- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
We're mostly stuck thinking that causality follows time. Time's just another aspect of reality. We can only be reasonably sure that our reality continuum spans some amount of time, which might or might not have boundaries. I like Hawking's North Pole analogy: the Big Bang is the point in time where causality is meaningless because there are infinite conditions that could lead to or from it, time being bi-directional. As the globe has infinite longitude lines in two dimensions (non-Euclidean), time has infinite progressions from the big bang in 24 dimensions or whatever you wanna say it is. These infinite progressions are the infinite possibilities that can emerge from the Big Bang State. We're somewhere along a superposition of all such lines that we haven't diverged from, to put it in quantum mechanical terms. This assumes that the Big Bang State is a singularity, of course. Don't think that I hold that assumption too...
Edit:
Note to hypothetical readers- What I meant by time being bi-directional is that physical laws seem to work the same way going both ways. If I hypothesize condition A and run time one way, stuff will probably happen, leading to different condition B. If I start at B and run time in the opposite direction as in the previous thought experiment, I should arrive at A because the rules by which things change are independent of time direction. It's suspected that this breaks down somewheres, so that I can't run a system through time one way along the exact same path as the other way. This would mean that I can run time backwards to put a system in a state that cannot develop into the state at the time where I started running it backwards! It's kinda werid.
If not to talk about interesting things, what're these forums for?
[Edited on 6/7/2004 9:57:32 PM]