[ 3 / biz / cgl / ck / diy / fa / ic / jp / lit / sci / vr / vt ] [ index / top / reports ] [ become a patron ] [ status ]

2023-11: Warosu is now out of extended maintenance.

/sci/ - Science & Math

File: 388 KB, 1366x768, 1425845388641.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

7167866

Anonymous Thu Apr 2 03:50:12 2015 No.7167866 [Reply] [Original]

Either the universe has always existed, or it originated from nothing. This is atleast my understanding of it.

After thinking about this for a while, it dawned on me that... Maybe these two are, in a literal sense, the exact same thing? The standard response when asking a physicist what happened before the big bang is that the question is meaningless. Time did not exist prior to the universe appearing. And so, my thought is that, with this being true, a universe coming into being from nothing is essentially a universe that has always existed, since its creation necessarily was the beginning of time itself. It does not make sense to ask what came before, and so in the same sense it does not make sense to say that the universe did not exist prior to its existence, because when there is nothing, there is also not a lack of something (I'm not sure I'm wording this properly, but I hope you get what I'm trying to say)...

I'm a pleb law student whose understanding of science/math is superficial at best; I'd just like some actual science people to weigh in on this. Am I being retarded or does this actually make sense? I feel that I didn't really capture my thoughts properly in the words that I wrote, but I did the best I could (English is my second language) so if there's something you want me to expound on, tell me and I'll give it a try.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 03:54:34 2015 No.7167868 How can you be sure that time is in fact a vector? What if time is circular, we just are able to observe such a small portion of the arc we can never be sure what it really is.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 03:56:35 2015 No.7167874 >>7167868 I never really understood what people mean when they say that time might be circular. Could you explain?

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 03:57:56 2015 No.7167876 >>7167874 what if time acted like a sinusoidal function instead of a straight line? Or perhaps any function greater than a 1st order function?

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 04:14:25 2015 No.7167893 File: 29 KB, 300x300, the_big_lebowski___jeff_bridges_9616.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>7167876 >sinusoidal function >1st order function >I'm a pleb law student whose understanding of science/math is superficial at best

>>

Anonymous Thu Apr 2 04:40:49 2015 No.7167914

>>7167866
Analyzing time will always be paradoxical. Our physiology and psychology only allows us to perceive existence linearly. Death is the true reason we have created the concept of time at all. It's a way of chronologically organizing life events in a way that's understandable to our cognitive abilities. I do not think time truly exists in the natural world. It is conceptual. A tool used to make sense of things mathematically and scientifically. A helpful tool, at that, but proves to be trivial when extending it to the unknown. Thus, paradoxical and philosophical questions come to mind.

As for the circular anecdote - I think its a short way to explain that time, or it's implication, has a depth that is beyond human understanding. That it will continue infinitely, with or without us. There is no end destination or line - just the present.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 04:48:21 2015 No.7167919 Existence is basically set membership where the set is the universe. Without a universe, the concept of "existence" is meaningless.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 04:53:43 2015 No.7167923 I've always wondered why so many people care about this. I never felt such curiosity and "I don't know where the universe came from or if it always existed" is a perfectly good answer for me.

>>

Anonymous Thu Apr 2 05:28:06 2015 No.7167941

> a universe coming into being from nothing is essentially a universe that has always existed, since its creation necessarily was the beginning of time itself.
Yeah, that's pretty reasonable, I guess. I don't know that it needs to be as wordy as you've made it... but then again, you're a law student, so maybe it does. ;)

I take a bit of issue with the phrase "coming into existence from nothing" in this context, though. It didn't come from nothing; at any given time there was something. It's just that time appears to have a minimum value. Say that value is t = 0. No matter what time you're at, say t = 1, you can always get closer to that minimum; and no matter what time it is now, there was always something in the past. From t = 1, there was t = 0.5. From there, t = 0.3 was in the past. t = 0.0004 was in the past relative to that. And so on. And there's no such thing as t = 0... just values of t that are as close to 0 as you like.

In mathematical terms, it's an open set.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 05:31:33 2015 No.7167944 >>7167893 >I'm a pleb law student >thinking that being a law student puts you anywhere near above regular pleb status >i know what you said >i know what you meant fucking pleb

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 05:33:44 2015 No.7167947 >>7167866 >Either the universe has always existed, or it originated from nothing nice baseless assumption, didnt read the rest of the autism

>>

Anonymous Thu Apr 2 05:44:57 2015 No.7167956 [DELETED]

[DELETED]

I really dont understand any of these threads.
We know that virtual sub_atomic particles 'pop' into existence.
Mathemeticians are telling us there is a quantum foam structure to our entire universe, permeating everything (speculation).
The definition of nothing has to be the abscence of anything, anything at all.

If there is nothing, then something cant just start existing. Nothing means no space-time, no matter, no quantum foam, no virtual particles, no time, no 3 dimensions, 2 dimensions or 1 dimension.

There is literally nothing for anything to exist in.

So if nothing is a logical possibility, then there has always been something, we cant know what that is, but something has always existed and always will.

>>

Anonymous Thu Apr 2 05:53:21 2015 No.7167959
File: 47 KB, 306x469, 1422624883154.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

I have absolutely no evidence for this, but somehow I feel that we are because we can. How can there be something? How can there be nothing? To me it feels unreal an illogical. Even if we existed in some sort of matrix, there had to be a creator, and a creator for the creator (And so on.). Doesn't this seem impossible? since every layer of simulation would be more dumbed down?

Are we here simply because we can? Is this world that cruel?

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 15:11:43 2015 No.7168678 Time is perceived to be linear because entropy appears to be going in one direction (always increasing)

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 15:13:27 2015 No.7168682 >>7167947 what are the other possibilities

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 15:14:35 2015 No.7168684 >>7168678 ffs, stop conflating time with entropy.

>>

Anonymous Thu Apr 2 15:18:45 2015 No.7168691

>>7167866
aerospace engineering grad fag here
i dont know much about theoretical physics and related subjects, but i can assure you the reality or even the assumptions about such stuff far more complicated than fancy sci books/documentaries
if you are really interested learning them, you should just quit law and start studying physics/maths and go for a suitable masters degree, otherwise your knowledge will always be shit

anyone can know the history of aeronautics than me, but please leave the thinking part for trained people

>inb4 aerospace eng is shit

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 15:26:14 2015 No.7168706 >>7168691 AeroE is a shit. Jelly of your recent job market boost though.

>>

Anonymous Thu Apr 2 16:59:29 2015 No.7168856

>>7168684

Since perceptions of time is pretty abstract, it's hard to define/represent it without natural phenomena. I would say anthropomorphic interpretation is time is definitely related with a similar interpretation of entropy. Someone had mentioned death is the reason humans have established our perception of time

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 17:53:51 2015 No.7168944 >>7167866 what physicist really mean with "the question is meaningless" is not that everything before time is meaningless, it is literally meaningless to think about the origins of the universe, since it's not measurable in any known sense.

>>

Anonymous Thu Apr 2 19:47:50 2015 No.7169136

>>7167866
So one time I was wondering what it was like before I was born.

But, it wasn't like anything before I was born, because it was before I was born, so to ask what it was like is a meaningless question. Naturally, the conclusion is that I have therefore been since there was anything for it to be like, meaning I have always existed, and will always exist, as long as it's like being me.

Then I started freaking out, because I didn't want to exist forever because forever is a really long time and fuck that.

Don't worry though; I eventually realised that the paradox is only caused by some combination of language, our lacking/imprecise lexicon and our neurology.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 19:49:57 2015 No.7169141 >>7167919 So the universe is the set of all sets that exist?

>>

Anonymous Thu Apr 2 19:57:41 2015 No.7169163

>>7167866
>The standard response when asking a physicist what happened before the big bang is that the question is meaningless Time did not exist prior to the universe appearing.
That's the standard autism response coming from autistic physicists. The reality is that you CAN ask the question "what came before the big bang" but only if you define "before" as a measurement of some other variable instead of time that might exist independent of our universe. Maybe there is more than just the universe but right now we really dont know so nobody bothers unless you can come up with an experiment to test your theory with.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 20:13:48 2015 No.7169214 >>7167919 >Existence is basically set membership where the set is the universe. Without a universe, the concept of "existence" is meaningless. There is nonsensical. You can't construct the universe as a set under any axioms.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 20:14:48 2015 No.7169216 >>7167959 What about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

>>	Imnot Arobot Thu Apr 2 20:57:34 2015 No.7169277 File: 25 KB, 250x250, robotdance.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>7167866 >Either the universe has always existed, or it originated from nothing. >atleast There may be more than only those two alternatives.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 22:58:02 2015 No.7169568 >>7169163 This is true actually. The notion that there is no before the big bang necessitates non-absolute, or only-relative time. It's like saying 'What is BC? Our calendar starts at 0AD; there was nothing before then.'

>>

Anonymous Thu Apr 2 23:24:09 2015 No.7169609
File: 31 KB, 375x521, kant.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>7168682
There are possibilities that we are not even aware of as being possibilities because our mind is working with a set of categories, filters, and intuitions that just don't comprehend beyond the rules of the mind we are born with. In other words, read Kant.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 23:47:49 2015 No.7169659 >>7169609 What books by Kant do you recommend reading?

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 2 23:51:22 2015 No.7169664 >>7169659 Critique of Pure Reason Logic

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 3 00:06:29 2015 No.7169704 >>7169163 >explaining things in a way that is accessible >autism

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 3 01:58:14 2015 No.7169841 If it originated from nothing, then it HAS always existed. Then it'd have a beginning but there would be nothing before it came into existence.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 3 02:21:09 2015 No.7169862 Numbers are human invention. We cannot understand the world through human inventions. Thank you for your time.