Concept of time

Read up a bit about the big bang. With current theories it's entirely possible for there to be nothing (in the sense that we regard it as). Physics at that level becomes something which is incredibly difficult to visualise mentally.

:confused:

Most theories on big bang only go back to milliseconds after the big bang.

One theory is it part of string theory?
Is that different dimensions slowly osocolate and when they crash into each other you get a big bang. So there's always something in such theories.

And going the other way, the universe just goes dark as atoms/energy just get far to spread out, so stuff is still there, but rather than clumped together for mavity to take effect. It all eats spread out and goes dark and cold.
 
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:confused:

Most theories on big bang only go back to milliseconds after the big bang.

One theory is it part of string theory?
Is that different dimensions slowly osocolate and when they crash into each other you get a big bang. So there's always something in such theories.

I wasn't going to go into too much detail, as that wasn't what the OP was looking for. Hence why I said nothing, in the sense that we regard "something" as.
 
Yes we know it's the attraction between masses, but we don't know why it exists.
Standard model still doesn't explain mavity.
It's still a very much unexplained phenomena. A few theories like general relativity exist though.
Have a look at the general relativity page, still many unknowns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity

If you think of matter only being able to move through space in accordance with the rules of classical physics layered on quantum mechanics, each "move" on the smallest planck level (change of spin state for example) is the exploration of a degree of freedom. For some reason matter wants to explore as many degrees of freedom as it can, and it can do that by connecting with other matter. So dust floating in space can only explore where momentum and background radiation pushes it, there is low entropy. But once it comes close to something big more probabilistic degrees of freedom open up and it clumps together and has higher entropy. Compare the low entropy space dust to high entropy Earth's core.

mavity is really the probabilistic exploration of degrees of freedom by matter, or on a more basic level the changing of information bits according to a set of rules which we don't understand beyond our concept of entropy. Once the program is understood it would unite classical and quantum physics and explain exactly how the universe works. The theory of everything.
 
Time is just the progression from low entropy to high entropy.

If the universe is infinite then what we call time must always have existed. If the universe isn't infinite then it's possible what we call time was created with the big bang.

Patrick Moore was asked the question "what was there before the big bang?" and he answered (with the assumption the universe isn't infinite) "there was no before".

This sort of thing is difficult, if not impossible, to totally get your head round.
 
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If you think of matter only being able to move through space in accordance with the rules of classical physics layered on quantum mechanics, each "move" on the smallest planck level (change of spin state for example) is the exploration of a degree of freedom. For some reason matter wants to explore as many degrees of freedom as it can, and it can do that by connecting with other matter. So dust floating in space can only explore where momentum and background radiation pushes it, there is low entropy. But once it comes close to something big more probabilistic degrees of freedom open up and it clumps together and has higher entropy. Compare the low entropy space dust to high entropy Earth's core.

mavity is really the probabilistic exploration of degrees of freedom by matter, or on a more basic level the changing of information bits according to a set of rules which we don't understand beyond our concept of entropy. Once the program is understood it would unite classical and quantum physics and explain exactly how the universe works. The theory of everything.

er er lol kwerk

Watched about 10 mins of that first documentary, didnt understand it so off it went. Going to give the 2nd longer one a go.
 
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What I find weird is how time can seem to stop sometimes. One example is if I glance at a clock in my house to check the time, sometimes the second hand is motionless, I watch it for a while expecting it to tick its was around the face, then start wondering if I have a spare battery in the man drawer, then it ticks & continues its way.

This freaks me out.
 
As the universe expanded from the moment of the big bang, the universe gained distance and speed. Distance created by the expansion from the central point of the big bang, and the speed of the expansion itself.
 
As the universe expanded from the moment of the big bang, the universe gained distance and speed. Distance created by the expansion from the central point of the big bang, and the speed of the expansion itself.

So would everything need to contract to end or simply expand so far, lose energy and freeze for it to end?

Was the universe stationary before the big bang? cant see how it could be considering what we know about explosions at the minute, so that cant be time?
 
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So would everything need to contract to end or simply expand so far, lose energy and freeze for it to end?

Was the universe stationary before the big bang? cant see how it could be considering what we know about explosions at the minute, so that cant be time?

If the universe was to stop expanding, mavity would end up just pulling everything to the "middle", and you'd get a big crunch.

Don't think of the big bang as an explosion in the sense that the word is usually used. Trying to model the big bang from an understanding of explosions would be completely wrong.
 
If the universe was to stop expanding, mavity would end up just pulling everything to the "middle", and you'd get a big crunch.

Don't think of the big bang as an explosion in the sense that the word is usually used. Trying to model the big bang from an understanding of explosions would be completely wrong.

Back to the middle in to its original state?

What would it be the mavity of?

You said earlier there was nothing before the big bang but now you say mavity will pull everything back in, so what does it become or was it it before the big bang.
 
Well time is a concept I suppose so we've sort of created it.

It would be possible for some other sort of organism to just have no concept of it at all and effectively exist 'without' it.

I'm not clever enough to think about that any further, so good day sir.

Not only that, but different cultures have different perceptions of time.

http://library.thinkquest.org/06aug/01010/timeCultures.html

The Pirahã Tribe[...] There is no past tense…because everything exists for them in the present. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, to all intents, to exist [...]

Lots of other interesting articles out there to read as well...
 
I don’t get that at all, how can a universe just start and finish. It had to be started from something and when it finishes thing just cant disappear. There will always be matter. For example if the universe explodes, what about the debris? There will certainly be elements left behind, dust, bits of rock etc?

You're being misled by the explosion analogy (which itself was originally coined to mock the theory!). There won't be debris left behind if the universe collapses again, since there won't be a universe for the debris to exist in.

I think you're imagining the big bang like you see it on Horizon - a giant explosion in the middle of a big dark space. That's a great analogy, but it's not strictly accurate. Another analogy (again not to be taken too literally) is the idea of the universe being like an expanding balloon. Let's pretend for a moment that we're flat, 2D creatures. Imagine a balloon, and imagine that out 2D flat selves live on the surface of that balloon. That surface of the balloon is the universe, and there is nothing outside of it to us. We can move around the balloon, like we can move around the globe, but we can't move up or down, the words 'up' and 'down' have no meaning for us. We live in a flatland - with me so far?

Now let's imagine the big bang in our flatland. The big bang here corresponds to the inflation of the balloon - imagine this universe starting as a tiny, tiny microscopic speck, then slowly inflating bigger and bigger until we have a full-fledged balloon. At the beginning, the balloon is so tiny that it has no surface area. Our universe is the surface of that balloon, so our universe doesn't exist in a meaningful sense. As the balloon inflates, its surface area gets larger and larger until there is enough space for 2D stars, planets and flat creatures like me and you to form. At the end of this universe*, the balloon deflates again, it's surface are shrinking back down to nothing. There can be nothing left over, because we live on the surface of the balloon, and the surface area shrinks and shrinks until there's nothing left. There's literally nowhere for any debris to be - no spatial dimensions, no time, nothing. The universe is shrunk to a tiny, tiny point where there's no backwards or forwards, no side to side, no up or down, and no forward or backwards in time.

You may need to read that a few times, I've never tried to explain that properly before and my exposition isn't particularly polished yet. :p

*: To pre-empt any criticism, let me say that I'm assuming a big crunch ending, ignoring accelerating expansion and dark energy, ignoring string theory or entropic fluctuation theories etc etc. That stuff is interesting, but superfluous to the point I'm trying to make here.


Standard model still doesn't explain mavity.

It's not supposed to, it's a particle physics theory. :p

That said, I take your point. Quantum mavity is still not well-formulated (except in string theory, which itself is incomplete), but we understand classical mavity on large scales pretty well. General Relativity is a bit more established than you give it credit for - it's a stunningly elegant bit of work that describes mavity on large (i.e. non-quantum) scales near perfectly.
 
Back to the middle in to its original state?

What would it be the mavity of?

You said earlier there was nothing before the big bang but now you say mavity will pull everything back in, so what does it become or was it it before the big bang.

So if the universe had "frozen" and stopped expanding, and there was no force to keep it expanding, then the mavity of everything in the universe would start pulling everything towards everything, resulting in a "big crunch". What that would produce is where the fun physics begins, and I don't know enough about the details to explain any more, but you're basically looking at forming a singularity of some nature (that's the unknown bit, as the rules of physics break down at the start/end of the universe).

Apologies for giving you a wiki page, but it's the first one from the search results and I'm lazy!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch
 
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