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Location: where you sip the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kirdik
If time goes infinitely into the future, can it be seen as going infinitely into the past? Where ticks become smaller and smaller past Plank time into infinity making it impossible to reach the exact moment of the big bang.
I'm not a physicist, but I suppose that it has to do with the quantized nature of things, there's a unit of time that cannot be divided?
I think the idea is that before time and space in our universe there was nothing, but the nothing was full of stuff, particles popping into and out of existence. Quantum vacuum:
Quote:
In quantum field theory, the vacuum state (also called the vacuum) is the quantum state with the lowest possible energy. Generally, it contains no physical particles. Zero-point field is sometimes used as a synonym for the vacuum state of an individual quantized field.
According to present-day understanding of what is called the vacuum state or the quantum vacuum, it is "by no means a simple empty space",[1] and again: "it is a mistake to think of any physical vacuum as some absolutely empty void."[2] According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum state is not truly empty but instead contains fleeting electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of existence. Vacuum state - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
So first there was nothing - the quantum vacuum - and then it exploded. It exploded because eventually, statistically, those little particles are going to all go in one direction and make a Big Thingie that leads to a universe of time and space.
This "explanation" doesn't even make sense to me, so you might give Beninfla a ring on the direct messaging system and try to drag him back to this thread.
Hey Woof, thanks for the links very interesting. So going beyond Planck time doesn't even make sense.
My attempt to explain why there's no time before the big bang by going back into the past indefinitely makes no sense either.
I'm not a physicist, but I suppose that it has to do with the quantized nature of things, there's a unit of time that cannot be divided?
Planck time doesn't imply that, exactly. There isn't any current experimental evidence supporting the idea that time is quantized (or evidence supporting the idea that it's continuous). It's an open question in physics. What Planck time provides a time scale over which quantum gravitational effects might be important.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Woof
In quantum field theory, the vacuum state (also called the vacuum) is the quantum state with the lowest possible energy. Generally, it contains no physical particles. Zero-point field is sometimes used as a synonym for the vacuum state of an individual quantized field.
According to present-day understanding of what is called the vacuum state or the quantum vacuum, it is "by no means a simple empty space",[1] and again: "it is a mistake to think of any physical vacuum as some absolutely empty void."[2] According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum state is not truly empty but instead contains fleeting electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of existence. Vacuum state - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I think the idea is that before time and space in our universe there was nothing, but the nothing was full of stuff, particles popping into and out of existence. Quantum vacuum: So first there was nothing - the quantum vacuum - and then it exploded. It exploded because eventually, statistically, those little particles are going to all go in one direction and make a Big Thingie that leads to a universe of time and space.
This "explanation" doesn't even make sense to me, so you might give Beninfla a ring on the direct messaging system and try to drag him back to this thread.
I think the cosmological implications of vacuum states you allude to are less well established (i.e. there is no experimental evidence either way). Ordinary vacuum states, on the other hand, are pretty firmly grounded in both theory and experiment.
The basic idea is that even a "pure" vacuum actually consists of countless pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles that are constantly coming in and out of existence. One popular way of describing this vacuum is using the uncertainty principle to say that on short enough time scales the vacuum can borrow energy to create a particle antiparticle pair as long as that energy is returned quickly enough. The product of the energy and the time should always be less than ℏ/2, where ℏ is Planck's constant (divided by 2 pi). Why the Planck time is interesting is that it's so small that the corresponding energy is large enough to make a black hole.
Of course this popular explanation is just that--a popular explanation. Attempting to derive additional results from it will likely lead to an error of some kind. The underlying math is well-tested and solid but it's also too complicated for discussion with a general audience.
Is the multiverse infinitely large? If so, doesn't that mean that somewhere there is a universe identical to this, except that the atoms that make everything up in the para-universe are enlarged to the size of our universe itself? Due to an infinite amount of combinations of particles. So basically somewhere you could just run into an infinitely large you? Well, maybe the particles themselves wouldn't be enlarged, but it would be possible that sooo many particles combine in such a way as to recreate an infinitely large you. And an infinitely basketball. And infinitely everything...see this is where stuff stops making sense to me. Everything is everything.
Location: where you sip the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
8,297 posts, read 14,156,795 times
Reputation: 8105
Plus, Lord, what if there is a parallel universe where a creature evolves having all the attributes we believe God has? And what if he created our universe and came here to lord it over us?
Plus, Lord, what if there is a parallel universe where a creature evolves having all the attributes we believe God has? And what if he created our universe and came here to lord it over us?
Holy bleeping bleep, you just blew my mind. Why not right?
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