It would be similar to the Earth being round. A single person standing at any point on earth (except very high mountain on a clear day) would have a hard time imagining the slightly-oval sharp the Earth takes. Time, similiarly, doesn't have to be linear. If time IS the fourth dimension, it can be bent, possibly by extreme gravity.
If one assumes that "before" the big bang time didn't exist, then, what in the world constutites the concept of "before"? Therefore, it's likely that "something" did exist. What if, in its exaggeratedly simplfied form, "it" is humanly comprehensible. Say, something like a cycle. Sure we know that the universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old and will go on for a while, a long while, that is, compared to our pathetic yet grateful existence (a few million years), or even our solar system (4.5 billion years old). Anywho, this cycle I speak of is a cycle not unlike what we have on earth, days and nights pass and things happen again much in the same way. The only difference is that when the universe ends, it happens again with a big bang, however it's a warp that brings us back to the original big bang. Hence the cycle continues with no definite end or beginning.
It may not be the greatest idea but we got to give up physics as we know it. Gravity dictates most of the forces yet when its power increases, what we believe to be true is sometimes shaky. Now multiply that a billion times we get a vague picture of how unreliable our knowledge is. One thing we seem to have a solid grasp for is that the universe is expanding at a rapid rate. From observing the activities of a supernova, most astronomers come to the conclusion that expansion leads to explosion, eventually to a structrual collapse that sucks all matters back towards the center, energized by the incredible gravitational pull from the core. As far as we know all things in the whole universe are like one another. For example, our solar system is a smaller version of the Milky Way, which is a smaller version of the bigger galaxies near us, then of the groups of galaxies, finally of the universe itself. The fate of the universe can't be that different from what other stellar bodies inevitably go through.
The only real difference is, it won't go on to form another universe, it warps time back to the original state. My random educated guess of the life span of the universe is 1 centillion 531 billion years. Time does not move on, instead it moves in a cycle only once over a period of 1 centillion 531 billion years. (roughly 10^303, 10 to the 303rd power, years)
now tell me again how important insomnia is
6 comments:
I roughly recalled a book I read (A Brief History of Time?) mentioned that time itself, as we all know, is a dimension. It expands out from the singularity after the bang. This implies that "before" the bang, there is no time and therefore we cannot even talk about "before" with the big bang. Obviously, some physicists are quite unsatisified with this including Stephen Hawking. His latest book he published before(?) he said he gave up searching for the theory of everything seemed to have provided some answer in this respect.
By the way, the book I am refering to is The Universe in a Nutshell. It is fun but quite hard to fully comprehend.
I used to have this on my blog description: "People ask what happened before the Big Bang, but there is no 'before' the Big Bang, for time didn't exist." But then I thought the Big Bang is what we think happened only because we don't know any better. I'm pursuing the utimate truth in this. The universe must be an eternity or somthing similar to that. So what constitutes an eternity and where the hell is the begining? It might just be a cycle, for now.
About two years ago, I read an article in a magazine (Scientific American?) talking about some physicists theorized the fate of universe being cyclic versus the tradition of being linear. My first feeling is that ideologically this is something like the difference between how Buddhism and Christianity view the way the universe runs.
By the way, I think the big bang theory is not created out of nothing. If I am correct, it is implied by (general?) relativity. So if relativity is true (well, it is not refuted up to now), then big bang may well be the truth.
You may be interested to read this: how Stephen Hawking gave up searching for the "ultimate truth" based on the Godel Theorem.
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/strtst/dirac/hawking/
Hmm. I didn't know about the concept of "cyclic v.s. linear". Too bad I thought mine was original. Damn it!
Will read that Hawking peice. Thanks.
When you think about it. It IS linear.
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