Brian Cox

[Chippy_boy]

We aren’t sure about that either. The singularity is where physics breaks down. But it was quite warm anyway (very soon after it started expanding*)

*NB: understatement.

Of course, but shortly after the beginning all that existed was energy. It took a whole thousandth of a billionth of a second for mass carrying particles like quarks and electrons to form. Positively ages!

 

[Chippy_boy]

I don't think the Big Bang is terribly relevant to the context of the question.

True. Although you did say "You can't make mass from energy", which is obviously not true hence my post.

 

[MillionMilesAway]

True. Although you did say "You can't make mass from energy", which is obviously not true hence my post.

I concede that, if taken in isolation.
I have no idea if it's been done by man though, or is purely theoretical.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Bear with me, since this is a bit long, but I find it fascinating and I hope some of you also will:

As a bit of a segue, I posted some while back about the very real possibility that all of time "exists". That the future exists in just the same way as the past does, only we can't see it yet.

It got into a bit of a heated debate with some posters (wrongly imo) suggesting that this implies there's no free will if everything that's going to happen is going to happen anyway no matter what you do. I say wrongly, since all it implies is that if you decide change your mind about something having read this, you were always going to change your mind having read this. I was always going to write it. It's all pre-ordained, even if it doesn't feel like it is.

The science about whether time does actually "flow", or whether it's some kind of illusion, is still unclear and even Einstein and Stephen Hawking puzzled over it. All we know for sure is that Special Relativity shows us that there is no universal concept of "now". Your now, my now and someone else's now are not the same. That's pretty profound when you think about it.

All of this follows from our realisation that the speed of light is constant no matter how and where you measure it. Once that penny drops, everything above logically follows.

So imagine in a typical "thought experiment", two men sitting opposite each other on a speeding train travelling at near the speed of light. There's a lamp in the middle of the table and the lamp is remotely switched on. Einstein proved that even though the two men are moving on a very fast train, the speed of light as measured by them, must be just that, the speed of light. So the light emits from the lamp, travels and the speed of light towards each bloke and they both see the lamp come on at the same time.

But to observers on the platform, as the train whizzes past, they see the light radiating away from the lamp at the speed of light. And they see the forward-facing guy slam into the oncoming light beam, whilst the rear-facing guy is racing away backward from a light beam slowly catching up with him. He sees the lamp come on much later!

So two events that are simultaneous from one vantage point are not simultaneous from another. What happens at the same time on the train, doesn't happen at the same time if viewed from elsewhere.

And it gets even weirder. Move the lamp slightly nearer the rear-facing guy and on the train, he sees the light first (call this Event A), because the lamp is near to him. Slightly later, the front-facing guy sees it: "Event B". Event A is followed by Event B. But on the platform, witnesses see light hitting the front-facing guy first and the rear-facing guy second. So as viewed on the platform Event A comes AFTER Event B!

So not only can we not agree on a universal "now", we cannot even agree in what sequence events in time actually happen. General relativity amplifies these effects over great distances, leading us to the conclusion that events 1000's of years in our future, have already happened in some alien's distant past. And therefore the logical conclusion that all of time, past, present and future all exist already.

I find all of this particularly fascinating! If you do, I can recommend books such as Brian Greene's, "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality".

Or maybe as a starter his book, "The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory"

 

[inchy14]

Oh, like Blackpool?

(NB: Quite warm, not where physics breaks down)

And just where Biology broke down............

 

[crazyg]

Bear with me, since this is a bit long, but I find it fascinating and I hope some of you also will:

As a bit of a segue, I posted some while back about the very real possibility that all of time "exists". That the future exists in just the same way as the past does, only we can't see it yet.

It got into a bit of a heated debate with some posters (wrongly imo) suggesting that this implies there's no free will if everything that's going to happen is going to happen anyway no matter what you do. I say wrongly, since all it implies is that if you decide change your mind about something having read this, you were always going to change your mind having read this. I was always going to write it. It's all pre-ordained, even if it doesn't feel like it is.

The science about whether time does actually "flow", or whether it's some kind of illusion, is still unclear and even Einstein and Stephen Hawking puzzled over it. All we know for sure is that Special Relativity shows us that there is no universal concept of "now". Your now, my now and someone else's now are not the same. That's pretty profound when you think about it.

All of this follows from our realisation that the speed of light is constant no matter how and where you measure it. Once that penny drops, everything above logically follows.

So imagine in a typical "thought experiment", two men sitting opposite each other on a speeding train travelling at near the speed of light. There's a lamp in the middle of the table and the lamp is remotely switched on. Einstein proved that even though the two men are moving on a very fast train, the speed of light as measured by them, must be just that, the speed of light. So the light emits from the lamp, travels and the speed of light towards each bloke and they both see the lamp come on at the same time.

But to observers on the platform, as the train whizzes past, they see the light radiating away from the lamp at the speed of light. And they see the forward-facing guy slam into the oncoming light beam, whilst the rear-facing guy is racing away backward from a light beam slowly catching up with him. He sees the lamp come on much later!

So two events that are simultaneous from one vantage point are not simultaneous from another. What happens at the same time on the train, doesn't happen at the same time if viewed from elsewhere.

And it gets even weirder. Move the lamp slightly nearer the rear-facing guy and on the train, he sees the light first (call this Event A), because the lamp is near to him. Slightly later, the front-facing guy sees it: "Event B". Event A is followed by Event B. But on the platform, witnesses see light hitting the front-facing guy first and the rear-facing guy second. So as viewed on the platform Event A comes AFTER Event B!

So not only can we not agree on a universal "now", we cannot even agree in what sequence events in time actually happen. General relativity amplifies these effects over great distances, leading us to the conclusion that events 1000's of years in our future, have already happened in some alien's distant past. And therefore the logical conclusion that all of time, past, present and future all exist already.

I find all of this particularly fascinating! If you do, I can recommend books such as Brian Greene's, "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality".

Or maybe as a starter his book, "The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory"

That's all very well, but the answer is still 42.

 

[Chippy_boy]

That's all very well, but the answer is still 42.

I know, you'd already said that.

 

[aguero93:20]

Bear with me, since this is a bit long, but I find it fascinating and I hope some of you also will:

As a bit of a segue, I posted some while back about the very real possibility that all of time "exists". That the future exists in just the same way as the past does, only we can't see it yet.

It got into a bit of a heated debate with some posters (wrongly imo) suggesting that this implies there's no free will if everything that's going to happen is going to happen anyway no matter what you do. I say wrongly, since all it implies is that if you decide change your mind about something having read this, you were always going to change your mind having read this. I was always going to write it. It's all pre-ordained, even if it doesn't feel like it is.

The science about whether time does actually "flow", or whether it's some kind of illusion, is still unclear and even Einstein and Stephen Hawking puzzled over it. All we know for sure is that Special Relativity shows us that there is no universal concept of "now". Your now, my now and someone else's now are not the same. That's pretty profound when you think about it.

All of this follows from our realisation that the speed of light is constant no matter how and where you measure it. Once that penny drops, everything above logically follows.

So imagine in a typical "thought experiment", two men sitting opposite each other on a speeding train travelling at near the speed of light. There's a lamp in the middle of the table and the lamp is remotely switched on. Einstein proved that even though the two men are moving on a very fast train, the speed of light as measured by them, must be just that, the speed of light. So the light emits from the lamp, travels and the speed of light towards each bloke and they both see the lamp come on at the same time.

But to observers on the platform, as the train whizzes past, they see the light radiating away from the lamp at the speed of light. And they see the forward-facing guy slam into the oncoming light beam, whilst the rear-facing guy is racing away backward from a light beam slowly catching up with him. He sees the lamp come on much later!

So two events that are simultaneous from one vantage point are not simultaneous from another. What happens at the same time on the train, doesn't happen at the same time if viewed from elsewhere.

And it gets even weirder. Move the lamp slightly nearer the rear-facing guy and on the train, he sees the light first (call this Event A), because the lamp is near to him. Slightly later, the front-facing guy sees it: "Event B". Event A is followed by Event B. But on the platform, witnesses see light hitting the front-facing guy first and the rear-facing guy second. So as viewed on the platform Event A comes AFTER Event B!

So not only can we not agree on a universal "now", we cannot even agree in what sequence events in time actually happen. General relativity amplifies these effects over great distances, leading us to the conclusion that events 1000's of years in our future, have already happened in some alien's distant past. And therefore the logical conclusion that all of time, past, present and future all exist already.

I find all of this particularly fascinating! If you do, I can recommend books such as Brian Greene's, "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality".

Or maybe as a starter his book, "The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory"

I thought you were going to start going on about Nietzche there at the start, we would have had a row if so (no free will, see?).

 

[Chippy_boy]

I thought you were going to start going on about Nietzche there at the start, we would have had a row if so (no free will, see?).

It's an interesting topic altogether and whereas I am no philosopher (and not much more a physicist having forgotten more than I ever knew), the idea of a fixed, pre-ordained sequence of events for every atom in the universe (and you and me with it, implicitly) from the beginning of time until the end, is not as daft as it might seem. And in fact, it's not daft at all.

Since we now know that space and time are intertwined into what Einstein named Spacetime, we can think of places in space but equally validly, spaces in time. If you fly to Sydney this year, you'd find the opera house and the harbour bridge there. You would not fly there next year and find the Taj Mahal was there instead. Equally, if you visited Hastings in 1066, you'd only expect to see the events of 1066. And just the same, the events of 2047 are very possibly what they are, but we just can't see them yet.

 

[aguero93:20]

It's an interesting topic altogether and whereas I am no philosopher (and not much more a physicist having forgotten more than I ever knew), the idea of a fixed, pre-ordained sequence of events for every atom in the universe (and you and me with it, implicitly) from the beginning of time until the end, is not as daft as it might seem. And in fact, it's not daft at all.

Since we now know that space and time are intertwined into what Einstein named Spacetime, we can think of places in space but equally validly, spaces in time. If you fly to Sydney this year, you'd find the opera house and the harbour bridge there. You would not fly there next year and find the Taj Mahal was there instead. Equally, if you visited Hastings in 1066, you'd only expect to see the events of 1066. And just the same, the events of 2047 are very possibly what they are, but we just can't see them yet.

It might work with non sentient matter but not with sentient beings. If I go to Sydney, it's because I've chosen to. That's my responsibility, not the universe's.