For many years I’ve tried to understand the concept of “time” and how it shapes us and the universe as a whole. Sure, time is trivial to understand when we talk about it in terms of the environment in which we live, but that doesn’t really mean anything when we are on a universal (and fundamental) scale. To put it quite simply, humans created the unit of time. Time is not something you can go out and measure quantitatively (as of yet)… this is why it’s known as the universal independent variable. In order for one human’s path in space to intersect with another human’s path in space, an order of time must be created otherwise the head of your paths are unlikely to meet together. Many years ago we used moon cycles, sun locations and stars in the sky to tell us an order of time. I won’t get into a lot of the history of the creation of time because it doesn’t correlate with my argument, and you can look it up yourself.
The Universe
Understanding time has plagued humanity almost as long as we’ve had cognizant brains. The reason lies with beginnings and with ends. Obviously, when talking about time, it is impossible to avoid the deterioration to the ultimate question… “why are we here” and “where did it all come from”. What I am going to do is attempt to give my explanation to time and the answers to the question postulated above.
Humans are action-reaction creatures. It is how we learn, how we understand, how we decide and how we act. From the moment we are born we become a sponge for information. We witness an event or an action and become of the consequences thereafter. This endless process is what shapes us and our mind. We literally are made up of our experiences. The point being, humans inherently know there are beginnings and ends to everything because it’s intrinsic in the world we are raised in. Naturally, it leads people to wonder why the universe had a beginning and what was the action that caused it. This is where we could get biblical (which is not the purpose of this article). But both sides of the spectrum use arguments of relation to “getting something from nothing”. As in, “the big bang was something from nothing”… or, “god is something from nothing”. I’ll leave the biblical portion of the article to that.
What we fail to recognize is the notion of infinity. BUT WAIT! This is not another argument for infinite time! Anyone with any form of intelligible thought process has heard somebody argue a universe that exists outside that of time, whether religious or not. I do not believe in a universe that has a time line that extends infinitely in both the early and later directions. I speculate that everything in the universe is happening at once.
That’s right, there is no timeline, or rather, it is a timeline of no length. Let me put it into perspective here. If I were to write this entire article fading from the color red to the color blue, would you be able to tell me which letter was purple? The answer is no. But that still isn’t precisely a good analogy. The events in our day are all superfluous, there is no strict beginning or end to events in our day-to-day life. Our brain perceives beginnings and ends to make sense of things because it’s the natural process as to how we learn. But every single little sub-atomic particle in the entire universe is behaving superfluously with each other at any point in “time”, removed from however you divide it, there is no literal beginning of anything, it’s all arbitrary. Which means it’s possible for everything to be happening at once. The only confusion is how we clarify which event happened after another event. Einstein showed how time and space are relative and it has been proven that the faster you go the slower time appears (look up the Hafele-Keating experiment). In fact, without relativity, our GPS satellites wouldn’t work. If time is relative, then maybe we are locked in this mentality of thinking time is an actual thing… simply on the basis we exist at speeds exasperatingly less than the speed of light.
Ultimately, I think the questions, “why are we here” and “where did it all come from”, are invalid questions to ask. It might be an extremely complicated and far out reaching version of the question, “what is the color of the number 3″. That question is a non-question. And we may not be intelligent enough of a species to understand that or see why this is the case. Again, this is just a speculation. But without the existence of “time”. Then there is no beginning and there is no end. There will definitely be an end to humanity at some point in the future, how far out we don’t know.
Ultra zoom in (this shows you where we are in the universe): Click
What existed before the known universe very might as well be another universe, in constant contraction and expansion… or dissipation. Which then begs the question, “what is beyond the “edge” of our universe?” Well, recently, there has been a lot of data coming in from research astrophysicists have been doing that leads us to believe there could be other universes butting up against ours. There are unexplained bubbles of energy all around the “edge” of our universe that come out to be exactly what we would expect if another universe (not too different from ours) were bumping into us. Knowing this, we can speculate an infinite amount of universes, all with their own laws of physics and chemistry and biology. But we would never be able to witness this or go there because time and space and physical law limit us from crossing that “edge”. In our universe, space is expanding, but we can’t go where space isn’t yet and we also can’t see where light hasn’t traveled yet. Which means we would never ever, ever, be able to witness first hand another universe whether one existed or not… only by 2nd hand witnessing would we be able to infer.
I hope this wasn’t too cloudy of an article. My roommate and I talked about this and the like for nearly 2.5 hours trying to come to an agreement of opinion and/or understanding. If you wish to ask a question about my opinion, or leave a comment, feel free to do so below.
