When people say “the universe began 14 billion years ago,” do they realize that this is not true in the slightest?
It’s not true not because they aren’t measuring things accurately. Rather, it’s not true because the standards of measurement cannot have possibly remained unchanged over such a time period.
To put it crudely, this is because there were no years back then. There were no years because there was no Earth rotating around the sun, no sun, no Milky Way galaxy… no us, and no anything we would recognize whatsoever.
To assume that years predate the universe and the solar system, or that they constitute an abstract measure that can be applied to the universe before the universe even existed (as such), is to assume that time is a container within which things move, and that both the container and the things in it are fundamentally stable and unchanging. It’s no better than the assumption that space is a container within which things move and that all are stable and unchanging. According to contemporary science — and according to the assumptions of the more adequate philosophical systems (okay, I’m setting up a standard there) — both of these sets of assumptions are untrue.
Time and space are folded together. (A process-relational approach would assert that they are folded together with experience; but we need not go there.) When all was one tiny, hyper-dense singularity, there was neither space nor time as we know it.
Let’s admit it: time as we measure it is part of the universe we have inhabited, a universe that has developed habits as it has grown and evolved. We are situated within those habits, not free of them; we inhabit a particular array of them, and learn to inhabit beyond our constraints as we develop new habits (with the aid of imagination, language, technology, and the rest) — as we become-other.
None of this is the same as saying that “time did not exist because we (humans) did not.” (That would be an anthropocentric form of ontological “social constructionism.”) Quite contrarily: time as we know and experience it is simply not time itself. If there is such a thing as “time itself,” we only know something about it through our experience of it, but to presume from that limited experience that we know what it is for any and all entities that have ever arisen, or ever will, seems arrogant to me.
All right then… With that off my chest I’ll cave in a little and agree to this: Since we have no other way of measuring it, we might as well say that the universe began so long ago that if we measured it in our earth years, the number 14 billion would be as good a number as any that we could give it. If that helps us inhabit the universe just a little more comfortably, then fine, have it that way.
I suspect that someone may well pick this post up and use it as support for the claim that universe could therefore be 6,017 years old, due to space-time compression as one approaches the singularity of creation ex nihilo.
But good post, I’ve always had my doubts and irritation about the meaning of second, day, year, time etc. as one approaches the “beginning”.
That possibility hadn’t even occurred to me… But now that you mention it, Paul, I remember learning something like that from Catholic grade school: that God’s seven days of creation were equivalent to scientists’ 14 billion, at least in a metaphorical sense. Ascribing it to space-time compression instead of to metaphor makes it literal and would require finding scientists who agree that such compression could be so dramatic (good luck!).
I’d be curious to know what a millenarian Christian would do with that information to theorize what happens at the other end… Does time begin to stretch out near-infinitely again (so that the end won’t come for another several billion years), or does it collapse altogether, with the end coming any moment now? But I somehow doubt that my post will create a novel mutation in End Times prophecy…
I’m not sure I follow. Is this not what everyone assumes anyway? That is, you have just teased out what is implicit and made it explicit.
Well, there are ways we could test this out empirically to see what “everyone assumes anyway.” We could ask people which of the following they believe is closer to the truth. I’ve distinguished these into three options, but there are probably others one could come up with.
(a) Time is absolute: i.e., it is what it is, proceeding at the fixed rate that it does, irrespective of space, speed, extension, change, gravity, experience, or anything else that is happening anywhere (at least from the “beginning of time” to its “end,” if not eternally). Seconds, years, centuries, and so on, are simply ways to measure this absolute phenomenon called time.
(b) Time varies with other factors such as space, speed, extension, change, gravity, and so on. This means that it may “speed up” or “slow down” in accordance with whatever is happening with or in the universe (or multiverse, or whatever there is).
(c) Time varies with other factors such as space, speed, extension, change, gravity, and so on, such that it varies for whatever entity it is that is experiencing the “passage” of time. Time is in this sense phenomenological and not an ontological universal (except insofar as “the” or “a” universe might include experience that is shared across all its member parts). Time is a category of experience for something that experiences. Beyond that, it is nothing.
What I’ve argued in my post is that (a) is not true. I haven’t really distinguished between (b) and (c).
This is all a matter of definitions, of course — we can define time phenomenologically or ontologically, subjectively or objectively. I think that people would generally distinguish between time itself as an objective phenomenon and the subjective experience of time, and assume that time itself isn’t altered by our experience of it.
What I’m saying is that if there is a “time itself,” it is not flat and constant; but also that there may not be a time itself, but only an experienced time. The first statement (“it is not flat and constant”) might be taken to assume a flat and constant baseline, and here one could speculate that if there is anything outside “our universe” (and theories of multiverses and other kinds of cosmological macro entities would suggest there are), then time within our universe and time outside our universe would likely be different.
How does this stack up against what contemporary scientific cosmologists think? For starters, the educational web site Khan Academy had someone ask: “Does the 13.7 B years (based on red shift) take into account the time dilation that would occur because of super-massive amounts of gravity, as proposed by Einstein?” The answer someone else gave was:
“Time dilation as expressed by the theory of general relativity is not a phenomenon that would effect [sic] the whole universe as one. Time dilation has to do with the way time is relative for different observers, depending on their movement relative to one another, or certain gravitational effects. There are no “different observers” of the entire universe (so far as we understand it) so there’s no way that different observers can experience different amounts of time passing between now and some specific universe-wide event in the past.”
(I would qualify that by saying we just don’t know enough to say whether there are “different observers of the entire universe,” because we don’t know what’s outside the universe.)
This would suggest that if the universe expands and contracts at the same rate everywhere throughout it, then there is no difference in how someone at the outer edge of the universe and someone at its middle experiences time, since expansion/contraction is constant throughout it, and that therefore time is the same for them. Or, rather, there is no difference in objective time for either of them. (One might still experience time more slowly than another, say under the influence of drugs or some other factor, but that would be subjective difference, not objective reality.) The idea of expansion that is the same for something at the middle of what’s expanding as it is for something that’s at the outer edges of what’s expanding is a difficult concept to wrap one’s mind around.
Sorry for the long-winded answer, but I thought the question was interesting.
maybe this will cheer you up:
http://newbooksinphilosophy.com/2013/09/14/michael-marder-plant-thinking-a-philosophy-of-vegetal-life-columbia-up-2013/
Thanks for that, dmf. Yes, an entirely different experience of time can be had from some of our closest cohabitants. Makes me want to eat vegetables much more respectfully…
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