Expanding time?

Hi cavediver,I've been wondering about this for a while, ever since i had a discussion with onifre where i told him i believed nothing has changed since the Big Bang. I have since then posted this on another forum where professianal cosmologists and astophysicists couldn't give me a definite answer, so maybe you want to have a knack at it. Here it is.One of the postulates of the Big Bang theory taken from GR says that the universe is not expanding into anything, but that it's the metric that's expanding. The idea of metric expansion says that two points in space remain at the same spots but the distance between them grows(while these two points remain at their same locations).Extrapolating this back to the Big Bang we have a universe that did not change in size since the Singularity if we were able to view it from the "outside". If such an "outside of the universe" viewpoint were possible, the universe would still be a zero-dimensional "point"(aka Singularity), that only when viewed from the inside would show internal metric expansion and size that appears to be different than zero.The point is these 3 dots/symbols did not move. My uncertainty is whether we can extrapolate this metric expansion all the way back to the singularity because if we could, the size of the universe, when viewed from the "outside"(if it were possible) would still be zero, as it is assumed to have been 13.7 billion years ago.I am not interested in the philosophical implications of this, I just want to hear your opinion.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

I sort of expected this answer since i've never been able to have you speculate on anything. I knew this outside viewpoint was impossible, that's why i said "if it were possible".But your answer brings up a good point - the answer to the earth old question - "what's the universe expanding into?". It means the universe is not expanding into anything but that it's expanding into itself(whatever this "itself" we choose to believe is, whether it's solipsism/idealism or realism).

My question would be just very slightly offtopic, not about expanding time, but about spacetime in string theory. In the official website of String Theory at http://www.superstringtheory.com, at one of the pages you could find something very curious:"This is a hint that perhaps spacetime geometry is not something fundamental in string theory, but something that emerges in the theory at large distance scales or weak coupling. This is an idea with enormous philosophical implications."The authors of the site intentionally omitted mentioning what those "enormous philosophical implications" are, probably so that they won't scare the general public before the ST is tested.And since i've had most of my childhood "illusions" of material reality already crumbled to dust, i have no trouble accepting these implications.One of the biggest one is that space and time are also made of strings, those string that make up everything that we perceive as material/physical or real.String theorist prof.Sylvester Gates, of University of Maryland:"Strings create everything, including space and time and even us."But what about the prediction that spacetime is not fundamental..., this is really serious, but is a reflection of a holographic universe(this is the prediction of all 5 versions of the ST).Where does the idea of the universe being a giant hologram come from? How is this related to the 1-dimensional strings, that have definite size?I can see much logic to this prediction, as it solves all kinds of QM paradoxes.What would string theory say about the source of this projection that gives us the illusion of a real, physical universe? The "thing" that's not allowed to be talked about on the science forums? How do we label this source/projector of our "reality"?If you don't like to answer, i'll understand, just disregard this question.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

I'll try to re-define what i said in an attempt to get you closer to my position.Suppose the theory of the beginning of the Universe out of a quantum fluctuation was right. At T=0 the inside and outside of the universe measure the same - zero(i.e. there is no universe and no spacetime), so we kind of circumvent the "size has no meaning outside the universe" argument. At any moment after T=0 there is a metric expansion that "creates" expanding space inside, into itself. And any point one would pick from the inside would show on the antenna to be at relative rest(to the process of expansion) by observing uniform CMB from all directions you point you antenna, thus obeying the Hubble Law. So my question is this(and to me at least, it makes more sense than the FTL cosmos ) - is this a proper use of the metric in this scenario, pushing it all the way back to the quantum fluctuation?Wouldn't this allow for countless numbers of other virtual universes, where everything and nothingness are both sides of an equation and differ only by the relative perception of the observer/measurement inside them?I am asking this question as it kind of seems to fit the holographic universe model discussed above and supported by ST and gives a somewhat reasonable explanation for the something out of nothing scenario, where this something appeared to be ill-defined with the advent of QM(or more precisely mis-defined when taken out of the context of our animalistic perceptions and everyday experience).EDIT: I now remember you explaing the expansion of the universe by a balloon analogy here at evc. However, if we are to picture correctly the balloon, its outside dimensions should remain the same throughout time(quantum fluctuation universe) while the balloon would expand almost indefinitely on the inside.BTW what's the relationship between the zero energy universe and the CMB?Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Cavediver, you might want to have a look at this paper that discusses my point about the universe being based on the holographic principle, predicted by the String Theory, while at the same time the author is tieing this to the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric in great detail and math.http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0203101The holographic principle appears to give equivalence to matter/energy and information, but even if the whole of physics is fundamentally just information inscribed on the surface of the 2-dimensional boundery of a hologram, how can we consider this fundamental nature of our universe - a natural process? What would ever qualify as an un-natural process?Isn't modern physics encroaching on metaphysics as discussed in various papers, while slowly departing from the concepts, predictability and intuitiveness of the Newtonian world, attempting to unite GR and QM?As some famous physicist has said - how can nature be so absurd? Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Cavediver, i'd like to get away for a moment from this mind blowing space/universe/separatedness of "things" being just an illusion of the mind(whatever that mind is - casually and loosely referred to as "observer" in QT) and focus on the philosophy side of it all.
So my question is - and this has been racking my mind for a while - do you still trust your reasoning? This will be mind blowing for the others but i am sure you understand quite well the question.
Can we "project" our animal newtonian reasoning and extend it beyond the appearance of the world and try to make sense of this illusional universe when we've come to find out that 1 object can be in multiple places at the same time? When the wave function of your body is spread out throughout the universe with different probability amplitudes of being in certain places? Are you doubting the animalistic perceptional "logic" inherent in humans that what we consider logic is actually that? That 2+2 is actually fundamentally 4 outside of our animal perception of the "world"? The fundamental nature of the world is not counter intuitive - it's completely f*cked up, it can be said to be counter intuitive only:1. By people who have not understood what quantum theory says at all(as Niels Bohr said "Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it."Or2. By people who want to avoid scaring other people.Do you think causality is a fundamental characteristics of this universe? I don't. How can we be sure of the infinite regress of that which i am not allowed to talk about on this sub-forum, when i am not sure that our logic is really logic at all? How can we seek the meaning of life when logic and reason fall apart beyond the scope of our primitive and decptive senses and all we are left with is the notorious "shut up and calculate" approach? When neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet has come to find out through experiments that free will is also an illusion of the mind. That decisions are taken fractions of a second before our brains engage in activities?What about the f*cked up "movement" called quantum leap where particles move from A to B without ever going continuously all the distance from A to B but just jumping from A to B, while ceasing to exist while in transition*? Where particles(electrons, positrons, neutrons) pop into existence from somewhere(although i have no idea what somewhere means at all) for brief periods and vanish where they came from. Or where partciles can spin both ways at once? How can we ever reconcile this fundamental nature of reality to our inheritant, perceptional ape logic?Do you still trust your reasoning and are you willing to bet it can ever take you to the answers about the ultimate nature of reality and finding out through reasoning or interpreting experiments if there is god or not, in a world described by the Bell's theorem(hailed as the most important finding of science) where absolutely everything, including you(whatever you are), is one wholeness(albeit virtual). I don't, i don't trust my reasoning beyond my projected everyday experiences and i agree with Feynman that:"... the more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work. So theoretical physics has given up on that."We really don't know that much and what's worse we have no idea if what we know is applicable in any way to answering the grand questions of our existence or whether it's right at all or whether it's not simply a delusion set up so that it would appear to make sense to us in our primitive fight for survival or simply lead us like sheep down a pre-defined path. IMO thinking about those unanswerable questions that this board is set up for, is just a hilarious and heroic waste of time while we are bound to this interface we call "human body and brain" which experiments point to lacking free will.I used to believe, and it's evident in old posts of mine, that science could in time reach god. I don't hold that view anymore, my viewpoint shifted close to that of Schroedinger who was convinced that physics can provide absolutely no answers to philosophical questions. I don't even think anymore that logic, as we think of it, applies to philosophical question while we are using this deceptive and limited interface. Or as Brian Green puts it: [i]“Human experience is often a misleading guide to the true nature of reality.”I'd very much like to hear your opinion on this philosophy of physics aspect, even if i get suspended i'd be still be having an occasional look at the forum.* Michio Kaku is making his students in the University of New York calculate the probability that a person will wake up on Mars through the Schroedinger equation. The chance is very very slim but is not zero . This is the same as why a ball has a chance different than zero of passing "through" the wall instead of bouncing back(aka quantum tunneling).Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

This is incredible - it compares to the middle ages where Galileo proved the Earth was not flat, as was commonly believed up to that point.Einstein on the Optical Illusion of Separateness"A human being is a part of the whole called by us "the universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical illusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

But to me this is misleading or i don't understand something - what you are saying suggests that a non-existing ball can have a size that's different to zero. To me "undefined" leaves room for other numbers beside zero. But my common sense tells me that zero apples means there are no apples. I am aware that "nothing" is very hard to define and grasp in a universe of infinite wave-functions(a particle with precisely known momentum). It seems you are saying that human common sense should not apply. Yes, i worded it wrong. I meant that it ties in with the optical illusion of separateness of "things" in the universe and the zero 3D size described by the Holographic principle. Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

This is drifting from the point i wanted to discuss. We agreed that this is true: What i was saying is that at any point in the past, say 5 bln., 10, 13bln years ago, any point you would pick from within the universe would show uniform CMBR. That is, this backward process would hold true until the universe reaches the Planck length. From this point on it really becomes undefined, but my common says after the Planck length comes zero.
Hence, i suppose that from this impossible outside perspective, the universe would have zero size. Do you find fault that zero makes sense to a human being, when this concept of nothingness is not supposed to make any sense or succum to mathematical description? Zero size + zero colour. I equate zero with non-existence, i would not talk of apples if they were zero. It's our human imagination that has the ability to project fictional apples that don't exist and fictinally ascribe mathematical properties like size, or subjective properties like colour. The solution to this is how consciousness works, but i don't have an answer for that. Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

If the whole western world believed the amoeba had a nose, all it would take to prove that the amoeba doesn't have a nose is to show mathematically, within the framework of the known laws of physics, that the size of the nose of the amoeba is zero. I hate to be the one who brought "exist" to the debate as it's bound to drift the topic to interpreting dictionary definitions, POV's and generally making a mess out of any thread.It seems cavediver is saying that the universe does not have an outsize size and i am saying this size is zero(whereby i acknowledged from the beginning that this outside of the universe viewpoint was impossible).
What i meant to show was the universe would not exist if there was such an outside viewpoint and if some other dimensional entity existed in what we generally refer to as "nothingness". In whichever way we word this, it all comes down to the same conclusion that there is an illusional appearance of size and separateness only from the inside of what we call a universe. I have no idea how this works but if we take Einstein's word for it from the above quote, it's "a kind of optical illusion of consciousness"Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

At x=0 the result is not undefined but is impossible, as x.0 can never equal one. But what does this have to do with the discussion?

Yes, the amoeba doesn't have a nose and the universe doesn't have a size(from the outisde). That was the whole point i was trying to make from the beginning. This is also confirmed by Bell's theorem and the recent developments in string theory. If you want to understand this discussion you have to first understand that we(I and cavediver) were not talking about an amoeba(read the whole discussion), where you could easily see that there is no nose. We were talking about the universe as it unfolded and its change in size that happens only within itself, without expanding into anything.
Where did i say impossible and zero were the same thing? You are putting words into my mouth.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

No i am not equating undefined with impossible, that why i specifically said that your example of f(x)=1/x at x=0, is not undefined but impossible.But that's drifting too much offtopic, it was a matter of different ways of wording the same thing as evident from cavediver's last post: There is simply no outsize size, i initially said it was zero but i really meant the same thing. Size and the perception of it is a construct of the mind that is applicable only from within the universe, and if we applied the metric expansion back to the beginning of the universe, we'd see that the universe hasn't been growing into anything, but into itself. This gave me a reason to conclude that the outside size would be zero, but I find the same meaning in "there is simply no outside size".Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

No it's you who are wrong, we never used that definition that you brought up. We used a definition where the word "size" itself was not defined(not mathematical impossibilities), meaning there is no outside size for the universe(and we already settled this, before your late arrival).
About the rest of your comments - well you are simply not following our discussion and what we mean in it, so you'll be on my ignore list on this thread.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

How about Bell's theorem non-locality(the non-local nature of QM)?Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.