Yet another round of painful periodontal surgery today. I’m too out-of-it to write much, or well. Some links, then:
‣ I’m going to have to get myself some of this, I think.
‣ 42 hours of Buckminster Fuller lectures.
‣ Charles Cooke on Ron Swanson.
‣ Every satellite orbiting Earth.
‣ No Big Bang?
‣ World’s simplest electric train.
‣ A familiar toy, if you’re old enough.
‣ An interesting blog.
‣ Rev’m Al vs. the teleprompter. (Weep for your nation.)
‣ The demon refuses to be exorcised.
‣ Ka-boom.
‣ The CEO of Gallup comments on unemployment.
‣ Edward Feser contra Singer on why sex is morally important.
Here also are two items that I’d like to say more about:
First, with a hat tip to the indefatigable JK, here’s Charlie Rose interviewing former DIA chief Gen. Mike Flynn. Do watch this if you can.
Second, here’s a response by the head of the FCC to President Obama’s “net-neutrality” intervention (yet another push for consolidation of power and control over every aspect of public life by this relentless autocrat). I think “net neutrality” is a bad idea, and will explain why later.
12 Comments
“Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning”
Is that also true of time? If so, how did we get to this point?
Jeffery Hodges
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HJH,
The absence of a beginning does not preclude duration.
But if the duration is infinite . . .
Jeffery Hodges
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HJH,
Infinite duration into the past precludes a beginning, but says nothing about either an end or an absence of an end.
“Infinite duration into the past precludes a beginning.”
This is the duration I’m interested in. Can there be an infinite duration into the past? Since each moment of time is finite, then how could a sequence of finite moments ever reach our time from an infinitely long past?
Jeffery Hodges
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Jeffery, the phrase “reach our time” implies a starting point in the past.
Instead, why not imagine an infinite series of moments stretching both forward and back from the present? In this way an infinite past is symmetrical with an infinite future.
The way I’ve always understood these things, even a finite past with a Big Bang doesn’t imply a beginning of the Universe in time. Because of the curvature of spacetime itself, this would be like imagining a place north of the North Pole.
Or:
Not a problem, actually. But it takes forever.
HJH,
It is hard (if not impossible) to make complete sense of infinity. The great stumbling block that confronts progress in string theory is the annoying re-occurrence of infinity in the mathematics. The only way string theorists can evade those stumbling blocks is via what they call “renormalization”, whereby they look for ways to eliminate them through some form of “cancelation”. But it is not clear that this is strictly kosher (rigorous) math.
General Relativity predicts that mass density and temperature becomes infinite at the center of a black hole. If that is indeed what occurs, how would you envision anything (including photons) reaching the event horizon of the black hole? I think you would have the same difficulty that you are having with infinite duration into the past.
Take my advice — don’t try to make too much sense of concepts that include infinity. It is bigger than both of us!
If you don’t like my previous response, I can offer one that a mathematician might prefer:
Pick any point in the past. You can easily compute how we got from that point in time to the present — it’s the elapsed time from that point to the present! But, but, how did we get from the infinite past to the present? Well, that point didn’t exist, because there was no beginning! QED
I know. That sounds like circular reasoning. Well, that’s what reasoning about infinity often comes down to — chasing your tail.
Bill Vallicella has an interesting post partly on this issue.
Jeffery Hodges
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HJH,
Vallicella is a very smart guy; I have been following his blog for some time. But he is first and foremost a philosopher.
As a physicist, my problem with philosophers is that they have an instinctual confidence in their ability to make sense of anything they are able to conceptualize. I don’t believe in such grandiose capability. I believe the human mind can conceptualize beyond its ability to explain. Moreover, I believe that the mind can conceptualize ideas that are impossible to explain, sometimes (perhaps most often) because the concepts are just plain wrong.
I have recently read a book co-authored by a philosopher and a physicist, both brilliant men in my opinion: The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy. I recommend it highly.
TBH, thanks for the reference and recommendation – I read a book by Smolin on the so-called “fine-tuning” of the universe many years ago and was quite impressed.
Jeffery Hodges
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