Time Begins or not

[wazzz]

AS lame and stupid this Question sounds but it’s very Confusing !!
when is the beginning of time ??
first ,time is just a relative issue ,who said that a day is devided into 24 H why not 10 or 20 or 100 ???
Before Earth ?? before the whole universe what was before that ?
Just A whole Great Gas exploded making the universe
that’s the beginning of this galaxy and this universe then planets , Suns and stars …etc was .
but before that what was there ??
if u tell me there was a X thing there must be a X-1 thing before X (i like math can’t help it )
and before X-1 there is X-2 until what ? -∞
What is infinity why can’t we find this ?
it means that our measures are so lame we can’t imagine a thing that has no start with  no end
 
so guys what do u thing about time beginning ?
it’s hard Question to ask i know ?but i’ve seen that u guys are so great with arguing and that’s why i love ur site      

[curiosityandthecat]

Time is a measure of decay.

Asking what was "before" the "whole universe" is akin to asking what flavor happiness is; it just simply isn't a coherent question. The idea that the beginning was an "explosion" is a misnomer, and not exactly true. There can't be an X-1 if time began with X. The tricky part about wrapping your head around that is that humans base their experiences in time. It's very difficult for us to understand a "timeless" event. Interestingly, at 0 degrees Kelvin, there is, for all intents and purposes, no time: nothing is decaying, changing or moving.

As for infinity, there's a difference between an "actual" infinity and a "theoretical" infinity. The collection of real numbers is a theoretical infinity because there's no antecedent in reality. It's all about how you define it. Remember, there's no "infinitieth" number you can count to.

Our measures aren't lame; they're just dependent on our observations. They do not exist in a vacuum. We didn't have the numbers first and things to count, second.

Drat. I have to go to work. I saw Squid lurking in this thread when I started this, so I have a feeling you'll get a much more informed and eloquent post from him.  

[Whitney]

I think it is reasonable to assume that something somewhere always existed and that infinate "time" is possible.  Otherwise we are left with having to explain how something created itself or formed naturally out of nothing.  I'm not sure why the idea of infinity seems to impossible to many people...it could be because our minds evolved to process linear time.

[Squid]

Paul Davies wrote an excellent piece in Scientific American in 2002 about the construct of time:

http://www.nikhef.nl/pub/services/biblio/bib_KR/sciam14327034.pdf

[LARA]

Time is created from motion.  And the idea of a beginning is part of the concept of time.  If something has no motion whatsoever, there is no time in it.  But even in a black hole at absolute zero, (which noone has ever reached) where all molecular motion is stopped, there is still the motion of the electrons of the atomic nucleus.  I don't know how cold you have to get to stop electrons, or if that is even relevant since temperature is a measurement of molecular motion, but they apparently condense at the coldest temperatures when in a semiconductor and lose resistance.

In philosophy you can get into the concept of the First Mover, which I think Aristotle personified as God, because he saw all motion coming from anthropomorphic means, so obviously all this other motion has to have some kind of hand in it too.  Kind of like the whole argument from design thing the I.D. movement has going on.  But scientifically we see that there is no personification necessary.  Motion is.

As far as a 24 hour clock, this is probably because the culture that originated the first time keeping devices used a base 12 number system.  It doesn't have to be base twelve, in fact I think that it would be interesting if we redid our system of time in the same way we redid other measurements for metric and built base 10 clocks.  I did this one time with a regular clock by making a new face and 10 numbers for it, but of course the mechanism was still the same one built for a standard base twelve system, so it wasn't all that cool.  Maybe one of these days when I'm old and crochety I'll get into making paper clocks and figure out how to build a complete base 10 time keeping mechanism from mere rectangles of flattened cellulose.  Or maybe I'll just stare angrily at the attendees and complain that they have Voltage up too high on the weekly electroshock treatments they use to keep me calm after they insist on wheeling my mostly paralyzed carcass in to attend the Sunday Bible readings and just imagine I'm building my clocks.

[PatHayes]

Very good questions. First, the number of hours in the day is purely arbitrary, though people have been very reluctant to change it. (After the French revolution, the new government tried to impose a decimal day of ten hours. Clocks from that period are now very collectible.) But time would still be passing no matter what kind of clocks we humans make, so your larger question is still interesting. If time began at all, then it was at the so-called 'big bang', a LONG time before the earth was formed. Its hard to get your head around this, but if indeed this was the beginning of the universe ... and the universe really does mean everything, right? ... then time started then as well. The argument about x-1 is the old argument that there can't be a first time because what about just before that time?  But think: if we are really talking about the beginning of the whole universe, then there can't have been a time before that time. If you try to imagine it, I think you will be imagining a kind of empty space and then the universe suddenly appears. But that doesn't make sense, since the universe is EVERYTHING. There isn't a larger 'space' for it to be 'inside'. And time passing is also part of the universe; without a universe, there's no way for time be passing.

For more on this way of thinking, see Hawkin's best-seller "Brief history of time", though its not exactly an easy read.

Best wishes

Pat

[Asmodean]

The red colour is... Ridiculous.

The beginning of time would have to be with the first movement, thus with the first moving particle. If those existed eternally, so did time. However, time as we know it is a human concept. And it is linear, the way you described. But the fact that it suits us does not mean that is the only concept of time there is. And within other concepts, the math of linear time does not have to apply.

24 hours gives you the ability to divide your day in two and three equal parts. Beyond that, I can't really see how it is more convenient than 10 or 100, but it may have been a factor in the 24 hour system creation for all I know

As to your example with x-things... Ok. I have an apple. Let's call it x. Before the apple, there was an apple tree, not another apple. And thus, there was not an x-1, but another variable. Can't measure two things with the same variable in the same equasion, you know. Leads to a mess.
The concept works well enough for anything linear, but that's about it. Apples and apple trees come in cycles and there that example does not apply.

We can not "find" partly because on this here little planet, nothing is infinite. Everything has a length, width and height and is contained within those measurements. Thus, we are used to thinking "within the box" and have trouble defining things that are outside. Gere is a nice mathematical definition of infinity from a dictionary:

The limit that a function f(x) is said to approach at x = a when (x) is larger than any preassigned number for all x sufficiently near a

There, My two cents.

[DennisK]

It's difficult for most humans to understand such complex theories and our brains haven't evolved to truly understand the universe (if it indeed can be understood).  There are few who can grasp theories of space and time because they aren't tangible most of us.  That's why, in the history of our species, we put the label of 'god' on the unexplained.  As we learn more, we fill in the blanks.  However, there will always be blanks in our understanding, therefore, many will substitute with god.

[karadan]

I like to think of the universe (space time) as one giant Klein bottle. Ie, a one-sided 3 dimensional shape. No matter where you trace a line on that shape, you'll eventually get back to where you started. In essence, time never started. It just is...

[Sophus]

Time is the continuation of existence. It could have begun or not depending on whether existence has always been. I say existence in lieu of universe because as far as we know our universe is not the only thing in existence.

According to the Bible God has always existed but Christian also say God forged time and lives outside of it. However this means he has not always existed. What a ridiculous thing to say if he lives outside of time. "Always" is a measurement of time.

[Asmodean]

What a ridiculous thing to say if he lives outside of time. "Always" is a measurement of time.

Indeed. But I think what they tend to mean when they say that is that their god is outside linear time. (often without even understanding the concept) That does lead them to a whole new set of pitfalls and tripwires, but when did fundies ever care about those..?