TMF!

Simple question (well maybe not so simple), could an interminable amount of regressive turtle power suggest infinity and/or eternity of time exists? — 3017amen

I don't think time is real in the sense it exists outside of our minds. Assume time has a beginning, call it point X. We can always ask for any point like X the question, "what time was it before X?", implying time extends to infinity in the past. Yet, if the past is infinite, how on earth did we reach this point in time? Since the paradox arises because we assume time to be something as real as space, we must discard the idea of time being real. :confused:

Hey Buddy, you are my first follow(based on this initial question).

Personal non-answer answer:
I find very little interest in knowing: anything about the turtles I cannot see beyond with the tools my body can provide me with, but I know that I am limited in that respect. In addition, and partially based on that perceived shortcoming. I subscribe to the belief that micro/macro infinity is the only position to take within the realm of the scientific process without presupposing conclusion. Also, my vision may improve in my search for distant turtles.

I don't think time is real in the sense it exists outside of our minds. Assume time has a beginning, call it point X. We can always ask for any point like X the question, "what time was it before X?", implying time extends to infinity in the past. Yet, if the past is infinite, how on earth did we reach this point in time? Since the paradox arises because we assume time to be something as real as space, we must discard the idea of time being real. :confused: — TheMadFool

I agree. Particularly in context of the BB; something outside of time presumably created the energy necessary for time itself. But if time always existed in some way, shape or form sort-a-speak, then we are back to regressive (infinitely regressive) turtle power! Perhaps no less absurd than multiverse theories.

I agree. — 3017amen

I'm surprised. Optimism is yet to be vanquished.

:grin: :up:

Of course you could go Zeno on me — TheMadFool

Ah, good point: there is a mathematical limit in terms of mass to infinite spliting, a limit that is equal to 0 mass, just as there is a solution in the form if a mathematical limit in Zeno's paradox.

This limit may be what apokrisis called a "sea of U1 photons", though i'm unclear about the U1 part.

I find it hard to think of time as limitted.

though i'm unclear about the U1 part. — Olivier5

U(1) is just the simplest possible symmetry group. It is the symmetry of a rotating circle. And nothing is more symmetric than a circular object.

If you have a sphere, it always looks the same no matter how you rotate it. That is why the Greek Atomists imagined atoms as little spheres - the simplest material form.

A triangle (or tetrahedron) would have a more complex symmetry. The smallest turn of a triangle makes a visible difference. You can see right away something has moved. It is only after a 120 degree rotation that the triangle maps back on to itself as if nothing in fact changed.

Compare that to spinning a circular disc - one that has no marks to give the game away. Nothing visible ever changes no matter how furiously it is turned. The disc could be standing still for all you can tell.

Photons - as avatars of electromagneticism - have this simplest rotational symmetry. A sine wave is the trace carved out by letting a disc roll for a length by a mark on the circumference. So a photon - understood as a ray with a frequency - is just the simplest way to break the simplest state of symmetry.

It makes use of the two irreducible freedoms of nature under Noether's Theorem - rotational and translational symmetry. A photon rotates once and rolls one length - as the minimal definition of its existence.

At the Planck scale, such an electromagnetic event - a U(1)-expressing rotation + roll that marks a single wave-like beat of "hot action", something energetic happening - clearly happens in an unusual place.

Being confined to a spin and roll limited to a single Planck distance, it would also be the shortest, hence hottest, frequency event to ever exist. And energy being matter, it would also be the most gravitationally massive possible material event - so would curve the spacetime around it to a black hole extreme.

So it all becomes self defining. To break the simplest symmetry takes the simplest asymmetry - the combination of a spin and a roll that creates the mark, the trace, that is a spacetime-filling and energetic event. A single hot beat. The heat of that event defines the size of that spacetime (due to gravitational closure). And the size of that available spacetime in turn defines the heat that that even must have (due to the severest shortening of its frequency).

Ah, good point: there is a mathematical limit in terms of mass to infinite spliting, a limit that is equal to 0 mass, just as there is a solution in the form if a mathematical limit in Zeno's paradox. — Olivier5

So what I have just described is different in that instead the zero is about the zero sum game by which we can get "something from nothing" due to a symmetry-breaking that is based on a reciprocal balancing act.

A photon expresses the world of the circle. We can't tell if a circle is rotating. So that means that if reality is constrained by a generalised demand for maximum symmetry, then the ultimate best solution to that demand is to arrive at the shape of a circle. It is most stable shape in that it always must look the same.

A circle has translational symmetry as well because - without the help of outside reference marks - we can't tell if it is rolling along. This is the standard relativity. Motion is only detectable if the symmetry of the reference frame is broken in some way.

And as I say, putting a dot on the edge of a circle free to rotate + roll then counts as the most minimal mark, the simplest symmetry-breaking. The result is the "energetic event" of a spacetime frame that now contains a single sine wave.

We thus have a toy world described in reciprocal limits. There is both near perfect symmetry (U(1)) and near perfect symmetry-breaking - the dot on the circumference that reveals the still unconstrained "Noether" freedoms of the ability to spin, the ability to roll. The ability to thus mark an empty space constrained to perfect circularity with a sine wave event that the constraints can't in fact eliminate. And what can't be eliminated, must happen.

Real physics is more complex as the real Big Bang could not access the great simplicity of a U(1) world so directly. It actually had to constrain all the other possible symmetries - the many higher or more complex symmetries of group theory - and remove them from the fray first.

That created the shower of other particles with more complex rotational actions – the particles of SU(3) and SU(2) symmetries, according to the Standard Model. And even to get to U(1) perfection involves the Higgs kluge that cracks SU(2).

But the basic picture of what reality is seeking to achieve is to arrive at its greatest state of simplicity - as defined by the complementary limits of a perfect U(1) symmetry broken by a matchingly-perfect least form of asymmetry. The slightest blemish on the Cosmic cheek. :grin:

The Heat Death tells us that this perfection is where we will arrive in the future.

Given the discovery of Dark Energy (a new unexplained ingredient in the story), we at least know that the Universe is coasting towards a destiny where spacetime will be best described by a reciprocal U(1) structure of holographic event horizons and their "as cold as possible" black body radiation. That is, a de Sitter cosmology.

Spacetime will be devoid of matter. Blackholes will have gobbled up all remaining gravitating matter and spat it out as electromagnetic radiation. So spacetime will be empty with an average temperature of zero degrees K. But it will also be filled with the even radiance of a cosmic bath of photons produced by the quantum holographic mechanism - the Unruh effect.

These would be photons that - in effect - span the width of the visible universe in just a single wavelength. Their frequency would be measured in multi-billions of lightyears. A single rotation + roll that spans the gap that the speed of light can transverse.

So spot the connection. The beginning of spacetime - the Big Bang - and the Heat Death are mirror images.

Both are defined by that single U(1) based rotation + roll deal. Except at the Big Bang, the spacetime extent is the smallest possible, making the energy of the frequency as hot as possible. And at the Heat Death, it all has unwound to arrive at the complementary state of the largest possible spacetime extent and thus the coldest possible photon, the lowest possible energy wavelength.

Simplicity is always the goal. But because complexity has to be constrained first - all the other available higher symmetry states have to be got rid of along the way - it is only by the end of time that U(1) perfection (in terms of a simple circle and its irreducible symmetry breakings) is achieve.

That is why it isn't turtles all the way down. Existence is a push towards the limiting extreme that is simplicity. And that push is self-terminating in that the constraints (an insistence on arriving at maximal symmetry) contains within it the terminating thing which are those irreducible symmetry breakings.

Every kind of difference can be eliminated by U(1) circular symmetry, except a rotation and a roll. So already, the necessary blemish is built in to break that symmetry (in the simplest way).

Reality can go no further as there is no further splintering of the system arrived at. The constraining towards a symmetrical nothingness gets hung up on an irreducible grain of being. Things can go that far and no further - leaving reality as the coldest-possible fizzle of holographic event horizon radiation. Photons with the physical wavelength of the visible universe - that sea I speak of.

Charlie Lineweaver at ANU has written a bunch of decent papers about all this.

And as a caveat, Dark Energy remains a fly in the ointment. It is necessary to explain why spacetime expansion will get truncated by the de Sitter event horizon mechanism. But we need some further bit of machinery - another Higgs-like field or irreducible entanglement - to fold that into the final theory of everything.

As someone once said, explanations ought to be as simple as possible. But not too simple.

U(1) is the simplest possible story. But getting there was not a simple process as all other symmetries had the possibility of being the case. And the way they would then interact and entangle with each other becomes part of the story of where things actually wound hung up in practice.

The world of quark/SU(3) symmetry and lepton/SU(2) symmetry, plus the Higgs mechanism, is how we are all still hung up at that more complex level of things at the moment. The Universe is still breaking its way down through all those entanglements along the ultimate path.

The more complex symmetries have more complex spin states - chiral spin. And they thus have their own equivalent irreducible rotational symmetries. Higher level Noether freedoms that can't be eliminated directly.

By rights, in a symmetric world, matter ought to be annihilated by anti-matter leaving only radiation. But these complex spins produce uneven outcomes. So some matter survives. Quarks can then protect themselves by forming triplet structures like protons and neutrons.

And so that complexity could last forever. Proton and neutron crud messing up the empty perfection of a cooling and expanding void. A flood of ghostly neutrinos as well, messing up reality with their pointless SU(2) weak force interactions.

So long as black holes perform as advertised - hoovering up the crud and evaporating it into photons - the universe can get there in the end. SU(3) and SU(2) will be rendered relic memories. Maybe surprisingly, the Cosmos will arrive at the mathematically ultimate state of simplicity in terms of its symmetry - and the symmetry-breaking events, the holographic U(1) photons, needed to reveal that that symmetry in fact "exists".

The edge of the disc has to be marked to reveal the world within which it can rotate + roll. The blemish is needed to complete the deal that conjures "something from nothing".

I don't think time is real in the sense it exists outside of our minds. Assume time has a beginning, call it point X. We can always ask for any point like X the question, "what time was it before X?", implying time extends to infinity in the past. Yet, if the past is infinite, how on earth did we reach this point in time? Since the paradox arises because we assume time to be something as real as space, we must discard the idea of time being real. :confused: — TheMadFool

The begining of time (your X, or t=0) could be another mathematical limit, like what happens when the function 1/x gets close to zero. In this idea, there's no time before X because the universe never actually was at time X. And the reason the universe managed to reach this point in time is because at (almost) "start" everything happened (almost) infinitily fast.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, although the technicalities are largely wasted on me, I'm afraid. The way I understand your take, this perfect simplicity at at begining and end of time is still an unreachable limit, a state of affairs that never actually happened at any point in time. In other words, time and space and "the universe" is what happens between these two extreme, unreachable limits.

The begining of time (your X, or t=0) could be another mathematical limit, like what happens when the function 1/x gets close to zero. In this idea, there's no time before X because the universe never actually was at time X. And the reason the universe managed to reach this point in time is because at (almost) "start" everything happened (almost) infinitily fast. — Olivier5

Yeah, I know. The problem is we had to make an adjustment to a simple theory of a normal sequence of events and change it into something involving a more complex structure to time and causation, no?

That's true, we must think of time as a complex function of something else rather than a straight line from -inf. to +inf. But in my mind it doesn't follow that "time is an illusion."

my vision may improve in my search for distant turtles. — Scemo Villaggio

Ciao Scemo. I'm new here too.

I agree that our collective vision may improve in our search for distant turtles. That's the best we can do.

if time always existed in some way, shape or form sort-a-speak, then [...] — 3017amen

Isn't that already presupposed in your sentence (regardless of whatever span of time)?
Also, there couldn't have been a time when there wasn't anything, since there would at least have been time (check B Rundle).
Anyway, I'm guessing that whatever spans of time all lead to apparent absurdities because of our intuitive sense of sufficient reason which seems violated. As pointed out by @Banno (I think), J W N Watkins showed that "all-and-some" statements, of which the principle of sufficient reason is one, are both nonfalsifiable and nonverifiable. Might not be unconditionally applicable. In some post somewhere (that I couldn't quickly find), @180 Proof took the consequence of this (without any contradictions).

Isn't that already presupposed in your sentence (regardless of whatever span of time)?
Also, there couldn't have been a time when there wasn't anything, since there would at least have been time (check B Rundle). — jorndoe

If eternity is time and time eternity, then yes. But if you add the theory of the BB starting time itself, then that still presupposes something outside of time (eternity itself) creating in-time, temporal time (time as we know it).

If the measurement of time is based on mathematics (the common calendar and clock that basically describes mathematical intervals of time), and mathematics is known to be incomplete (Gödel), then perhaps one could simply analogize to some sort of eternity in time. Time itself, being relative and illusionary/paradoxical, is quite a comprehensive topic... .

From the Newton to Einstein descriptions (not explanations) of the universe, to what happened before the BB (dark energy, expansion/acceleration, inflationary universe, bubble multiverse, etc.) it remains a mystery as to why the BB occurred when it did, creating our existence. But once again, is it no less mysterious than conscious existence and/or self-aware beings who happen to be here wondering about it (?).

A sine wave is the trace carved out by letting a disc roll for a length by a mark on the circumference. — apokrisis

Wrong. It's a cycloid. Far more complicated than a simple sine wave, which it resembles superficially. :roll:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_wave#/media/File:ComplexSinInATimeAxe.gif

OK. Thought you meant rolling along its circumference.

:up:

Indeed, I did.

...something outside of time presumably created the energy necessary for time itself. — 3017amen

It's really important for you that god shows up somewhere in creation, hence this governs your understanding of physics. But it ain't necessarily so.

It's really important for you that god shows up somewhere in creation, — Banno

Thanks. He already has, I believe. At least St. Augustine is consistent with the current scientific theory of cosmological time, believe it or not. After all, (and otherwise) starting with the basics, what is the essence of causation itself :chin:

Or, think of it another way; doesn't turtles all the way down in itself, suggest an eternity of time, of some sort? It's in itself a regressive theory... .

So even Anselm is to be rehabilitated...

Your approach is not "where will the science take us?" but "how do we get god out of the science?". So you will impose ad hoc corrections to any objection that is offered, rather than reconsider your theistic assumptions; or you will ignore the objection.

So even Anselm is to be rehabilitated... — Banno

No he can't be rehabilitated because the irony is, his argument is a priori and unchanging.

But of course we're not talking about a priori logic are we? In the meantime, I wonder if causation itself is logically necessary for existence :chin:

I wonder if causation itself is logically necessary for existence :chin: — 3017amen

...and that question again displays your muddling of grammar and ontology.

The way I understand your take, this perfect simplicity at at begining and end of time is still an unreachable limit, a state of affairs that never actually happened at any point in time. — Olivier5

It is more complicated. The simplicity is about the Universe being in a state of perfect thermal equilibrium. That means its expansion - or its "cooling by expanding" - is "adiabatic". The system grows, but does so in such a smooth and even way that its internal balance isn't broken or disturbed. It retains its simplest possible state.

At the very moment of the Big Bang - given we are assuming it is represented accurately by the Planck limits - it would have had that thermal balance. But it almost immediately got disrupted by the quick succession of symmetry-breaking steps represented by the Standard Model of particle physics - SU3, SU2, SU1, and Higgs. And so the smooth flow - the development of the Universe as a spreading space containing a cooling material - got disrupted.

This is important for how we even imagine "time". A universe that is just the simplest thing of a spreading bath of radiation is essentially timeless. All action happens at the speed of light - c. And so there just isn't anything different to measure that temporal rate against.

It is only when particles become "massive" - once the Higgs field in particular gets switched on by the messy symmetry-breaking and particles begin to "weigh" something - that time has the kind of meaning it has for us conventionally. Mass makes it possible for particles to go slower than c. They can even be "at rest" from the right inertial frame perspective.

In effect, mass makes particles fall out of the general adiabatic flow - the spreading bath of mass-less radiation. There is some part of the initial heat of the Big Bang now lagging behind as crumbs of matter. A gravitating dust, as cosmology puts it. And that - emergently - gives us a new kind of temporal potential to be unwound.

The mass is moving about slowly as lumps of energy density. It is taking a variable time to do things - have interactions like lumps crashing into each other - while, making the constant backdrop, radiation continues to move at its single rate of c.

Ultimately - to erase this particular complexity and return to the maximal simplicity of a bath of adiabatically expanding radiation - all the lagging mass particles need to be swept up and boiled away into radiation by black holes. Time as we know it - a spectrum of possible rates between "rest" and c - will then disappear. There will be only a simpler kind of time that is the universal rate of an unchanging thermal equilibrium - a world of event horizons formed by light cones.

Now we get into the really head-spinning topic of de Sitter models. So I won't start that.

But the point is that "time" is defined by change. Or the ability for change to happen at a variety of different rates within the one world. And time as we know it only exists from soon after the Big Bang until about the Heat Death - that being the period of Cosmic history during which particles could be massive and so go relatively slower or relatively faster within the gradient of rates defined by the opposing limits or "rest" and c.

At the Heat Death, this kind of gradient will have been erased. Only a continuing c-rate flow will continue. But that is a kind of frozen state of no effective change. A vanilla and featureless state. So a state that is both eternal and timeless - at least viewed relative to our current "timeful" view of things where differences in rate are a thing that can matter.

Yet when viewed overall - as a trajectory from a point-like Big Bang to a de Sitter light cone Heat Death space that "freezes out" at a scale of 36 billion light years in diameter - there is clearly some other notion of "time as a global change in state" to be had here.

Something did happen. One view of it is that a lot of "hot stuff" - the initial Big Bang energy density - got exchanged for a matching amount of "cold stuff", all the vast empty space that could act as a sink in which that heat content could be "wasted".

But even that is a rather too simple description of the actual deeper simplicity in which the two things of spacetime and energy density would be unified under the description of a theory of quantum gravity or "theory of everything".

Time, as we conventionally imagine it - a Cartesian axis marked by divisions, an unbounded sequence of instants - gets radically rewritten as we go along here. Time becomes merely an effective "dimension", an emergent distinction. Time is only another way of talking about the possibility of change. And change is always relative to the possibility of stasis.

The simpler the state of the Universe, the less meaningful difference there is between change and stasis. The definition of an equilibrium is a state where differences don't make a difference. In an ideal gas, every particle changes place freely. But overall, the temperature and pressure stay the same. The gas is effectively in a timeless state.

So our very notion of time has concealed complexity. It is not a physically simplest state as we normally conceive it - living in a world that has lumpy mass blundering about at any old speed between rest and c.

At least with space, we accept it has the complexity of three dimensions. Maybe many more with the higher symmetry states modelled by String Theory.

But with time, we brush all its complexity under the carpet by just modelling it as a single extra "dimension" against which everything can be measured in some abstracted fashion.

This is why time is the issue to unpick in arriving at a final theory. And thermodynamics - as the probabilistic view of nature, the laws that deal with emergent statistics - would be the key to that.

...and that question again displays your muddling of grammar and ontology.
5 — Banno

I feel your pain, hence there are many languages about existence that are mysteriously metaphysical... LOL

Thanks, that's useful. It confirms my interpretation that when you evoke "a sea of U1 photons", you are talking about the unreachable limits between which time and the universe happen.

I wrote above that "we must think of time as a complex function of something else rather than a straight line from -inf. to +inf." What you are saying is that time is a function of different things moving at different speed. Otherwise there isn't any meaning to the notion of time, if all there is is photons/electromagnetic waves moving at a uniform speed C.

Makes a lot of sense to me. In fact I find it quite deep.

I think he is right. A dot on a circle spinning along a straight line traces a cycloid.

A dot on a circle spinning along a straight line traces a cycloid. — Olivier5

The disc rotates around, and rolls along, its origin. Check the gif I linked to.

In the gif you shared, the curve is traced by the sine dot going up and down on the vertical axis of the wheel, not by the dot on the circumference.

The dot on the circumference traces a curve called a prolate trochoid, ie something like this: