How did the beginning of time start?

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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The Beginning of Time

Imagine you are the architect of existence, a timeless entity lounging in the infinite expanse of your cosmic home. In the attic, a grow tent hums with potential ~ a void we’ll call “Space.” You introduce a fragment of a larger world, a clod of Earth, into this void. Silence. A seed follows, nestled in the soil. Stillness. Water, measured with the precision of a creator, is added. Yet, nothing stirs.

Then comes light ~ a sun in miniature. As it floods the tent, life flickers, a seedling stretching towards the glow, only to falter, burned by an excess of love. The lesson is clear: creation demands balance. Not too close, not too far, but a perfect harmony. Yet, even with care, the plant’s life is fleeting. The enigma? Time itself. A cycle of light and darkness, measured in hours, is needed. Water, air, and light dance to a rhythm you conduct. But what happens when the creator needs to step away?

Enter the timer ~ a mechanical heart beating in sync with the plant’s needs. It flips switches, releases moisture, and whispers breezes, freeing you from the cycle. Just as the Earth was once a barren rock adrift in the cosmos, until a cataclysmic birth ~ the moon ripped from the Pacific, birthing time as we know it. Now, the moon, a celestial clock hand 238,900 miles distant but round it off 240,000 miles (or 24:00:00 in cosmic code), dictates our days. Should it drift further, our hours would stretch, our days lengthen. The moon, our natural timer, marks the dawn of time’s dominion, a moment before which existence was unbound by its constraints.

By Seemak M Macull

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If the laws of physics are time-reversible, as many physicists think they are, then it’s possible there’s no beginning - the timespan of the universe may go infinitely both ways. Like the equation y=x, it might go forward above 0 and backwards below 0.

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Interestingly enough, there are mathematical systems that are analogous to going back in time, with no distinct original moment, that generate an effect recognized at present that does not depend upon a particular “starting point”.

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This is a question needing an answer only to those suggesting that it something in need of starting, which itself is a process (there’s no time going, and later on it gets started, all quite self contradictory).

Imagine you are the architect of existence, a timeless entity lounging

If timeless, it can’t be lounging, introducing, creating, or doing anything else. If it can do any of these things, time was already there.

I find no conflict with time being bounded at one end, just like the natural numbers.

I also consider it insulting to post a topic and then reply to none of the responses.

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Time didn’t start. Motions and movements started. Time is just a human perception on the motions, movements, intervals and changes.

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Perception of time started when conscious beings capable of perceiving emerged.

Motion doesn’t start.

There is no beginning of motion because “beginning” requires a “before,” and there is no “before.”

Motion simply is, eternally.

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Before motion of object is the standstill state, which is perfectly legitimate and perceivable state.

All motion begins from the standstill state.

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What is “standstill”?

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Motionless, stationery, standing, unmoving

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It was asked how I arrived at the conclusion that motion simply is, eternally. Fair challenge, I used motion to justify motion, which is circular.

Let me restate. I cannot reduce motion to anything more basic, so I treat it as fundamental. And that’s not proof of motions eternality…

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Might it be that what came before was infinite; in time and energy, an absolute state of existence.

And that our universe is a bubble of slowdown rather than something “beginning”. That we’re a bubble in which this absolute state becomes “less”, slowed, and in doing so, energy solidifies into matter. That the state of things outside our bubble is glimpsed every time we see light, energy at its absolute maximum. And that the speed limit of light is essentially a reach into that absolute state of existence that is outside this bubble. The fields in physics seem awfully close to a form of friction, slowing down particles, giving them properties. Like the Higgs field giving mass.

If this were true, then time as we know it would simply be a slowdown of something that would have taken an infinitely less time to progress outside of our reality. That the Big Bang was not a rapid acceleration, but a rapid slowdown and the acceleration of expansion is this slowdown slowly returning to the state it was once in.

1 Like
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There was tohu va-vohu and then the light came.

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Broken teacups have not been observed to reassemble, the reversible laws of physics notwithstanding. Mistaking mathematical formulas for the reality which they proport to model (not to just approximate) has been termed a fallacy of misplaced concreteness.