ICANT'S position in the creation debate

That's the length of time we have decided to call a "year" but even if the earth and sun exploded in a grand fashion, time would plod on with nary a blink. Sort of, the universe has existed for all of time, re forever...but ofrever is only 13.7 billion years long so far. Then the question of the length of the (nonexistent) box is moot at best, nonsensical at worst. Not necessarily. Unless you can constrain "eternal" to mean 13.7 billion years and counting. In normal usage, this is not what it means, so I guess I have to disagree with you here. That's the current projection for what will happen to this universe a long time in the future. We're just not to that point yet. I don't know. And I'm comfortable with that answer. Maybe it just did without any underlying rhyme or reason. Perhaps 'brane theory is correct, maybe there was a "cause" but there is no reason to believe there has to be. Just because causality is a consequence of being "inside" our universe, we have no reason to expect it's the same if you're not "inside" our universe. Only if "direction" you are including time. I took it to mean you thought something that began to exist couldn't go for infinity to the left, right, up, down, forward and backward. If you include time as a direction, then yeah, I guess you're right, it would only extend so far into the past. Tehn you're wrong. The inches, meters, liters, and gallons we use are arbitrary units we have devised, and could be considered human concepts, but length, volume, et al are intrinsic properties of something being physical. Whether we exist or not, whether we decide an inch is so long, or whether decide to call a unit of length of flomar and say it is the length of 500 hairs laid side by side, length still exists. They are not made of particles or waves. They are properties of being physical, they are not physical themselves. Is "red" physical? No, it is a property of something that reflects light in the 625-740 nm range. The light is physical, the reflecting material is physical, but the color is a property of those physical things.Likewise, the matter a box is made of is physical, but the length of that material is a property of the physical thing.This is pretty basic stuff. If you're having troubles here, I'm pretty sure you're a lost cause on the whole cosmology thing.

Depends on how you mean "count." WOuld there necessarily be anyone to tick of seconds and minutes? No. Would atoms still vibrate, would things still move in repeated patterns, would things still decay/change at standard rates? Yes. Why would anyone need to measure time for time to exist. Length exists whether we're here to measure it or not. No one. The terms we use to describe/count time are concepts of the human mind, but do not equal time, they are merely the units we have devised to measure time. If you equate minutes and seconds to time, then you're missing the entire point. You assert this, but have not given any reason to think of time like this. There is an infinite series of nows. But some nows have past and some nows are yet to come, this transition from now to now' to now'' is what we call time. Nope. I can conjecturize with the best of them, but since I can't detect, observe, or measure it, I can't do much more. Perhaps in the future, technology will advance such that we can do those things, but as yet, the answer is "I don't know." And rather than saying, "I don't like that answer so I'll make up some other answer and then, irrationally decide that must be true because I like it better," I just leave "I don't know" alone until we discover more. Yes, if expansion is correct, for a universe to be infinite, it must be eternal. I was merely pointing out that infinite must not always equal eternal, if we take expansion out of the equation. There is, perhaps, the possibility of a universe existing which is infinite in size and finite in time, it's just not, apparantly, the universe we live in. The measurements have been devised by man, but the things they are measuring have not been, otherwiase there would be no need to measure them. Cheetahs exist independant of us, even though without us, the word "cheetah" would not exist. You're conflating the word, or the measurement, with the actual property. No, they are properties of things that are physical. The universe has more in it than just physical things, it also has fields and properties which are themselves not physiucal but are necessary for other things to be physical. And everyone, but apparantly you, can perceive time. If something exists, it has duration. Something cannot exist for no span of time. Time measures duration, rate of change or motion, etc. I would disagree with you here, very vehemently, and this is probably where we are talking past each other. "Box" has very specific criteria that must be met to qualify. Being chipped up in a chipper and scattered to the four winds quite liaterally obliterates the very basic criteria. The components of the box still exist, but the box itself is now no loonger in existence. It's span of time, it's duration, has come to a close.

The same way inches measure distance. If we had never conceived of inches, or if we all died out and no one was around anymore to measure distance, you can't possibly believe that everything would collapse and exist in dimensionless space because length no longer exists.Time is exactly the same. Time exists. It exists independent of us and our thoughts. A long time ago, people wanted to be able to measure time. They first came up with a name for the phenomenon, they called it "time." This name was not the phenomenon itself, merely a label for it. Now they had a name for it, but they needed a way to quantify it. They took the most basic divisions that we can all see, namely the pattern of light and darkness we call "day" and "night." These divisions were the first division of time into human units. Again the division is not time, it is merely a way to quantify, or measure, this phenomenon which we call time.These light and dark divisions were then seen in larger patterns, based on the movement of the sun through a long series of days that we called a year. This year, we found out, was equivalent, and indirectly based on, the movement of the Earth around the sun. We also realized we needed shorter periods of time than half a day, if we are to use it effectively in a society where there is a difference between "before the sun reaches the zenith" and "after the sun reaches the zenith" and, perhaps, a way to predict exactly when the sun would reach the zenith. To that end, we divided the day into things we call hours, we divided these hours into minutes, and the minutes into seconds. Again, these divisions are not time, they are merely the units we have devised, based on easy observations and necessary divisions, to quantify and measure this phenomenon called time. Later, it was discovered that the division we had called a second was equal to "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.' You'll notice, even the definition of a second relies on duration being an external phenomenon, otherwise the definition would be circular. Duration is a phenomenon of physicality. Duration is time. Duration and time are measured in units we have devised.DO NOT CONFUSE THE UNITS AND THE PHENOMENON! No, no, no. The units only exist as that which describes a period of duration to us. Time exists whether we are there to measure it or not. A sun on the far side of the universe that we have never seen before, and will never see because of the expansion of the universe is still enduring for a period of time. If there are aliens in the area, they may measure it's duration in "Quigglats," a quigglat being defined as the amount of time it takes a 2.4 pound rock to drop 10 meters to the surface of their home planet at 500 meters above sealevel under a 50 knot breeze blowing to the east. The unit is arbitrary, the phenomenon is not. Yes it would. The term "second" and "hour" would not exist, and if they did, somehow, they would not equate to the same duration that we equate them to, but time, as we perceive it, would still exist. But this now is different from the now that just preceded it, so we can say that the previous now changed to this new now and no longer exists as itself. These nows changing from one to another is the flow of time. If we all existed in one eternal now, nothing would change because a now is an instant in time, and an instant has no change, no movement and no duration, thus an eternal now would have to be unchanging. The fact that this now is different than the previous now means that there is no eternal now, merely a series of nows that flash into existance for but an instant before being replaced with the next one in line. You're the one conflating the measurement of time with the phenomenon. An object has length, otherwise it is not an object. If the length is taken away, the object no longer exists. Likewise, if the object is taken away, the length of that object no longer exists. They exist simulataneously and symbiotically, each needs the other. Because if it exists, it would have to exist at a place and a time. If the time dimension is reduced to zero, it doesn't have any duration, and duration is necessary for existanece, it has to be above zero, but can possibly extend infinitely along the the other direction. Duration cannot be zero or less for anything that actually exists. This is basic definition stuff here. Exactly. And duration is time. Duration exists whether we have seconds or minutes or hours or not. The labels have no bearing on the actual duration, they're just terms we have arbitrarily made up to help communicate and measure this phenomenon of duration (time). We don't need to designate anything for it to exist. No, it's just nonsensical. The word "box" has, as part of its definition, the form it must take. If the form changes, the "box" no longer exists. Its constituent parts still exist, but the parts must be arranged in a particular way for them to be a box. In any other configuration and the label "box" no longer applies.

Really? This is not something I have heard. As far as I've ever heard, the current thinking is that the universe is finite but unbounded. So, you could travel in any direction forever and never see and edge, but the universe would still have a finite...volume, I guess is the word.Is this now, not the considered opinion? If so, then my entire meager understanding of the universe has been blown away and must be rebuilt from scratch. A long laborious process, but one I enjoy every time I have to do it.

I knew this part, and it always seemed interesting to me that the mass of the universe was so close to this critical amount, perhaps there's a reason for that? I must have misunderstood this when I first heard it. I had thought open meant the universe would continue to expand forever because the mass of the universe was not enough to cause it to collapse again, flat was where the mass was perfectly able to slow the expansion, but it would still never end up in a "Big Crunch" because the amount of time needed to reach that scenario was infinite, and closed was where the mass was over that critical mass and the universe's expansion would reverse and collapse.Of course, this was before dark energy was "discovered" (I think) so the ideas may have changed drastically, but I always assumed the universe was finite in all three scenarios, the difference being if/when it would collapse back on itself.

That's not quite what I mean by inifinite. When I say infinite, I mean there is no volume value. Even if we can never circumnavigate the universe due to time constraints or the expansion rate, that doesn't mean there isn't a finite value for the volume.

Yes...it has a radius, a diameter, a circumference...all of those things fall under the banner of length as used in the argument. I suppose a better way to characterize length, width, height, etc is size. Technically, I guess you're right, but when people speak about time in this type of argument, they typically mean duration (which, by the way, also isn't physical), change, and or motion...or the penomenon that allows those things to have meaning.

To spout your favorite equivocation back at you...is it made of particles or waves? Length is a catch-all term indicating a definite size. And, even if you want to be literal and pedantic, you could put a sphere on a piece of paper and slide a pencil so that it is tangential to the side of the sphere and perpendicular to the paper and make a dot, then go 180 degrees around the sphere and do the same thing and make another dot and then connect the dots with a straight line...this would be the length of the sphere...and guess what, it's the same as the diameter.

Oh really? What particle makes up duration...what wave makes up duration? Don't tell me atoms and such, for those make up matter which have duration, but they aren't themselves duration.So, what are the particles/waves that make up duration and where were they discovered? The numbers are products of the human mind and are used to quantify and examine the length. Length and numbers are not the same thing...equivocation and conflation, that seems to be all you do.So, God is a product of the human mind, since words are products of the human mind, and the word God was made up by human minds, therefore God does not exist...thanks for the ICANT proof of God's nonexistence.

But particles and waves have existence and duration as well. SO, if duration is made of particles and waves that have duration, which is also made of particles and waves...is it particles and waves all the way down? That's the only conclusion you can logically draw from your conflation. You conflate the units we use to describe length and time with length and time themselves, then say that since the units are products of the human mind, the phenomenon must be as well. Well, the units we use to describe God are products of the human mind as well...so if units are the thing itself, then the word god must be god itself, which means it's a product of the human mind. If you disagree with this, then you can obviously separate units and terms from the phenomenon itself...making you disingenuous at best and a liar at worst when you conflate minutes and seconds with "time" or "duration"

How about relativistic speeds. If something would normally decay in a few miliseconds, and we speed them up to as close to c as we can get, they last longer than those few miliseconds, showing that duration is relative, as it's duration was supposed to be a specfic value, and it changed in a different reference frame.

Yep, they were all pre-corrected according to relativity, which assumes that spacetime is an inherent property of the universe...and they work to very exact degrees. So, either relativity's calculations are just very lucky guesses, or there is a factual basis to the assumptions it makes.

We're also operating in conditions very different from those in which life originated and have the added difficulty of making sure current life doesn't contaminate our experiment. We're also relegated to an extremely small area of operation compared to, well, the entire Earth, as well as guessing what types of chemicals and things are necessary, which ones were present, and how much energy/time/proportions etc are needed or optimal.We're also closer than we've ever been before, so just because we haven't doesn't mean we won't. When we succeed in creating life out of non-living materials, will you finally admit the possibility, or will you just take a step and say, all you've shown is that it takes life in a lab to create life?

Both and neither. The "correct" time depends on your reference point, and is relative. For the reference point on the satellite, the satellite clock is correct, from the Earth based reference point, the Earth based clock is correct. There is no Galactic Mean Time, it's all relative...just like length and width and every other dimensional property of the universe.Edited by Perdition, : No reason given.

I sincerely hope you will, but I have to say, I doubt you (or I) ever will.