h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the beginning, before Life, the Universe and Everything
there was only one thing -
Time ...
Unlimited quantities of it ...

God must therefore be Time and Time must therefore be God.

You could have this idea made into a t-shirt slogan and start
a new religion but probably not many people would join.
People here on Earth like the idea that God is in their image.
They like to see him every morning when they look in the mirror.

Didn't time start when the universe started. Therefore there is no before the beginning of the universe.

I appreciate your comment Ste. Thanks for your contribution.

Many Earthlings believe that time began with the Big Bang. This is the time they mean by Space-time. Time moves at different speeds in different places in the universe.

Simpler folk have the happy idea that time began with the invention of clocks.

Before the creation of the universe as we know it a different kind of time existed. Think of it if you like as Time/BC - Time before creation. Earthlings cannot imagine this concept - let alone prove it.

There was always time even when there was no time. And there always will be time ... even if the universe flies apart into oblivion, falls into an enormous black hole or is blown to smithereens by colliding with another universe expanding in the opposite direction.

Time is a dimension like any other, you need a coordinte to locate yourself in it/ It isn't special.
Therefore to argue time before the begining of the universe also allows the argument that you have the other dimensions, height, width, length before the big bang, but then whats the big bang, the argument time was before the big bang suggests the whole universe existed before the big bang, which it didn't

Maybe it's another kind of time, a time not requiring normal big bang generated dimensions.
Consider the Aboriginal concept of Dreamtime for example.

time is still the same as any other dimension. To suppose you can have a "different kind of time" is also to suppose you can have 'different types'of width, height, length. This still involves a universe before the big bang.

If we reduce, in our imaginations, the Milky Way Galaxy down to the size of a chocoloate smartie, and scale down all the other galaxies and the distances between them by the same ratio, then the whole universe will fit, according to received science, into a space 1 km across.

What you are saying, it seems to me, is that there cannot be a time before the tube of smarties was opened (i.e. the so-called big bang) because time cannot exist before we have the smarties.

What I am saying is that the universe, that spilled tube of smarties seen through the Hubble telescope, is a free gift, and that there was a kind of time before the tube was opened.

Spatial dimension: is any of the three dimensions that are spacelike - that is, any except the time dimension. (Hawking)

Another way of looking at this:

Time is the interval between events.

I'm saying that the interval comes before the event and you are saying the interval comes after the event because of the sense that there was (so far as we suspect) no event preceeding the so-called big bang.
I'm saying there can be time before the event because as Hawking points out the time dimension is not spatial and not spacelike.

here you propose the exsintence of space before a big bang (even if it is a very small amount) and therefore seem to be suggesting that the big bang, when you open the 'smartie tube', isn't the creation/begining of the universe, merley a poit at which it begins to expand. If you can convince me of this I will believe you can have time before the big bang, I still believe that no time existed before the begining of the universe, as time is relative to the universe, and is linked to it.
Oh, and Hawkings recently renounced a lot of his theories on the nature of the universe.

Planck's quantum principle basically states that light waves (or any other waves) can be emitted or absorbed in discrete quanta, whose energy is proportional to their wavelength.
Imagine we are in a cinema, sitting there in the dark room, quietly waiting patiently for the film to start.
When the film gets going we cannot see the individual frames (unless it's an old Buster Keaton movie) and we see the film as a continuous running thing unless something goes wrong with the projector and the film jumps a couple of sprockets ... but that's another bag of tricks.
There's a possibility the universe is a bit like that Buster Keaton experience. It's not there (or here) all the time. The gap between the frames may be so small (Planck's quanta) that we cannot see it or measure it.
Space-time I may be persuaded to agree cannot exist outside of space (i.e. the universe before the so-called big bang); but like the audience waiting patiently in the cinema, I say that linear time (or waiting for the film to start) exists.

Sorry I'm returning so late.

Can you give me a link to this theory of the universe in frames please, I'd be intrested.

I don't fully understand, as light (or anything else) is both a wave and a beam of individual photons at the same time (wave-particle duality), and the waves are continous.

Also, if the whole universe does occur in 'frames', wouldn't this require all exchange particles to be proportionally linked to each other, ie same speed, same distance apart etc.?

Blubblub

Hello blub-blub. Sorry to disappoint but I can't give you a link because it's simply a daft idea of my own based on Planck's quantum principle and the fact that I've seen lots of Buster Keaton movies.

If light can only be emitted in discrete quanta - let's say light comes in packets of photons (I don't think it matters for the purposes of my argument that it moves in waves)then how could one explain why light always travels to or from the observer at the same speed. I merely put forward my idea. I've never heard that anybody else came up with an idea (or theory) to explain any of this - so until they do I'm using my own (as above).

Drago

Wave-particle duality dosn't suggest that exchange particles move in waves, but that forces are simultaneously beams of quanta and also waves of continuos energy at the same time, even though these two are both different things, if you just use the particle model you can't explain how light diffracts or inteferes. Therefore light must be a wave and so continuos.

Blub-blub