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>There has to be a beginning and end. Ha! No, there does not. Humans use create a hallucinated duality as a means of navigating a non-dual reality. Let me ask

• lloeki 5y ago
  (caveat: IANA astrophysicist/cosmologist/whatever, I just like to wrap my head around things with some bits of logic) > Let me ask you; How long was the time before you were alive, and how long will the time be after you are dead? This is misleading as it posits that since there's a "before you" and an "after you", "you" are standing within some time continuum. > There has to be a beginning and end. Wrap your head around this: if there is a "beginning" and an "end" to our universe, both would define discrete stop points, thus there would be some way to say "before" or "after" these discrete points, and thus the universe sits inside something that has time. But then either this something of a container either has infinite time (which goes back to square one of things not having beginning and end) or has a beginning and end itself. But again, if this container has a discrete beginning and end then you can apply the same logic that you applied to our universe in the first place. So there's another container of the container, to which you can recursively apply the same logic (assuming logic itself somehow applies to this container). So if you want all these container things to have beginnings and ends, it implies there's an infinite set of nested containers. The alternative is that time exists within our universe, but our universe doesn't sit within time. Thus "beginning" and "end" are not discrete points but concepts that only exist as limits (in the mathematical sense of "limit"): by travelling the arrow of time forward or backward you can only move closer and closer to either but never actually reach these because these points don't actually exist. Such a universe could be freestanding (as in: it's all there is), or it could have a container of sorts, and maybe even neighbour universes. But since time only exists within our universe, there could very well be no concept of time in the container (or other universes), or similar concepts but behaving entirely differently. In any case these (the container, the other universes) would be unbelievably incomprehensible to us. These concepts of unreachable zero, unreachable infinite, or unreachable value do exist in other areas: absolute zero is basically unreachable, reaching c velocity requires infinite energy†... † which creates other interesting conundrums such as a pair of photons travel at the same delta speed whether they go away or towards each other, or there's no "velocity = 0" either, or tachyonic vs baryonic realms.
  • podgaj 5y ago
    > This is misleading as it posits that since there's a "before you" and an "after you", "you" are standing within some time continuum. It was not misleading, it was a question. What person does not think they were born or that someone died? In my experience, time does not exist. It is an illusion. Have you read Barbour's book?