FeedCreatio Secula ex Infinitas
Friday, May 12, 2006 → by DanieruThis is definitely not the first time I have come across these ideas, although throwing the Cosmological Constant into the works is an approach I have not seen. What is it about a cyclical universe that so vexes people? To me it makes a whole lot more sense.The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory.
The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago. This mammoth explosion which created all the matter we see around us, was just the most recent of many.
The standard big bang theory says the universe began with a massive explosion, but the new theory suggests it is a cyclic event that consists of repeating big bangs.
"People have inferred that time began then, but there really wasn't any reason for that inference," said Neil Turok, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, " What we are proposing is very radical. It's saying there was time before the big bang."
Under his theory, published today in the journal Science with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University in New Jersey, the universe must be at least a trillion years old with many big bangs happening before our own. With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it. "I think it is much more likely to be far older than a trillion years though," said Prof Turok. "There doesn't have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large." - link
Beginning and end are completely human constructs. We witness the birth of a child - knowing too it's point of conception - and through 70 odd years of existence we imagine a simulacrum for whom the rest of the universe has a distinct and independent existence. The year starts January 1st, winter through autumn carve out the months as the Earth spins on through indeterminate space, never once defining a timetable for itself. These abstractions are conceptual tools wielded by human minds to bring order out of the chaos of reality. The universe never needed a beginning, or an end. For us to assume it does is symbolic of nothing more than our anthropic tendencies.Further still, I have oft before touched on the idea of multiple universes. Perhaps these realities compete with each other in Darwinian style competition to pass on their 'genetic' material to offspring-like baby universes born of their black-hole orifices. Our universe, in this conception, is but one in an ancestral chain which stretches back long before the birth point of the big-bang, perhaps off into infinitely elongated time periods. The multiverse has always, and will always be. For it to be any other way, for my common sense at least, is utterly oxymoronic, ridiculous and immaterialistic. From nothing there could never have emerged anything, for this, my multiversally aware friends, is impossible. The philosophy of creatio ex nihilo ('creation out of nothing') has long populated our imaginations with the Godlike entities who replenish the human soul from one life to the next; a cyclical passing much like the cyclical universe this 'new theory' now posits.
All is infinite. Nature is cyclical. Time is a perceptual illusion. Long live this infinite reality.
Creatio secula ex infinitas (cyclical creation out of infinity)...
Related forum topics:
- Thinkers Lay Out the Beliefs They Can't Prove
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- The Anthropic Principle, Extinction and the Fragile Nature of 'Intention'
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May 12, 2006 4:31 AM
May 12, 2006 4:39 AM
May 13, 2006 5:44 PM
I agree that an infinity of constant mass if far more convincing than one of blank origin. It's sort of interesting to wonder why we do think of one as more probable when we may never really understand time and space to their fullest extent from our tiny singular world/dimension/etc. The anthropomorphised universe is definately part of the problem for those whom believe in a point of zero origin.
Are we compelled to believe in endless existence simply because we do not/may never have the capabilities for perceiving the lack of time and space?
If there is infinite time and space, then it follows that the universe has no point of origin. If there is no point of origin, there is no 'creation' point for mass or time and nothing before that. Without an origin, we are still making some of the same claims as those whom do believe in an origin. We are still unable to explain how matter itself has come into being yet allow for a constant that gives a parameter to a universe that builds and destroys itself into and from 'something.' A different leap of faith but still one afterall.
Anyways, if time is continuous but this world is not, then does time travel become multi-dimensional travel at greater intervals? Moot, but still.
If your city metaphor can be extended from the mind to the universe, all the bits (i don't know how small they've configured matter these days) are constantly rebuilding the city as well as the dwellers whom pass in their infinite ways and perceptions... perhaps even giving rise to completely different conscious beings to view their landscape. How nice :)
May 14, 2006 11:35 PM
I have been rolling a theory around my mind for a while now, which I find very very difficult to explain even to myself. It revolves around the idea that reality is somehow a reflection of the conscious state in existence at a particular time. It also hinges on a statement I have made a lot of times on this blog, but perhaps one which is not always read as literally as I mean it to be:
Each independant consciousness lives in an entirely different universe.
As I move further through this thing called life I become more and more aware of the patterns of existence bubbling around us. This is not to say fate or God works on our realities. Nor is it to perceive the statistically viable coincidences of life as evidence of some over-arching direction to the universe, merely order arises not out of pure chaos, but out of an endlessly interconnected stream of stuff we call 'reality'. Especially in our Western conceptions it is easy to view the universe as full of discrete entities, our theories of science allow us to manufacture reality this way. The underlying routines of nature are far beyond our grasp, and lie deeper in the folds than we may ever perceive, yet I believe they are there.
What if all reality is akin to a hall of mirrors. At the centre of which lies an maleable form somehow reliant on the perceptions of the consciousnesses which inhabit it. If you have enough mirrors, reflecting kaladescopic patterns in enough variations any sufficiently symmetrical pattern of light can be created from the simplest shimmer. All the patterns are somehow interconnected, but it is not that they merely rely on each others action, for at the heart of the infinite reflections there is no first cause of some sort. The reflections form this entity as much as the entity forms the reflections, and as the patterns change so the entity morphs to accomodate these changes.
Now add time into this maelstrom of activity. From the perspecptive of a reflection bouncing through the mirrors there is only the absolute moment. Looking sidelong at itself the light beam would see an independant entity at a slice in its path. They would not perceive the play of reflections before or after their present point. They would not see the distortions that bend their perceptions so. They would not be capable of peering at other lightbeams mere nano particles away from their position, whether on similar paths or entirely different ones. Time is the key to turn a mass of bounding light into an interplay of self absorbed entities.
As time goes on so the play of reflections tends to increase, thus enhancing the mass of light within the hall of mirrors. Over time things become more focussed, have greater intensity, yet the further the light reflects the further away the source of that light becomes. It is hidden in the reflections as if to be a reflection itself. The source need not exist anymore, if removed, and time stopped at a point the reflected light would still rebound and the perceptions would remain the same. The stronger intensity of light at time Z is a consequence of the light at time A, yet the two realities thuc created seem as independant of each other as any two entities could be.
See its one thing to metaphorise any idea of reality, another to bring it back into a worthwhile idea.
I believe that if we were able to lift our perceptions off the current trajectory we are following and view our entire history from another angle we would see other universes in our very being. Composed of the same matter, time and light as us, entirely different beings live out entirely distinct lives completely unaware of our existence also - yet as close to us as we are to ourselves, perhaps indistinct. The ways in which these beams can be perceived is infinite, the forms reality moulds from the same abstract being is indefinite. There is a mass of reality, growing more and more focussed with time. We are merely one way to view this mass of reality, though there are countless others.
Matter, time, beginning, end, reality, humanity. These concepts are just as abstract as the one I have tried (foolishly) to outline here. We can philosophise all day about these concepts and never gain true insight merely becuase we are bound too strongly to the concepts themselves. The fish in the pond can argue all day about the workings of their pond universe. They can devise a thousand theories, each one more complicated than the next for why their pond is the way it is. Raise a fish beyond the pond, give them a new angle and everything they believed seems utterly irrelevant. Yet I don't believe we are just fish in an abstract pond we call a universe. Raise us out of the pond, out of the garden, town, country, planet, galaxy of our perceptions and we would still not be far enough away to fully grasp the interplay of forces working in tandem to forge our worlds. The fish can move infinitely from their origin and never find a final destination. And part of me believes that if you move the fish far enough out from their pond universe at a certain point they would cross an invisible threshold, one of perhaps infinitely many that have come before, and if the fish then peered around them at the new reality perspective they had arrived at they would merely see the pond again in the same form as was there before. Infinity is just that, it goes on and on until it becomes a copy of itself infinitely many times again. Why there needs to be a beginning here I don't know. How one can perceive such a beginningless, endless reality is beyond my fish perspective, as it is to all of us.
All just is.
I can't see it any other way.
There is not just one city, there are infinitely many cities and they all exist as one.
May 15, 2006 2:36 AM
May 15, 2006 3:42 AM
I agree fully.
Usually when I try and imagine how our realities are interconnected I wind up with this abstract notion of an infinite space filled with discreet yet vague little orbs of perception. Across all these entities runs an infinitely thin plane of shared `reality` while the rest of our complex selves exist entirely out of the boundaries of shared awareness. Yet communication/culture/closeness do seem to bring the little orbs within clearer sight of each other (at least in my experience).
I do like the Borges quotes... they are awe-inspiring in their level of insight. The library analogy works well and I revel in ties to chaos theory. Order from disorder, perhaps only infinity can make it so.
May 15, 2006 4:36 AM
May 16, 2006 9:36 AM
May 18, 2006 8:36 AM
May 29, 2006 8:09 PM
Wish I had more knowledge of Latin/Greek words derivations.
May 30, 2006 1:50 AM
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