Question on time (don't bash me too hard haha)

[GracieBarra]

Well, Im a 20 year old guy, and I really love reading all I can on two fields, that being physics and biology (although my main passion is mathematics).

 

I still never really got to understand how time could have "started". Are there any good hypothesis on this? I mean, time had to have started at some point, so let's call this t=0.

 

Obviously, there can be nothing before t=0 since time is absolute. So what really got it going?

 

 

 

I was thinking of this today, and the only idea I myself can come up with that time could be more related to what mathematically is a limit. Thinking backwards, maybe we would never arrive at t=0, but it could approach it.

 

Think of it somewhere around the terms of an equation (lets just make one up) that looks something like (t^2 + 1)/t. In this equation, t could never equal "0", but it can approach infinitely close to zero (from the positive side of course). Using limits, we could find the value as t---> to 0, but that's besides the point.

 

This would work sorta like, the farther time strays away from 0, the faster time goes by (speed of time is really relative, and no matter how fast it goes, we could never feel that, because we are confined by it). BUT, the interesting this is, that the closer you get to t=0, the slower time is, and it would NEVER really reach zero, but just get infinitely close to it.

 

 

 

Yea, that's the only idea I could think up of to explain how there could ever be a t=0 starting point. I'd love to hear people's ideas of what I wrote down, and also any existing hypothesis that talks about the same thing.

 

 

 

 

Thanks,

Matt.

 

Hehe, to add to the idea of mine I was talking about, maybe time itself goes back and forth. We could never know if time moved backwards and forwards, fluctuating from one direction to another. That way, since time could go infinitely backwards (if it was a limit approaching zero), and could go infinitely forward, since there would be no end to time, it would make some sense. And interestingly enough, even if it was random which direction time would take, and that fluctuated back and forth, it would on average, do more forward than backwards, since at going forwards, it would speed up, and backwards, slow down.

[ydoaPs]

In the same way that distance is the measure of separation between two objects, time is the measure of the separation of two states. So, "before" the first event would be somewhat meaningless, since there is no reference with which to measure; it is like asking the difference between a duck. The first event(presumably the big bang) would have created time by virtue of it changing the universe.

Edited May 30, 2008 by ydoaPs

[KALSTER]

You could apply the same logic to any movement, yet we can move! Zeno's_paradoxes are what we are dealing with here in your proposal, and as you suggested, calculus takes care of it. Time is the way we measure relative movement and nothing more. Time would not exist in a universe of zero size, or T = 0 as you call it. Some people have in the past suggested that there exists a fundamental increment of movement. This would take care of your problem, if it existed. Modern theories dealing with vibrating strings mean that at small enough scales things get "fuzzy", so I guess that could mean that at small enough scales movement becomes a misnomer, similar to electron orbitals. In current quantum theory they can't be thought of as orbiting the nucleus, but rather that the electron is governed by a probability function, which means essentially that it could be thought of as being at every possible point in its orbit at all times, creating an electron cloud as it were. It is called quantum uncertainty or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

 

PS:

it is like asking the difference between a duck.

Never heard it explained that way before:D

[swansont]

I still never really got to understand how time could have "started". Are there any good hypothesis on this? I mean, time had to have started at some point, so let's call this t=0.

 

Obviously, there can be nothing before t=0 since time is absolute. So what really got it going?

 

It can't be infinite?

 

Tim is not absolute, time is relative to your reference frame.

[iNow]

Tim is not absolute, time is relative to your reference frame.

 

Exactly. Also, time is not absolute, and is relative to your reference frame.