Personally, I don't see how there can be an uncaused cause, a beginning of time, or a smallest/indivisible unit of matter. To me infinity makes a lot of sense. There is an infinite series of causes, there is no beginning of time (what would come before that?), there is no indivisible unit of matter (everything gets infinitely smaller. If something has a left and a right side, it must be divisible. Then again, If something was 1-dimensional, by definition, it wouldn't have a left and a right side. But I don't think 1-dimensional objects (points) can exist because they could not lie contiguous to each other to create 2-D. If they did, they would have a left and a right side). I'm not entirely sure of any of the above. I don't have an extensive knowledge of string theory or any of that. |
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Parallel lines by definition cannot meet. If they do, they aren't parallel. |
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Let me clarify; say you have two lines pointing in exactly the same direction. If extended linearly, would they ever meet? |
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I had the EXACT same thoughts for a few months now. |
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Last edited by Ivan452; 09-12-2011 at 10:58 PM.
I thought we were talking about hypothetical lines like the ones in algebra. The concept of a line composed of 1-D points doesn't work in reality. It's an abstraction. Also, if the lines were sufficiently far apart, they probably wouldn't cross would they? |
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Hmm, well, not really. Straight lines are abstractions, but they're still abstracted from real things. The question is about any of the 'abstractees'. Something that never has cause to deviate from its path defines a straight line; a particle never influenced by a force, or a beam of light. Or a straight-edged physical object, like a perfect crystal. |
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I could have sworn I posted a response. I listed 3 issues in the OP of things that seem contradictory or incomplete unless you introduce the concept of infinity. So if you think that time either has a beginning or it doesn't and if it can't have a beginning because you could always ask "well what happened before that?" then it follows that time is infinite. It gets confusing when you talk about QM and backwards causality through time because our normal conception of time requires that an event take place before another event in order to cause it. |
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Well if you go back before time existed, infinity really doesn't matter does it? If something caused time to exist, then that cause doesn't really need a cause(though it might have one too), because it exists outside of time. In essence, if the first cause was always there or not, doesn't really matter, because time did not yet exist. |
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You're not following. |
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All experience says nothing happens in isolation, every process is caused by another, anything else is understandably hard-pressed imagination. |
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"Before and After" is a reference to the timeline with respect to some event and an observer. You can't go before time when there is no time to go before. |
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Time is interesting. |
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Jujutsu is the gentle art. It's the art where a small man is going to prove to you, no matter how strong you are, no matter how mad you get, that you're going to have to accept defeat. That's what jujutsu is.
Huh. Terry Pratchett. I keep hearing how great he is, and still haven't read him. Now I guess I gotta. That was pretty brilliant, though I did find myself wondering what the hell Death is doing when there's nothing alive for him to bother with. |
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Last edited by Darkmatters; 09-13-2011 at 11:46 AM.
Do it. I suggest it from bottom of my heart. He is great humanist, humorist, writer and I respect his philosophical ideas. He has many interesting ideas, especially with time. Death is a being that exists outside the time in his books, thus he has seen the recreation of world again and again. Also, Death can remember past, present and future because they have already happened. |
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Jujutsu is the gentle art. It's the art where a small man is going to prove to you, no matter how strong you are, no matter how mad you get, that you're going to have to accept defeat. That's what jujutsu is.
Well, if you could elaborate on why you believe that nothing can cause something, then that would be great. I mean, it's simple just to say "I don't know" so there an infinite number of possibilities or "scientists can't prove X" and therefore, Y is a possibility. However, unless you give some supporting evidence for Y, I have more reason to justify X and just as much reason to justify some absolutely absurd claim like Z (a giant sphaghetti monster). |
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Time only goes one way, forward. So if you really think about it, time shouldn't be infinite backwards, but only infinite forwards. For time to be infinite going backwards it would have to be traveling backwards, which it doesn't appear to do. Which means at some point it started, and is now traveling forward towards infinity. Though if you think about it, we are not at infinitely right now, we are just at some point, and we can measure time to this point we are at now. And no given point is time at infinity, it is just traveling towards it. At no point would time be at infinity going backwards, it has to be traveling towards it, but time doesn't go backwards. |
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If time began with the Big Bang, and scientists theorize that the universe could end with a Big Crunch, then time would not extend infinitely forward either. |
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I claim to have a question that will help you work out the answer, and you just repeatedly ignore it. Why did you make this thread? |
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"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." |
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Last edited by Unelias; 09-13-2011 at 09:19 PM.
Jujutsu is the gentle art. It's the art where a small man is going to prove to you, no matter how strong you are, no matter how mad you get, that you're going to have to accept defeat. That's what jujutsu is.
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Actually what I was trying to say has nothing to do with physics, really; it was about epistemology. |
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Oookay, cool. |
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Last edited by Xei; 09-13-2011 at 10:21 PM.
If time is infinite and thus going backwards, then cause and effect doesn't mean much anymore. Since things in the future that have not happened, are causing things in the past to exist. If you really believe everything has a cause, then time can't be going backwards, and thus time would have a starting point. |
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