_heretic

In the past of what? It can be in the future of something else. I think what I'm really asking is: To what extent do events exist? And can they said to have stopped existing? (You might dismiss this as metaphysics I suppose but that doesn't really make the question go away or resolve it - we are after all talking about reality here and I think it's important to know what is really going on.)

The question of course is, as the events still exist, do I - since I would also still exist - experience them?

So even events we would consider to be in the past then?

So if we were to consider a single event on its own, when it happens is relative but we can be sure that: It happens. What does "happening" even mean then?

Shouldn't the universal wavefunction - as described by the Wheeler-DeWitt equation - be subject to the quantum mechanical version of the Poincaré recurrence theorem? "Quantum Recurrence" http://prola.aps.org.../v107/i2/p337_1 "Note on the quantum recurrence theorem" http://pra.aps.org/a.../v18/i5/p2379_1 A paper discussing the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and quantum gravity http://www.physics.d...o%20Rovelli.pdf Thoughts?

This question occurred to me thanks to my other thread Since Eternalism says that every point in time still exists, which means that there's another me - in my past - a few keystrokes behind, doesn't that suggest eternal return. According to Eternalists, when a person dies it is trivial because they are still alive and well in the relative past. If this was correct, would this mean we all have to go through our lives, as we would perceive, ad infinitum?

I was browsing the Foundational Questions Institute when I came across this essay written by one Avtar Singh: http://fqxi.org/comm...rum/topic/1317/ The abstract for the paper reads: and the conclusion reads According to the author biography section Mr Singh has written a book "The Hidden Factor: an Approach for Resolving Paradoxes of Science, Cosmology and Universal Reality" Which I tracked down on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co...s/dp/1403393648 So is this guy some quack, as I suspect?

Does this not imply that while events happen, there's no true "when" they happen?

Relativism and Absurdism are not philosophies about the ontological nature of time... Thanks, I'll try to get my hands on this book

Really? So what are the other alternatives to consider?

Interesting thread here! So what's a "Measurement"?

Lol. Thanks! Is there anything Petkov has written that you can recommend reading?

I apologise if similar topics have like this have already been posted on this forum before, but since I've started reading more in depth about Relativity, I am now confused about what the "present" is supposed to be!! Is there really a present? "When" is the present?! What determines what/when the present is?!! How "long" is the present?!!! If there isn't a present, what is the "past" and "future"?!!!! Could someone be kind enough to explain all this to me...

So recently I have been turning this over in my head. Is Eternalism correct? Or is it Presentism? It seems to me that, Special and General Relativity support Eternalism. Just look at the Andromeda Paradox and the fact that there is no preferred "frame of reference" to choose from. On the other hand, there seems to be a "arrow of time" in physics, although for all we know this might get resolved. I have considered that an argument for Presentism is that we humans experience a "flow of time." This is not convincing to me at all because if this was anything to base facts upon then Quantum mechanics and the modern model of the atom (where its mostly empty space) would have been dismissed long ago as drivel since, after all, those ideas go completely against the reality we experience. Now there are of course emotional reasons for not liking, particularly Eternalism: 1. It seems to suggest the future is set and so that apparently means we don't have free will (I don't really see how this takes the choice out of our hands. So what if its "set", we're never going to know what it is until we get there anyway!) 2. As I have considered it, Eternalism surely implies "eternal return" since it says that Shakespeare, for example, still exits (in the sense that the time point he's 'in' is as real as this one) and so could still be said to be writing plays. What do you think? (I find myself more "aligned" to Eternalism, given what we know about space-time and relativity; whereas, as it stands, we are liberty to 'pick' an interpretation of quantum mechanics and there are relativistic ones.)

You shouldn't look for inherent meaning or purpose. You have the freedom to make your own. In the same way that an artist is not concerned about the blank paper but is interested in what he paints on to it.

That seems a little harsh I've read through Lynds papers myself and they seem interesting, he is published after all (http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/622019?ln=en) but anyway that might be straying off topic. What do you think makes this one look rubbish, I've only skimmed over it myself.

Does this look like pseudoscience to you fellows? http://vixra.org/abs/1206.0020

What are the (theoretical) conditions required for some kind of non-orientable wormhole to form? Thanks,

?

I have a question as to the actual nature of cyclic models of the universe (e.g. Roger Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology or the Ekpyrotic universe) - essentially where the universe has no beginning or end it simply goes through cycles eternally in both time directions. So in these situations would the entire history of the universe be considered to be mathematically an countably infinite or uncountably infinite as a set? That is, would each cycle (e.g. big bang to big crunch) be classed as an element of a countably infinite set or an uncountably infinite one? Furthermore, if the set of these cycles was countably infinite would that mean that each cycle (i.e one in which there is an Earth and this post of the Science Forums) could only ever occur **once** in the entire history of the universe. (?) Or would it mean that each cycle could have identical "looking" cycles later on. i.e at time N1 we encounter cycle A in which there is an Earth with this post on the Science Forums, and later, at time N2 we encounter cycle B in which there is a situation functionally the same as in cycle A: Identical planet with identical post on identical network which, for all intents and purposes, is then the same as cycle A (?) Thanks in advance!