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.

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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.

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“Misplaced concreteness”. Thank you. I learned something by reading your post. I am a retired mathematician and not a philosopher, and my research topic was the basis for the weird speculation I made. Occasionally pure math is shown to describe physical phenomena, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for this example. :slightly_smiling_face:

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@Corvus @Christoffer
I was thinking of what was said and this is what I pictured ( mostly from thinking of infinity and standstill and bubbles ) :

P1. Energy is unbounded. The capacity for distinction has no ceiling, no external cause, no boundary. This is the single brute fact. Everything else follows from it.

P2. Unbounded capacity for distinction cannot prohibit difference. To prohibit difference would require a boundary on what distinctions can exist. P1 rules this out.

P3. Therefore all possible configurations exist. If distinction is unbounded and difference cannot be prohibited, every possible arrangement of distinction exists somewhere.

P4. Every configuration has its opposite. Follows from P3. If all configurations exist, their opposites exist too. The net tendency of unbounded energy is toward cancellation.

P5. The system tends toward equilibrium. Follows from P4. Opposites cancel. The net of unbounded energy is zero. Perfect stillness is what the system moves toward globally.

P6. Perfect cancellation at every finite scale simultaneously is impossible. Unbounded capacity cannot coordinate perfect resolution everywhere at once. The system is too full. Local stillness would require global coordination that unboundedness prevents.

P7. Therefore asymmetry is inevitable locally. Follows from P5 and P6. The system tends toward zero but cannot achieve it everywhere. Something always remains. Not caused. Just — what unbounded energy cannot avoid locally.

P8. Asymmetry that persists before fully cancelling is a bubble. Definition. Stable incomplete cancellation. The system finding a local pattern that holds before resolving.

P9. Each bubble generates a boundary. Follows from P8. Incomplete cancellation has a shape — the limit of what it cannot be.

P10. Each boundary is itself a configuration of energy. Follows from P1 and P9. The boundary exists within unbounded energy. P6 and P7 apply to it too. It cannot cancel perfectly at its own scale either.

P11. Therefore nesting is inevitable and infinite in both directions. Follows from P8, P9, P10 repeating without privileged scale. Every bubble is inside a larger one. Every bubble contains smaller ones. No level is more fundamental than another.

P12. Time is the process of asymmetry moving toward cancellation. Follows from P5 and P7. Where asymmetry exists, resolution is in process. That process is time. Where there is no asymmetry there is no time.

P13. Matter is asymmetry that has found a stable pattern before fully cancelling. Follows from P8. Matter is what a bubble looks like from inside it.

P14. Force is asymmetry pulling toward balance. Follows from P5 and P7. The tendency toward equilibrium experienced locally as a pull.

P15. Before the first asymmetry there is no time. Follows from P12. No asymmetry means no process, no resolution, no before or after. The unbounded energy in perfect global equilibrium is timeless — not empty, but full and still.

P16. The first asymmetry has no cause. Follows from P6 and P15. There is no time before it in which a cause could operate. It is simply what unbounded energy cannot avoid being locally. Inevitable without being caused.

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What have these got to do with the beginning of time? We need more explanation on where they are coming from and what they are related to.

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Do you perceive infinity?

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Infinity doesn’t exist. It is a concept with no matching reality or object.

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Standstill is also a concept with no matching reality or object.

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Why do you think that is the case?