Time, death and the universe

[leo9]

I have always found that 'time' is a difficult concept, and yesterday I saw an interesting program about it that kind of made it more complicated ;-)

So what is time? Movements on a watch's face? If you take the watch away, is there not time? Well, there are the seasons, due to the earth's travel around the sun. So, if you have no earth and no sun, is there no time???

Yes, there is. People living for long periods in deep caves, intentionally not using clocks, still live by regular routines from the passage of time that they feel in themselves.

They say time moves foreward, never backwards, but no one knows why..The example was a gletcher from which ice broke off to land in the sea. It never hops back into the gletcher again - why not? According to Brian Cox, physicist, nothing in the natural laws prevent it.

Well, he's stretching the truth there. A massive reversal of entropy like that, by pure chance, is theoretically possible, but you run out of zeroes to say how improbable it is. On average, the arrow of time always points in the direction of increasing entropy.

But to me a much more interesting point is that, theoretically, there is no arrow of time. Physicists model events by space-time diagrams which don't have any points on them marked "Past" "Present" and "Future": those concepts are irrelevant. You cannot find anything in science to tell you why "now" is different from "then," it is something that only happens in our heads. Time as a linear scale is objective, but the passage of time is completely subjective, a shared hallucination of thinking beings. One of the things I mention when atheists argue that subjective experiences like spirituality can't have any serious importance...

He talked about how a lot of stuff was brought into motion by the big bang (no one knows how that happended or why, or from what) and that those reactions run along still. Stars collaps and explode. He said the star 'died'. He talked that way about many things, and I do not quite understand, but then I do not understand 'death' either. It is said to mean the end of whatever died, finished, gone. But in reality it always seems to mean change.

When my children were little, when I had to explain to them that something was broken or worn out beyond repair, I would tell them it was dead. I felt that besides giving them a useful conceptual tool for knowing when to give up on things, it would prepare them for the time when they had to encounter a living thing's death. They would already understand that sometimes things are finished and can't be brought back, however we may want them.

The star stops being a star, ok so far, but it does not vanish, what is was does not disappear, rather it is spread over a big area. When we die, we are also spread around. Even before we are spread around - by DNA if we have off spring they have bits of us in them, as we have bits of others in us in a long chain backwards. And when we die, what we are made of does not vanish as such, the combination we were does, but our stuff goes into other stuff. Nothing vanishes, as such. It changes.

That is why the only way I can understand 'death' is as 'change'.

That works for me.

This guy talked about the end of the universe, which I think must be an old theory. Leo9 says the 'heat death' theory dates before the discovery of the the black holes, and I would be grateful if you would say something about that Leo9, please? It does not compute that 'something' becomes 'nothing'. That matter disappear, or energy disappear.

OK, the old idea of the "heat death of the universe" was a simple extrapolation of thermodynamics. Entropy must always increase (on average), therefore there must come a time when general entropy is so high - energy and matter are so evened out and mixed up - that there are no concentrations of energy or matter left to make anything happen, and the universe will settle into a permanent flat calm.

This was always philosophically awkward, because it left cosmology with a beginning but no end, and people have been thinking up ways round it ever since. One such theory notes that black holes break the rules: however the general entropy level rises, a black hole remains a reservoir of negative entropy. So it's been suggested that, since the flow of matter into black holes is irreversible, eventually they must mop up all the mass in the universe, then draw themselves together, till everything there is is packed into one vast black hole... which might be the seed of a new universe?

Right. So, does anyone understand what 'time' is, and can tell me more?

"Time is what stops everything from happening at once."

Does anyone understand what 'death' is, and can tell me more?

A boy who worked for a Zen master dropped the master's favourite cup. When the master returned that evening the boy said "Master, why is there death?"

"People die when it is time," said the master. "It is meant to be."

The boy brought the pieces of china from behind his back and said "Master, it was time for your cup to die."

Surely there is more to us that our bodies - where does it go? Join the rest of energy, as our stuff joins other stuff?

Mind is not just energy. Like a candle flame or this document on the computer, it is energy in an orderly self-maintaining pattern, and when the pattern breaks down (the mind dies, the candle goes out, the computer closes down or crashes,) the energy is conserved but the order is gone.

In my book on the afterlife, I suggested that the spirit plane - being, according to all the world's mythologies, the place where patterns of order go when they are lost to the material world - balances the material plane's increasing entropy by accumulating order and decreasing entropy. I haven't followed that thought through, but it seems to have possibilities.

And what about the universe? What started it, and from what? Where will it go?

{levitates gently to the ceiling chanting OM} It is a cosmic mystery, my child...

[Thorne]

People living for long periods in deep caves, intentionally not using clocks, still live by regular routines from the passage of time that they feel in themselves.

Humans have evolved within a 24 hour diurnal world, and our bodies' clocks retain that timing. However, without outside references, this timing can be changed, stretched to longer periods, or compressed to shorter periods. While they may perform regular routines, without any kind of objective reference there's no way for them to perform them at regular intervals.

Time as a linear scale is objective, but the passage of time is completely subjective, a shared hallucination of thinking beings.

I think that the passage of time is less an hallucination and more of a memory. Having had a couple of surgeries, with anesthetic, I experienced no sense of the passage of time until I began to wake up. And even then there were gaps until I was fully awake. The same happens when we sleep. If you wake up during the night, without looking at a clock or some other means of measuring the passage of time, you cannot know how long you've really slept. One hour or four, or only a few minutes?

One of the things I mention when atheists argue that subjective experiences like spirituality can't have any serious importance...

Not sure I understand this reference. Subjective experiences of any type can have tremendous importance to the person having them. But without some kind of objective evidence there's no way to tell if they were real or simply a false memory.

however the general entropy level rises, a black hole remains a reservoir of negative entropy.

According to Hawking, though, black holes do NOT remain. They eventually evaporate. I don't claim to understand the physics, but there is one thing that does escape a black hole: gravity.

In my book on the afterlife, I suggested that the spirit plane - being, according to all the world's mythologies, the place where patterns of order go when they are lost to the material world - balances the material plane's increasing entropy by accumulating order and decreasing entropy. I haven't followed that thought through, but it seems to have possibilities.

Maybe, if you had any objective evidence for the existence of this spirit plane. But we already know that energy cannot be lost to the material world. It can be changed and dispersed, but not lost.

[thir]

According to Hawking, though, black holes do NOT remain. They eventually evaporate. I don't claim to understand the physics, but there is one thing that does escape a black hole: gravity.

The biggest known concentration of stuff just evaporates?

But we already know that energy cannot be lost to the material world. It can be changed and dispersed, but not lost.

And so I cannot understand how the universe (or anything else) ran 'run down' ?

[Thorne]

[QUOTE=thir;960215]The biggest known concentration of stuff just evaporates?
Try this.
Still pretty hypothetical, but Hawking radiation has been observed.

And so I cannot understand how the universe (or anything else) ran 'run down' ?

Imagine striking a match in a large room. The heat around that match is pretty high, enough to burn you. As the match burns out the heat dissipates. Eventually, the infrared radiation will spread throughout the room, leaving the same amount of energy, but spread over a far larger volume. Pretty much the same as the universe. The energy remains, just much more spread out.

[thir]

[QUOTE=Thorne;960231]

The biggest known concentration of stuff just evaporates?
Try this.
Still pretty hypothetical, but Hawking radiation has been observed.


Imagine striking a match in a large room. The heat around that match is pretty high, enough to burn you. As the match burns out the heat dissipates. Eventually, the infrared radiation will spread throughout the room, leaving the same amount of energy, but spread over a far larger volume. Pretty much the same as the universe. The energy remains, just much more spread out.

As I understood the theory, they meant no energy left. This is what is so weird.

[Thorne]

As I understood the theory, they meant no energy left. This is what is so weird.

That doesn't sound right. There would be no FREE (as in usable) energy left. All energy would be bound up in small particles of matter, which would require an input of energy to release, or spread out so thinly throughout the universe so as to be useless. A homeopathic universe, if you will!

[michaelwarlock]

there is no time ... time is something we've created to measure the years we live cause we are scared of death .and we think death is the end .
so no there is no such thing as time . we separate day from the night , we separate our hours in a day . we think those are different because we are doing something different .

I think death is just a beginning . I believe we all are one . in different bodies . but our souls are pieces of a big puzzle one united ball of energy called Universe.
not just us humans we all are one as In the Universe and we are one we all are part of it . we are universe in a shape of a human when we die we dont actually die we go back to our basic form . we reunited with what were were once . and I think our souls keep coming back until they are complete . until they learned that everything is nothing ...

As for what started the Universe .... I dotn think anyone knows but I have myh own theory that The Universe is unlimited there is no end nor no start to it . It always have been here and always will be . I know believing this theory is hard cause we have a tendency to find things starts and ends because out minds are limited its trapped in a bone shaped skull . we know there are other planets except for ours but what happens to them do they stop existing after a certain point > then after that what will it just be space ? still space is something so you know what I mean when I say Unlimited ?

[Thorne]

there is no time ... time is something we've created to measure the years we live cause we are scared of death .and we think death is the end .

A rather simplistic view. What you're talking about is a construct of humans, yes, but time is a fundamental part of the universe. How we measure time is not. And we measure it, not to mark the hours to death, but to regulate our lives, so we know when to plant, when to harvest, when to hunt (the earliest developments of measurement).

so no there is no such thing as time . we separate day from the night , we separate our hours in a day . we think those are different because we are doing something different .

We are doing different things because there are certain things you cannot do during certain times of day. Though with artificial lighting, those differences have become much smaller.

I think death is just a beginning . I believe we all are one . in different bodies . but our souls are pieces of a big puzzle one united ball of energy called Universe.

Nice thoughts, and you're entitled to your beliefs, but do you have any evidence of this? For starters, I'd love to see evidence for the existence of the soul. Mankind has been searching for that since - well, since the beginning of time!

we all are one as In the Universe and we are one we all are part of it . we are universe in a shape of a human when we die we dont actually die we go back to our basic form .

Well, in some sense you are almost right. We are all made from the same materials, and many those materials were once joined in the center of a star, so technically we are a part of that star. And when we die our bodies will revert to those component atoms and molecules again. But believe me, we'll be dead.

I think our souls keep coming back until they are complete .

Complete how? And again, evidence for these souls?

As for what started the Universe .... I dotn think anyone knows but I have myh own theory that The Universe is unlimited there is no end nor no start to it . It always have been here and always will be .

Well, we can agree here, at least. Except that the universe as we know it now did have a beginning (the Big Bang) and, as near as we can tell, will have an end (heat death), but there is no telling what other universes may be out there, or whether all that makes up this universe will merge with those other universes, somehow.

(our) minds are limited its trapped in a bone shaped skull .

Without that skull it's doubtful we would even have minds. Getting into really deep metaphysics here, but our minds are an emergent property of our brains. Without the skull, it's doubtful our brains would be able to develop sufficiently to produce what we think of as mind.

we know there are other planets except for ours but what happens to them do they stop existing after a certain point

Some of the planets in our Solar System will be absorbed into the Sun when it expands into a red giant. Others may wind up being either sucked in or pushed away, doomed to wander between the stars. But eventually, many trillions of years into the future, the universe as we know it will probably be a cold, dead, expanding cloud of dust and debris, expanding into infinity, with nothing to show that it was ever more than that.