Far out cosmology (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, February 04, 2014, 05:41 (3944 days ago) @ George Jelliss

dhw: The issue for me is not time on its own but time linked to cause and effect. If the Big Bang happened, it must have had a cause. You cannot have cause and effect without before and after.
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> George: For me this is outdated thinking. Things don't need to have a cause. Things are happening all the time by chance.-But it is chance within our spacetime. How do you account for chance happening to cause a big bang, and from what?
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> George: You appear to be wanting to invent some new fantasy "time" of your own. For me it is just the ticking of a clock.-Time is a measured sequence, and theoretically can go in either direction, but it seems to have directionality for us.
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> George: I'm not arguing that the universe "came out of" nothingness (although I have considered that in the past) more that "it was" nothingness. I take the "big bang" to be the earliest stage of the universe that we can detect traces of (background radiation and all that). I suspect there was a certain amount of time and space before that for a short while, but ultimately there was no measurable time or space. I suppose that must be a type of nothingness.-I follow your thoughts, but they lead me to think again of something eternal in order to produce our something, the universe. 
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> George: I'm willing to accept that that is where logic leads me, so is the best we can say. Trying to talk about time before time and space before space is just playing with words.-No it isn't. There must have always been something, or you are conjuring something from a true nothing.