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> time only came in to existence with the big bang My brains segfaults imagining that there was a time where time didn't exist...

• stcredzero 16y ago
  That's like trying to imagine what being dead "is like" for materialist atheists. If you don't believe in an afterlife, then your consciousness simply ceases. There is no experience of being dead.
  • jbarciauskas 16y ago
    I imagine being dead as being what my life was like before I was born.
    • stcredzero 16y ago
      What was that like?
      • jbarciauskas 16y ago
        Exactly
• bhousel 16y ago
  Think of it this way: We don't have any way of measuring time that doesn't also involve space. Whether it's pendulums, or atoms vibrating, or photons bouncing around, any way we measure time is linked to (and relative to) whatever space is around it. If space is being deformed by a large mass being there, time will be affected (slowed down). Some theories of time say that what we think of as 'time' is really just a byproduct of space. So if space didn't exist (in any meaningful way that we would understand today) before the big bang, time couldn't exist either.
  • stan_rogers 16y ago
    For anyone who hasn't seen it, this lecture by Bill Phillips (Nobel Laureate, of NIST, given at the Perimeter Institute) on time, relativity, cooling and the Bose-Einstein condensate is probably the most entertaining real science lecture you're ever going to see: http://feeds.tvo.org/~r/tvobigideasVideo/~5/QOpqIcl2UDk/BI_Full_20080920_834096_WilliamPhillips_320x240_304k.mp4 http://feeds.tvo.org/~r/tvobigideasVideo/~5/QOpqIcl2UDk/BI_F... It's long, but it won't merit a tl;dw unless you have no curiousity, imagination, sense of humour or innate geekiness.