherer society. And it's not just for cars and jewelry, the vast majority are gatherers. A few are hunters. However instead of hunting wild animals, they decide instead to simply grow their own. So these hunters have cattle, and chickens, and piggies. Then they kill them. Well they have too much to make use with, so they come to us, the gatherers. They've already got the weapons they need, for the killing, but their tools have evolved from rocks and sticks to machinery, and they need oil to make sure their tools keep working. Just so happens there's a gatherer over in the desert gathering up some oil.
But, it's hard to take a few dead chickens to him, and some beef tongue, and get a respectable amount of oil to keep the hunt on. So instead, the hunter goes through a third party. This party trades with him currency, for his meat, which he then trades for what he needs to continue to hunt.
It's easier to hunt animals that you control, than it is to hunt roaming, wild animals. Just as it is easier to gather crops, that you've planted, versus finding them growing wildly. And just as in the primitive days, people had to find and gather what was necessary to build tools. But the tools are more advanced, and you can't just find a good rock, and a stick. Now you need to dig deep to find the rocks you need, instead of chipping away at them to form something useful, we instead melt it down, and craft it into something useful. Just as our ancestors crafted jugs to hold water in. As it's easier to have water right next to you, than it is to go down to the stream every time you want a drink.
We are still a hunter gatherer society, and just as having a nice buckskin tunic with eagle feathers hundreds of years ago got you respect and admiration in the tribe. Having a big dick, and fast car gets you the same in our tribe today.
Also, most species of cats (tigers, lions, domesticated) kill for pleasure. Orcas, and dolphins. Primates. Hell, there's a tribe of bonobo chimps who committed genocide on a pack of worthless, beneath them monkeys, seemingly because they made too much noise. Then when the monkeys tried to hide, the chimps took up sticks, and used them as weapons to continue killing them. The monkeys tried to stay out of reach of the apes, they got a long stick and stabbed them to death. All simply because they made too much fucking noise. Now say "we're the only species that kills someone cause they said "your mom is fat". It's not true.
As for the virus thing, horseshit. It was cool in the Matrix, cause the Matrix was a fictional movie. Know what else is cool in make believe. Unicorns, and pixies. Time travel, and super powers. But it's bullshit make believe, and using that as an example of whats wrong with the world is a cop-out.
The fact is we are the earths golden child. We were born into a world of kill or be killed, the strongest survive. And we dominated that playing field. It took us awhile though. We got our assholes ripped open by bears, lions, bugs, and colds. But eventually we evened the playing field by harnessing nature itself. Fire. We took a once great enemy and turned it into an ally, and used it to increase our chances at the game. Eliminated cold and disease from uncooked meat, used it to turn a simple rock into a mighty weapon.
The next time that big ol' bear came a knockin' we simply shot it, and said, "Yeah well fuck you!". And now there is no animal that can stand up to the human animal. Sure if a tiger gets you under their favored conditions, a single human may lose. Hell sometimes the tiger will just show us that we aren't quite what we think we are. Making sure that we aren't too confident in ourselves.
But in the end, should we choose, we can eliminate the tigers as a whole. If oneday we decide, man tigers are fucking too many people up, then you know what, we gather, and we fuck the tigers up; and when we're done, there ain't no tigers left.
It is lucky for the tiger, that in modern day, we have decided that the best course is not to completely eliminate our enemies. As we are the ultimate players in the game. Even nature sometimes fails to weed us out, we've become so good at the game, the "natural" obstacles aren't much of an obstacle for us anymore. Nature throws a fire our way, we put it out. Sure a few individuals may lose their dwelling for awhile, but they are not out of the game anymore. They find shelter amongst other humans, and we rebuild. A pesky river keeps flooding us out, damn that bitch up, or build higher. Earthquake? Design buildings to withstand the shaking.
Sure there are some forces we just have to buckle down and face, such as a hurricane or tornado. But in the end, it doesn't turn the favor against us. We are just inconvenienced for a bit. And when nature throws everything against you, and the only response is, "Fuck, now we have to clean some shit up, instead of playing my new video game." you know you've won the game.
But maybe one day "nature" will decide we're unbalanced. Well it will be very hard to get rid of us, and the only real way is to hit the reset button, which will also wipe out what we haven't decided isn't necessary by that time, and start over from scratch. Assuming, by that time, we haven't decided to move on, and play the game on a another planet.
TL;DR:
Nature is a game, and we're the star players.
EWom on
Whether they find a life there or not, I think Jupiter should be called an enemy planet.
But how do we know there was no time before the big bang? Spacetime as we know it began at the big bang, but how do is it knowable that no form of space or time existed before the big bang?
Because with the big band came "things." Time is a relationship between things. If there is no relation between things, there is no time.
How is it known that there were no "things" in any form before the big bang?
Edit:Bah, it doesn't help to put in a quote to respond to if I forget my response
I don't think that's how it would happen—but a lot of people have proposed a "multiverse" where our universe is one of many and there are/were/have been many Big Bangs. But if this is the case, it just pushes the problem back a step. You're still stuck with explaining where the first universe in the multiverse came from.
The main thing I'm going to look at here is "I don't think that's how it would happen". Is this because based off of Enstein theroems on spacetime and further knowldge along this path by other very intelligent people this is a very unlikely course of events that would lead to the big bang and our universe as it is now, or does it just seem unlikely to you? I'm actually quite curious if it is in someway possible for space and time to be... I guess a mix between sewn and fused together might be the right way to put it, from being seperate if the known universe was somehow sent down to a focal point which was the beginning of spacetime and our universe. Space and time could have been drastically different before that moment, and the matter and big bang are the result, and possible also what caused them to be one thing instead of two seperate things.
One thing I've wondered, but agian, at this point an unprovable theory. Is it possible for there to be some aspect of our universe, either an unseen force (such as gravity or time) or something so small that we've never been able to directly see it or it's effects, that could actually change how we see the way the universe works?
One final thing on this that I've heard but I want to know if it's considered true. I had a teacher once say that only a hand full of people on the planet that completely understand the theory of relativity, and thusly most of if not all of the rest of einstein's theories of spacetime and so forth.
One final thing on this that I've heard but I want to know if it's considered true. I had a teacher once say that only a hand full of people on the planet that completely understand the theory of relativity, and thusly most of if not all of the rest of einstein's theories of spacetime and so forth.
Its not some kind of secret, arcane knowledge, but it is very advanced physics. I'd imagine only professors and grad students specialising in that area could be said to "completely understand" it. Whether that counts as a handful or not is up to you.
One thing I've wondered, but agian, at this point an unprovable theory. Is it possible for there to be some aspect of our universe, either an unseen force (such as gravity or time) or something so small that we've never been able to directly see it or it's effects, that could actually change how we see the way the universe works?
Yeah, we can find something unexpected whenever we get CERN up and running. There is potentially many, many, many things we could find that would change how we assume the universe works. We could find dark matter or figure out how dark energy works or the mechanism by which gravity functions.
There are probably more unanswered question in physics now than there have ever been before.
The main thing I'm going to look at here is "I don't think that's how it would happen". Is this because based off of Enstein theroems on spacetime and further knowldge along this path by other very intelligent people this is a very unlikely course of events that would lead to the big bang and our universe as it is now, or does it just seem unlikely to you? I'm actually quite curious if it is in someway possible for space and time to be... I guess a mix between sewn and fused together might be the right way to put it, from being seperate if the known universe was somehow sent down to a focal point which was the beginning of spacetime and our universe. Space and time could have been drastically different before that moment, and the matter and big bang are the result, and possible also what caused them to be one thing instead of two seperate things.
Look at the bolded word. Time could have been different before ... time? It's square triangles again.
I don't know that the implications of Einstein's theory necessarily mean that space and time could not, by their nature, exist as separate things. But that's quite a stretch, the entire process of gravity seems to revolve around them acting as a single thing. And there's also a lot of evidence that time, itself, doesn't exist, but is rather a consequence of entropy—the inevitable disordering of the universe.
One thing I've wondered, but agian, at this point an unprovable theory. Is it possible for there to be some aspect of our universe, either an unseen force (such as gravity or time) or something so small that we've never been able to directly see it or it's effects, that could actually change how we see the way the universe works?
You mean, once we discover it?
Quantum mechanics has completely changed how we see the way the universe works. Much of QM basically involves smashing matter together at high energies to see what pops out—and the stuff that pops out generally gives us great insight into the nature of the universe. The point of the Large Hadron Collider is to discover a particle that could explain what mass is, the Higgs boson. We're also looking for a particle that explains gravity.
So yeah, there's a lot for us still to discover. But any change to how we look at the universe also has to take into account the evidence we already have. For example, before Einstein, there was Newton, whose laws worked incredibly well. Einstein's theory disproved Newton's, but the things that worked in Newton's theory still work in Einstein's theory.
One final thing on this that I've heard but I want to know if it's considered true. I had a teacher once say that only a hand full of people on the planet that completely understand the theory of relativity, and thusly most of if not all of the rest of einstein's theories of spacetime and so forth.
Probably true. I certainly don't understand it too well. My physics major friend said that in order to really understand it, you have to understand the math, which is hard.
The main issue though, I think, is that relativity describes concepts that are so far removed from our everyday experience—it's like trying to understand how to drive a car when you're a fish. The same is true for quantum mechanics. We humans, and our brains, evolved to interact with a certain size of phenomena—larger than cells and smaller than planets. If you go too far beyond those scales, reality simply works in a completely different way, and we don't really have the equipment to easily grasp it.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
"Objectively"—in a purely physical sense, I do not actually touch things. No contact is made between the atoms in my hand and the atoms on my keyboard. There is empty space between an electromagnetic repulsion, and my brain hallucinates the sensation of touch as an evolutionary adaption.
You've said this before, and I will always be here to contradict you.
You say that I never actually touch the keyboard, and that touch is an illusion. This is supposedly because the atoms in my hands never bump nuclei with the atoms in the keyboard. But I don't think that means touch is an illusion, or a hallucination--when we originated the word 'touch' and the concept of 'touching' we had no idea of the atomic structure of matter, or the distribution of mass in solid objects; what we denoted when we said 'touch' was just the commonsense process of touching things. When we discovered atoms, did we also discover that we had been speaking wrongly all that time? No, we just discovered more information about what happens at the microscopic level when we touch things--namely, that electromagnetic forces in each body repel one another.
You've said this before, and I will always be here to contradict you.
You say that I never actually touch the keyboard, and that touch is an illusion. This is supposedly because the atoms in my hands never bump nuclei with the atoms in the keyboard. But I don't think that means touch is an illusion, or a hallucination--when we originated the word 'touch' and the concept of 'touching' we had no idea of the atomic structure of matter, or the distribution of mass in solid objects; what we denoted when we said 'touch' was just the commonsense process of touching things. When we discovered atoms, did we also discover that we had been speaking wrongly all that time? No, we just discovered more information about what happens at the microscopic level when we touch things--namely, that electromagnetic forces in each body repel one another.
I thought I basically agreed with you later in my post?
Namely: it is "true" that we touch things, even though it is not "true" that our atoms do not physically contact one another? That truths in the macro-world are true even if the underlying physics of the micro-world work differently?
One final thing on this that I've heard but I want to know if it's considered true. I had a teacher once say that only a hand full of people on the planet that completely understand the theory of relativity, and thusly most of if not all of the rest of einstein's theories of spacetime and so forth.
Its not some kind of secret, arcane knowledge, but it is very advanced physics. I'd imagine only professors and grad students specialising in that area could be said to "completely understand" it. Whether that counts as a handful or not is up to you.
Obviously it's not some kind of secret, it's just very advanced physics which I've seen Physics 101... not everyone can even get that. I guess at this point the amount of people who understand would be higher and continually growing as we as a species continue to expand our understanding... and well, our ability to dumb things down for people to understand.
I don't even remember exactly who said it at this point, it may not have been a teacher but I think it was.
Also, I missed one of Qinju's responses from before which would have helped a hell of a lot. It does raise one or two more questions.
With use describing time as being experienced in a forward manner, and theorizing that time does infact move in a forward manner while the universe expands due to time and space being one spacetime, will time move in reverse with space during the big crunch? I guess the best analogy at this pount would be having two funnels aimed together, and the centermost finite point is either the moment of big bang, or what might be a reverse billionth of a second big bang. While this still goes into some form of multiverse theory I would imagine, is it possible that either before the bigbang (yes, I'm still saying before) time had wound down with space to reform the point at which it began, then well, began again?
Or, simultaniously the big bang went in two directions, sending spacetime forward how we experience it while also sending it backwards so that it is a parallel spacetime which is expanding the same yet opposite of ours. Where it begins equal to how ours ends, and ends where our universe began. How to make an analogy.... um,.. think of a song that begins and ends exactly the same, say three notes (A B# A) so that forward and backward it's the same. Play one forward (Our universe, or Universe 1) while the other backwards (parallel universe, or universe A) and they begin and end exactly the same.
So, who would have guessed that a thread starting off about hating people's pretense for claiming to have real knowledge would change to an argument about if we should revert to out former hunter-gathering society, if anything is real, questions on roles in nature and extinction cycles, if morals and ethics really exist or if they are even the same thing or not, something about circumcision and atheism (I stoped following half of the thread around then), and me taking a crack at spacetime and big bang theoroms.
Also, EWorm, growing one's own food in place of hunting and gathering for it is actually, if I'm not mistaken, the definition of an agricultural society and not a hunter-gatherer society.
"Objectively"—in a purely physical sense, I do not actually touch things. No contact is made between the atoms in my hand and the atoms on my keyboard. There is empty space between an electromagnetic repulsion, and my brain hallucinates the sensation of touch as an evolutionary adaption.
You've said this before, and I will always be here to contradict you.
You say that I never actually touch the keyboard, and that touch is an illusion. This is supposedly because the atoms in my hands never bump nuclei with the atoms in the keyboard. But I don't think that means touch is an illusion, or a hallucination--when we originated the word 'touch' and the concept of 'touching' we had no idea of the atomic structure of matter, or the distribution of mass in solid objects; what we denoted when we said 'touch' was just the commonsense process of touching things. When we discovered atoms, did we also discover that we had been speaking wrongly all that time? No, we just discovered more information about what happens at the microscopic level when we touch things--namely, that electromagnetic forces in each body repel one another.
So touching is an ontological relationship between two things?
I thought I basically agreed with you later in my post?
Namely: it is "true" that we touch things, even though it is not "true" that our atoms do not physically contact one another? That truths in the macro-world are true even if the underlying physics of the micro-world work differently?
I dunno, you were getting into levels of reality stuff that I'm not totally on board with.
I definitely agree with you that it is incorrect to make the inference: "it's all just atoms and shit bumping around, therefore life has no meaning." If anything, our experience as rational agents in the world should be enough to demonstrate to us that atoms and shit bumping around can have meaning.
You've said this before, and I will always be here to contradict you.
You say that I never actually touch the keyboard, and that touch is an illusion. This is supposedly because the atoms in my hands never bump nuclei with the atoms in the keyboard. But I don't think that means touch is an illusion, or a hallucination--when we originated the word 'touch' and the concept of 'touching' we had no idea of the atomic structure of matter, or the distribution of mass in solid objects; what we denoted when we said 'touch' was just the commonsense process of touching things. When we discovered atoms, did we also discover that we had been speaking wrongly all that time? No, we just discovered more information about what happens at the microscopic level when we touch things--namely, that electromagnetic forces in each body repel one another.
I thought I basically agreed with you later in my post?
Namely: it is "true" that we touch things, even though it is not "true" that our atoms do not physically contact one another? That truths in the macro-world are true even if the underlying physics of the micro-world work differently?
That actually depends on how you define touch. If you define it by the actualy physical contact of two or more objects, then no, we never actually touch anything. If you define it by the sensation we get when use our sense of feeling to touch and object, then I would say that is very real.
I would argue though that saying touch is a hallucination in our brain is wrong. Our sense of touch is derived from the feeling of repulsion between the electrons in our body and whatever object we attempt to make contact with, and our mind simply doesn't know to process it that way so it is processed as if we actually touched the object.
With use describing time as being experienced in a forward manner, and theorizing that time does infact move in a forward manner while the universe expands due to time and space being one spacetime, will time move in reverse with space during the big crunch?
I really have no idea. Last I heard the idea of the big crunch has been out of vogue because it looks like the universe is accelerating.
I also don't know that time can even be said to have a "direction" without some kind of consciousness to experience it as such. You get into "if a tree falls in the forest" territory. Presumably, you can't have conscious entities with a reverse entropy process because our brains evolved around chemistry that depends on entropy. So in a way, time can't move in reverse, because the perception of time coudln't move in reverse.
I guess the best analogy at this pount would be having two funnels aimed together, and the centermost finite point is either the moment of big bang, or what might be a reverse billionth of a second big bang. While this still goes into some form of multiverse theory I would imagine, is it possible that either before the bigbang (yes, I'm still saying before) time had wound down with space to reform the point at which it began, then well, began again?
Or, simultaniously the big bang went in two directions, sending spacetime forward how we experience it while also sending it backwards so that it is a parallel spacetime which is expanding the same yet opposite of ours. Where it begins equal to how ours ends, and ends where our universe began. How to make an analogy.... um,.. think of a song that begins and ends exactly the same, say three notes (A B# A) so that forward and backward it's the same. Play one forward (Our universe, or Universe 1) while the other backwards (parallel universe, or universe A) and they begin and end exactly the same.
I think you're just wildly speculating here and also getting back into square triangle territory.
I'd recommend taking some time and let the idea of relativistic spacetime settle into your brain, because it really is hard to comprehend and requires you to fundamentally rethink the way you imagine reality.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
As I've said at least two times now, I have no idea where I'm going in this thread, I'm just having fun. For the most part, I seriously have very little understand of Big Bang and spacetime and was just pulling stuff out of my ass.
And yea, the parrallel but opposite/reverse theory was wild speculation because it sounded cool at the time. Though if it started at the end, wouldn't time just go in reverse like hitting rewind on our spacetime? I know that most likely sounds silly, but do we know at all what reverse time would do to matter and entropy or is everything there speculation?
Hmm, random thing that might be a clear sign I should make like darwin and go to bed. Is a pyramid technically a 3-D squaretriangle?
Also, on the topic of natural progression, agricultural societies became the norm because they won out in natural selection over migratory hunter tribes.
My pet unsupported theory is that humans have been able to attain a great deal of scientific and philosophical advancement in such a short time compared to the existance of modern humans simply because we stopped running around and weren't consumed with having to find food all day, every day.
I'm still not quite getting the answer I'm looking for though. In that simply how do we know there was no pre-big bang? As far as pre-big bang time goes, it obviously wouldn't be what our current concept and understanding of what time is. Time may not have existed pre-BB, if there was a pre-bb.
The problem is that your question is essentially nonsense. It's like asking how many sides a square triangle has.
Why is the concept of pre-big bang, and thusly pre-spacetime so nonsense? Obviously it does not fit into anything we can currently understand, but is there anything at this point that shows evidence to support that no pre-spacetime existed in any possible form?
Because it's unobservable. If there's something "outside" or "before" our universe (hah), we can't see it. We can't see anything before there was the radiated energy from the Big Bang... which, by the way, was the Big Bang. That's just the way it works. We can't detect anything else. Ever. If there was a previous "crunch" and we're on a "rebound" that's gonna go "back in" (which, given all evidence to date, is exactly what we're not experiencing because the universe is still expanding faster and faster... as you read this, it just got bigger... bigger now... bigger now... get the point... still bigger!), it doesn't mean jack shit because we can never know it. Our reference is confined to this Bang and it's the only Bang we're ever gonna get as far as we ever need to be concerned. Projects to see "outside" the universe are ridiculous... as in, I'm ridiculing anyone who has one. I'm not even a science guy and I think they're goddamn stupid. There's no amount of equipment that is going to allow you to see outside or before the universe.
See, unlike the chair comment above, while there is a probability that all the atoms in my ass and all the atoms in my chair could align and I could pass through the chair without harming myself or the chair, there's a 0% probability of you "seeing" something before some form of radiant energy existed in the universe because it's plainly impossible. Might as well wait around for that pony your parents never gave you as a child.
With use describing time as being experienced in a forward manner, and theorizing that time does infact move in a forward manner while the universe expands due to time and space being one spacetime, will time move in reverse with space during the big crunch? I guess the best analogy at this pount would be having two funnels aimed together, and the centermost finite point is either the moment of big bang, or what might be a reverse billionth of a second big bang. While this still goes into some form of multiverse theory I would imagine, is it possible that either before the bigbang (yes, I'm still saying before) time had wound down with space to reform the point at which it began, then well, began again?
Well, if the Big Bang didn't "start" time, then, this is the lone possibility. However, all indications are that, despite the mathematical nature of time, is that spacetime is expanding at an accellerating rate. I'm emphasizing expansion because that expansion is uni-directional, even if it's not uniform.
Sure, when I'm ready to stop I start getting better answers, at least what I would call better answers. It being unobservable means that I can go on just about any theory I want as long as it leads up to and coincides with how the big bang works... I just can't do anything with it. But the first half is where all the fun is. Hell, we could just be some kind of deity version of some kids science fair project.
On the subject of "outside" our universe, are there any theories being taken seriously on the possibility of leaving our universe? Like, finally figuring out what holds our spacetime continuum together, splitting it apart and seeing if it makes a hole to the next universe over? Sure... that example right there would only work in cartoons, but that's beside the point.
Hmm, here's something. Is it believe that there is an end to our universe or that it is endless? If it's endless, how does something without bounds expand? If it takes up an infinite expanse of space, how does it then take up an... infiniter (is that a word?) amount of space?
Hmm, here's something. Is it believe that there is an end to our universe or that it is endless? If it's endless, how does something without bounds expand? If it takes up an infinite expanse of space, how does it then take up an... infiniter (is that a word?) amount of space?
It (probably) doesn't take up infinite space.
There is a difference between boundless and infinite.
Look at the surface of a balloon (well, a sphere). The surface is a 2-dimensional plane. It has a finite area. But it is also boundless. It doesn't have any "edges." It doesn't have a beginning or an end.
Now, blow up the balloon. The surface area increases. That's how universal expansion works.
Hmm, here's something. Is it believe that there is an end to our universe or that it is endless? If it's endless, how does something without bounds expand? If it takes up an infinite expanse of space, how does it then take up an... infiniter (is that a word?) amount of space?
It (probably) doesn't take up infinite space.
There is a difference between boundless and infinite.
Look at the surface of a balloon (well, a sphere). The surface is a 2-dimensional plane. It has a finite area. But it is also boundless. It doesn't have any "edges." It doesn't have a beginning or an end.
Now, blow up the balloon. The surface area increases. That's how universal expansion works.
Yay, more things to make my brain hurt when trying to understand.
KurnDerak, just a kind of offhand question. How much math have you taken?
Enough to know I should have no future heavily relying on math. I used to be good at math in MS and HS, but college math has become my enemy, I've passed Survey of Algebra and thats pretty much it.
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It's a fun diversion for a few minutes until they get flustered and leave.
Touch, similarly, is an "illusion" created by our brains adapted to dealing with the underlying reality, which is atoms repelling each other over empty space.
Both meaning and the sensation of touch exist in our brains. They do not exist in so-called "underlying reality" of quantum wavefunctions. However, that doesn't mean the universe is "objectively" meaningless or that touch "objectively" doesn't exist. It just means that meaning and touch exist on certain levels of reality, but not others.
I had a great go with one of the crazy yelling guys on campus once.
We was yelling about intelligent design that die, so I said to him "look, I'll accept, for the benefit of the doubt, that your god is an infallible being. I'll also accept, for the moment, that this infalible being designed and created me. So tell me, how did he manage to mess up my eyes? If I was designed by an all-knowing, infalible God, then why do I need glasses to see right?"
He started stammering, and then eventually cme back at me with something about original sin. I cut him off saying "So you're calling me a sinner? You have no idea who I am or what i do. Without knowing me you have absolutely nothing to go on in that angle."
The crowd cheered and I walked away.
If the universe is in an infinite cycle, wouldn't that by definition mean that there is both a Pre-spacetime and a post-spacetime, though pre-spacetime was the previous universe before it shrank back to super dense then went through the big bang again to our current spacetime?
I'm still not quite getting the answer I'm looking for though. In that simply how do we know there was no pre-big bang? As far as pre-big bang time goes, it obviously wouldn't be what our current concept and understanding of what time is. Time may not have existed pre-BB, if there was a pre-bb.
Also, correction on mine. Last thing you quoted should say "it does explain where our current everything came from", which by saying this I mean at the very least our current itiration of the universe before it goes through the hypothetical cycle of shrinking, condensing, and then Big Bang again.
I also wasn't asking if it always existed or came from nothing, I was asking how, or well, if it's even possible to know how at this point.
Another question, is it possible that space time more or less funneled into and then back out of the big bang? Either in a way that time was seperate and during the inital moments of our universe at the Big bang point, time fused with space to become spacetime? Kind of like, and really the first thing I could think of, you have hydrogen and oxygen but when combined into h2o you have water? Maybe a bad analogy, but I dunno what else to use.
I'm just full of fun questions, last one for this post. How do we know nothing exists out of our spacetime?
Other than the bit about different levels of reality, which just strikes me as being a bit too vague, that doesn't necessarily contradict or invalidate what I have said so far. I also question whether or not ideas about meaning and the sensation of touch exist in the same manner within our minds, but admittedly my knowledge regarding the mechanics of these thing is far from complete.
I think you are using perception and reality pretty interchangibly here.
Well... they are.
Or, alternatively, what Being was like before beings.
I mean, a lot of the difficulty here is that time, when you think about it, is weird. What does it mean to say that time progresses and has a "beginning"? What does it mean to say that time is part of the same fabric as space? Hawking suggests that we experience time in a "forward" direction because of entropy. The chemical processes in our brain—the processes that make our consciousness emerge—arose around the physical process of entropy, which in turn causes us to experience time in the same way that entropy moves.
In any case, it's incorrect to think of the big bang as a "transition," because that assumes there is a time when something exists in some other form before the big bang. There might be, but there might not be, and there's no reason to think there is. It looks like time itself doesn't go back any earlier than the big bang, in the same way that the direction of "north" doesn't go any further north than the north pole.
Okay. Pretend that the surface of the Earth is the universe. The Big Bang is the North Pole. When you travel "south" you are moving forward in time.
Now, keep on traveling south/forward in time. Moving towards the equator, the universe will expand (the circumference of the earth gets fatter). Then the universe will start to contract. Then, at the south pole, there will be a "big crunch." Then a reverse big bang as you start going north again. And so on.
This is a huge simplification, the actual universe is obviously not shaped like the 2-d surface of a sphere, and we also have no idea if the universe oscillates like this or what. But that's how it would work. There isn't a time "before" the universe in the same way that there isn't a direction "north" further north than the north pole.
Mostly Occam's razor at this point.
That's kind of the problem. All of the analogies you could used are based on the concepts of space and time. A funnel takes up space. The act of funneling occurs in time. These things only exist within the universe.
Well, part of it depends on how you define "exist."
To take an example within our universe—quantum particles: do they exist? If you take a photon (that's a particle of light), it exists at any moment as a cloud of probability. You can't say where a photon is or how fast it's traveling with any amount of certainty, because there is no answer to the question. According to quantum mechanics, the photon only has a probability of existing at any given point in spacetime, until it interacts with something else.
So does the proton actually exist before it interacts with something else? That's a tricky question—it only has a probability of existing. Does the wavefunction—that is, the mathematical equation of the photon that describes all of its possible states and positions over time—exist? I don't think so. At least, it doesn't exist in the sense that most people mean when they say the word "exist." Rather, existence—in the sense most people use it—is defined as interactions between quantum particles that produce quantum decoherence, collapsing the wave function.
Similarly, do mathematical concepts and laws "exist"? Does a triangle? Do the numbers 1, 0, π, e, and i exist? They aren't made of spacetime or matter and energy, which is how most people define "existence." And yet, our existence seems to obey mathematical laws.
I honestly don't know. I'm tempted to think that our universe—including the big bang and everything that happened afterwards, and all the laws that govern the behavior of physics, chemistry, biology, and philosophy—is simply a subset or a special case of mathematics.
So, I think I'm circling back to something previous now, but how do we know that there was no time, in seperate time from space or in some form of space time, in any moment leading up to the big bang?
I doubt it will serve me any real purpose, but I can go against the analogy of a movie for a bit. Sure, the movie it self does not actually happen before the beginning of a movie. If you're sitting down to watch a movie, there is no movie before the first frame. I would call pressing play the big bang, as that is the moment everything begins, and from there the movie (universe) unfolds. The problem with this is that there is existence outside and before a movie that is entirely detatched from the movie. In such a way, how is it not possible that something (god or even a pre-big bang big bang sort of event) was more or less acting as the we do when we push the play button. It was more or less the trigger that set off the beginning of the universe, spacetime, and all of the known existence.
If my understanding of time is correct, mass and energy can, if great enough, interfere with time. Then, with the amount of mass of the initial matter during the first billionth of a second of the universe, is it possible that the energy and mass both combined at that single point was enough to destory, alter, or something change a previous spacetime and thusly start what is our spacetime continuum?
If you look out at distant parts of the universe, you are seeing light from billions of years ago. We know this because light only travels so fast, and so it takes a lot of time to get to Earth from faraway.
Looking at such distant lights, we've seen that all galaxies are speeding away from each other. This means that the fabric of space, itself, seems to be expanding at a knowable rate.
The Big Bang is simply what you get if you take this expansion and run it backwards, until you get to a single point—the "singularity." Scientists have done this and it's consistent with a whole bunch of other stuff we've seen. The physical processes early on, miliseconds after the Big Bang when everything was just a super-hot soup of energy, are also consistent with a lot of the stuff we've measured from quantum mechanics. So we are almost positive that all of space was once just a single point—the "Big Bang."
Going back to Einstein, what happens to space also happens to time. They don't exist apart. So you can't say that all of space collapses to a point in the Big Bang but time proceeds as normal.
The problem, again, is that your analogy here deals with things that involve space and time—a play button, pressing a button, moments, etc.
There's no evidence that there is anything outside the movie. There's no VCR, no finger, no flow of time in which a button can be pressed. There's not even a tape on which the movie exists. It's just a movie, and that's it.
I don't think that's how it would happen—but a lot of people have proposed a "multiverse" where our universe is one of many and there are/were/have been many Big Bangs. But if this is the case, it just pushes the problem back a step. You're still stuck with explaining where the first universe in the multiverse came from.
Because with the big band came "things." Time is a relationship between things. If there is no relation between things, there is no time.
We are still in a hunter gatherer society. And it's not just for cars and jewelry, the vast majority are gatherers. A few are hunters. However instead of hunting wild animals, they decide instead to simply grow their own. So these hunters have cattle, and chickens, and piggies. Then they kill them. Well they have too much to make use with, so they come to us, the gatherers. They've already got the weapons they need, for the killing, but their tools have evolved from rocks and sticks to machinery, and they need oil to make sure their tools keep working. Just so happens there's a gatherer over in the desert gathering up some oil.
But, it's hard to take a few dead chickens to him, and some beef tongue, and get a respectable amount of oil to keep the hunt on. So instead, the hunter goes through a third party. This party trades with him currency, for his meat, which he then trades for what he needs to continue to hunt.
It's easier to hunt animals that you control, than it is to hunt roaming, wild animals. Just as it is easier to gather crops, that you've planted, versus finding them growing wildly. And just as in the primitive days, people had to find and gather what was necessary to build tools. But the tools are more advanced, and you can't just find a good rock, and a stick. Now you need to dig deep to find the rocks you need, instead of chipping away at them to form something useful, we instead melt it down, and craft it into something useful. Just as our ancestors crafted jugs to hold water in. As it's easier to have water right next to you, than it is to go down to the stream every time you want a drink.
We are still a hunter gatherer society, and just as having a nice buckskin tunic with eagle feathers hundreds of years ago got you respect and admiration in the tribe. Having a big dick, and fast car gets you the same in our tribe today.
Also, most species of cats (tigers, lions, domesticated) kill for pleasure. Orcas, and dolphins. Primates. Hell, there's a tribe of bonobo chimps who committed genocide on a pack of worthless, beneath them monkeys, seemingly because they made too much noise. Then when the monkeys tried to hide, the chimps took up sticks, and used them as weapons to continue killing them. The monkeys tried to stay out of reach of the apes, they got a long stick and stabbed them to death. All simply because they made too much fucking noise. Now say "we're the only species that kills someone cause they said "your mom is fat". It's not true.
As for the virus thing, horseshit. It was cool in the Matrix, cause the Matrix was a fictional movie. Know what else is cool in make believe. Unicorns, and pixies. Time travel, and super powers. But it's bullshit make believe, and using that as an example of whats wrong with the world is a cop-out.
The fact is we are the earths golden child. We were born into a world of kill or be killed, the strongest survive. And we dominated that playing field. It took us awhile though. We got our assholes ripped open by bears, lions, bugs, and colds. But eventually we evened the playing field by harnessing nature itself. Fire. We took a once great enemy and turned it into an ally, and used it to increase our chances at the game. Eliminated cold and disease from uncooked meat, used it to turn a simple rock into a mighty weapon.
The next time that big ol' bear came a knockin' we simply shot it, and said, "Yeah well fuck you!". And now there is no animal that can stand up to the human animal. Sure if a tiger gets you under their favored conditions, a single human may lose. Hell sometimes the tiger will just show us that we aren't quite what we think we are. Making sure that we aren't too confident in ourselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH8LQPKx7fE
But in the end, should we choose, we can eliminate the tigers as a whole. If oneday we decide, man tigers are fucking too many people up, then you know what, we gather, and we fuck the tigers up; and when we're done, there ain't no tigers left.
It is lucky for the tiger, that in modern day, we have decided that the best course is not to completely eliminate our enemies. As we are the ultimate players in the game. Even nature sometimes fails to weed us out, we've become so good at the game, the "natural" obstacles aren't much of an obstacle for us anymore. Nature throws a fire our way, we put it out. Sure a few individuals may lose their dwelling for awhile, but they are not out of the game anymore. They find shelter amongst other humans, and we rebuild. A pesky river keeps flooding us out, damn that bitch up, or build higher. Earthquake? Design buildings to withstand the shaking.
Sure there are some forces we just have to buckle down and face, such as a hurricane or tornado. But in the end, it doesn't turn the favor against us. We are just inconvenienced for a bit. And when nature throws everything against you, and the only response is, "Fuck, now we have to clean some shit up, instead of playing my new video game." you know you've won the game.
But maybe one day "nature" will decide we're unbalanced. Well it will be very hard to get rid of us, and the only real way is to hit the reset button, which will also wipe out what we haven't decided isn't necessary by that time, and start over from scratch. Assuming, by that time, we haven't decided to move on, and play the game on a another planet.
TL;DR:
Nature is a game, and we're the star players.
How is it known that there were no "things" in any form before the big bang?
Edit:Bah, it doesn't help to put in a quote to respond to if I forget my response
The main thing I'm going to look at here is "I don't think that's how it would happen". Is this because based off of Enstein theroems on spacetime and further knowldge along this path by other very intelligent people this is a very unlikely course of events that would lead to the big bang and our universe as it is now, or does it just seem unlikely to you? I'm actually quite curious if it is in someway possible for space and time to be... I guess a mix between sewn and fused together might be the right way to put it, from being seperate if the known universe was somehow sent down to a focal point which was the beginning of spacetime and our universe. Space and time could have been drastically different before that moment, and the matter and big bang are the result, and possible also what caused them to be one thing instead of two seperate things.
One thing I've wondered, but agian, at this point an unprovable theory. Is it possible for there to be some aspect of our universe, either an unseen force (such as gravity or time) or something so small that we've never been able to directly see it or it's effects, that could actually change how we see the way the universe works?
One final thing on this that I've heard but I want to know if it's considered true. I had a teacher once say that only a hand full of people on the planet that completely understand the theory of relativity, and thusly most of if not all of the rest of einstein's theories of spacetime and so forth.
Its not some kind of secret, arcane knowledge, but it is very advanced physics. I'd imagine only professors and grad students specialising in that area could be said to "completely understand" it. Whether that counts as a handful or not is up to you.
Yeah, we can find something unexpected whenever we get CERN up and running. There is potentially many, many, many things we could find that would change how we assume the universe works. We could find dark matter or figure out how dark energy works or the mechanism by which gravity functions.
There are probably more unanswered question in physics now than there have ever been before.
I don't know that the implications of Einstein's theory necessarily mean that space and time could not, by their nature, exist as separate things. But that's quite a stretch, the entire process of gravity seems to revolve around them acting as a single thing. And there's also a lot of evidence that time, itself, doesn't exist, but is rather a consequence of entropy—the inevitable disordering of the universe.
You mean, once we discover it?
Quantum mechanics has completely changed how we see the way the universe works. Much of QM basically involves smashing matter together at high energies to see what pops out—and the stuff that pops out generally gives us great insight into the nature of the universe. The point of the Large Hadron Collider is to discover a particle that could explain what mass is, the Higgs boson. We're also looking for a particle that explains gravity.
So yeah, there's a lot for us still to discover. But any change to how we look at the universe also has to take into account the evidence we already have. For example, before Einstein, there was Newton, whose laws worked incredibly well. Einstein's theory disproved Newton's, but the things that worked in Newton's theory still work in Einstein's theory.
Probably true. I certainly don't understand it too well. My physics major friend said that in order to really understand it, you have to understand the math, which is hard.
The main issue though, I think, is that relativity describes concepts that are so far removed from our everyday experience—it's like trying to understand how to drive a car when you're a fish. The same is true for quantum mechanics. We humans, and our brains, evolved to interact with a certain size of phenomena—larger than cells and smaller than planets. If you go too far beyond those scales, reality simply works in a completely different way, and we don't really have the equipment to easily grasp it.
You've said this before, and I will always be here to contradict you.
You say that I never actually touch the keyboard, and that touch is an illusion. This is supposedly because the atoms in my hands never bump nuclei with the atoms in the keyboard. But I don't think that means touch is an illusion, or a hallucination--when we originated the word 'touch' and the concept of 'touching' we had no idea of the atomic structure of matter, or the distribution of mass in solid objects; what we denoted when we said 'touch' was just the commonsense process of touching things. When we discovered atoms, did we also discover that we had been speaking wrongly all that time? No, we just discovered more information about what happens at the microscopic level when we touch things--namely, that electromagnetic forces in each body repel one another.
Namely: it is "true" that we touch things, even though it is not "true" that our atoms do not physically contact one another? That truths in the macro-world are true even if the underlying physics of the micro-world work differently?
Obviously it's not some kind of secret, it's just very advanced physics which I've seen Physics 101... not everyone can even get that. I guess at this point the amount of people who understand would be higher and continually growing as we as a species continue to expand our understanding... and well, our ability to dumb things down for people to understand.
I don't even remember exactly who said it at this point, it may not have been a teacher but I think it was.
Also, I missed one of Qinju's responses from before which would have helped a hell of a lot. It does raise one or two more questions.
With use describing time as being experienced in a forward manner, and theorizing that time does infact move in a forward manner while the universe expands due to time and space being one spacetime, will time move in reverse with space during the big crunch? I guess the best analogy at this pount would be having two funnels aimed together, and the centermost finite point is either the moment of big bang, or what might be a reverse billionth of a second big bang. While this still goes into some form of multiverse theory I would imagine, is it possible that either before the bigbang (yes, I'm still saying before) time had wound down with space to reform the point at which it began, then well, began again?
Or, simultaniously the big bang went in two directions, sending spacetime forward how we experience it while also sending it backwards so that it is a parallel spacetime which is expanding the same yet opposite of ours. Where it begins equal to how ours ends, and ends where our universe began. How to make an analogy.... um,.. think of a song that begins and ends exactly the same, say three notes (A B# A) so that forward and backward it's the same. Play one forward (Our universe, or Universe 1) while the other backwards (parallel universe, or universe A) and they begin and end exactly the same.
So, who would have guessed that a thread starting off about hating people's pretense for claiming to have real knowledge would change to an argument about if we should revert to out former hunter-gathering society, if anything is real, questions on roles in nature and extinction cycles, if morals and ethics really exist or if they are even the same thing or not, something about circumcision and atheism (I stoped following half of the thread around then), and me taking a crack at spacetime and big bang theoroms.
Also, EWorm, growing one's own food in place of hunting and gathering for it is actually, if I'm not mistaken, the definition of an agricultural society and not a hunter-gatherer society.
So touching is an ontological relationship between two things?
come one come on baby I'm so clooooooose
I dunno, you were getting into levels of reality stuff that I'm not totally on board with.
I definitely agree with you that it is incorrect to make the inference: "it's all just atoms and shit bumping around, therefore life has no meaning." If anything, our experience as rational agents in the world should be enough to demonstrate to us that atoms and shit bumping around can have meaning.
That actually depends on how you define touch. If you define it by the actualy physical contact of two or more objects, then no, we never actually touch anything. If you define it by the sensation we get when use our sense of feeling to touch and object, then I would say that is very real.
I would argue though that saying touch is a hallucination in our brain is wrong. Our sense of touch is derived from the feeling of repulsion between the electrons in our body and whatever object we attempt to make contact with, and our mind simply doesn't know to process it that way so it is processed as if we actually touched the object.
I also don't know that time can even be said to have a "direction" without some kind of consciousness to experience it as such. You get into "if a tree falls in the forest" territory. Presumably, you can't have conscious entities with a reverse entropy process because our brains evolved around chemistry that depends on entropy. So in a way, time can't move in reverse, because the perception of time coudln't move in reverse.
I think you're just wildly speculating here and also getting back into square triangle territory.
I'd recommend taking some time and let the idea of relativistic spacetime settle into your brain, because it really is hard to comprehend and requires you to fundamentally rethink the way you imagine reality.
Touching might not have any perfectly precise or interesting analysis, since it exists as a somewhat vague natural language term.
So, maybe?
ughhhhhh
indecisiveness?
way to ruin the mood, MrMister
And yea, the parrallel but opposite/reverse theory was wild speculation because it sounded cool at the time. Though if it started at the end, wouldn't time just go in reverse like hitting rewind on our spacetime? I know that most likely sounds silly, but do we know at all what reverse time would do to matter and entropy or is everything there speculation?
Hmm, random thing that might be a clear sign I should make like darwin and go to bed. Is a pyramid technically a 3-D squaretriangle?
Well, holeeeeyy sheep shit, guess what just happened to me?!?!
Because it's unobservable. If there's something "outside" or "before" our universe (hah), we can't see it. We can't see anything before there was the radiated energy from the Big Bang... which, by the way, was the Big Bang. That's just the way it works. We can't detect anything else. Ever. If there was a previous "crunch" and we're on a "rebound" that's gonna go "back in" (which, given all evidence to date, is exactly what we're not experiencing because the universe is still expanding faster and faster... as you read this, it just got bigger... bigger now... bigger now... get the point... still bigger!), it doesn't mean jack shit because we can never know it. Our reference is confined to this Bang and it's the only Bang we're ever gonna get as far as we ever need to be concerned. Projects to see "outside" the universe are ridiculous... as in, I'm ridiculing anyone who has one. I'm not even a science guy and I think they're goddamn stupid. There's no amount of equipment that is going to allow you to see outside or before the universe.
See, unlike the chair comment above, while there is a probability that all the atoms in my ass and all the atoms in my chair could align and I could pass through the chair without harming myself or the chair, there's a 0% probability of you "seeing" something before some form of radiant energy existed in the universe because it's plainly impossible. Might as well wait around for that pony your parents never gave you as a child.
Well, if the Big Bang didn't "start" time, then, this is the lone possibility. However, all indications are that, despite the mathematical nature of time, is that spacetime is expanding at an accellerating rate. I'm emphasizing expansion because that expansion is uni-directional, even if it's not uniform.
On the subject of "outside" our universe, are there any theories being taken seriously on the possibility of leaving our universe? Like, finally figuring out what holds our spacetime continuum together, splitting it apart and seeing if it makes a hole to the next universe over? Sure... that example right there would only work in cartoons, but that's beside the point.
Hmm, here's something. Is it believe that there is an end to our universe or that it is endless? If it's endless, how does something without bounds expand? If it takes up an infinite expanse of space, how does it then take up an... infiniter (is that a word?) amount of space?
There is a difference between boundless and infinite.
Look at the surface of a balloon (well, a sphere). The surface is a 2-dimensional plane. It has a finite area. But it is also boundless. It doesn't have any "edges." It doesn't have a beginning or an end.
Now, blow up the balloon. The surface area increases. That's how universal expansion works.
Yay, more things to make my brain hurt when trying to understand.
Enough to know I should have no future heavily relying on math. I used to be good at math in MS and HS, but college math has become my enemy, I've passed Survey of Algebra and thats pretty much it.