Posted on 09/01/2006 8:10:03 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
If there's a restaurant at the end of the universe why can't there be an outhouse at the beginning?
There are two worldviews though. One believes that space/time expansion is the effect of energy/matter. The other believes and energy/matter is the effect of the expansion of space/time.
I'm of the latter worldview.
Because those galaxies are lacking, for whatever reason, the elements/materials that absorb that particular radiation?
OTOH, maybe the materials route the radiation around/through the galaxy?
After all, didn't somebody last year came up with a material (copper-based, iirc) to route microwaves around an object?
Not me.. I believe UNdesignated energy/matter is Dark energy/ matter.. and designated energy/matter(this visible Universe) has been and will contuinue to be designated and UNdesignated even more in the future.. And that Time in all its perceptions by humans is/may be a MENTAL construct.. a physical brain thing..
>>Nobel Prize awarded to Big Bang proponents as evidence vanishes
by Tom Van Flandern
Meta Research<<
Its worth remembering as you read Dr. Van Flandern's article that he is working on what he believes is proof that the Universe is much older than the 20 billion years predicted by big bang theory and that like the other 500 articles that week he only had the the Alabama press release to work with.
Van Flandern is also the guy who claims Einstein faked the theory of relativity and lied to cover it up. He also says he has proof of an alien civilization on Mars.
If you look at at articles that came out over the next few weeks and months it turned out that the WMAP sensors would likely not have detected the shadow if there is a shadow. And that if the shadow is not there it may tell us more about the galaxy clusters than the big bang because they were measuring inside a cluster.
But the Alabama research raised some interesting questions that will be looked at in further studies. But in less than a week Dr. Lieu backed off saying ""I myself am not at this point prepared to accept that the CMB is non-cosmological and that there was no Big Bang"
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-09-11-big-bang-doubts_x.htm
But that's a fascinating article I'm glad you found it.
I'm familiar with TVF.
Does it matter?
Hi hosepipe!!! I've been mulling over this question myself. It seems to me that if time is a mental construct, "a physical brain thing," it is so because there really is such a thing as time. IOW, the mind isn't creating time out of thin air, so to speak. Time is not an illusion of the mind; rather the mind somehow is awfully good at modeling the reality in which it participates. So this is not an either/or question, but a both question: Because time is objectively real, it can be "imaged" as a human "mental category."
Then agan, there is time, and there is timelessness -- the latter not being susceptible to direct sensory perception, but capable of being grasped in some fashion by the mind. Plato insisted that man lives at the intersection of time and timelessness. Christians say that the human person is mortal, and yet his soul has extension (or rather lives) in timelessness, or eternity. Humans actually participate in two different temporal orders, one we can directly perceive within the 4D "Minkowsky space," and one we cannot.
It's a difficult subject, isn't it?
Thanks so much for writing, dear 'pipe!
Exactly.. What I try to say when I propose the donkey and the spirit.. metaphor.. What we see in the mirror as ourselves our bodies is in one paradigm and what is looking back at us from the mirror the eyes of our spirits is rightfully from another paradigm..
Could explain what a human body dieing is all about.. A separating of the material from the spiritual.. Which is not really death at all.. but a metamorphosis.. And we have just proved what our spirit Is or Isn't.. The human body being a chrysalis.. for the production of many kinds of spirits.. with a thousand different butterflys being an example..
Others are able to perceive physical reality as four dimensional - three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension (relativity.) This would be the Minkowski "space." I would venture that this is the limit of the unaided mortal perception, i.e. without mathematical reasoning and especially without the indwelling Spirit.
A few are able to mathematically envision additional spatial dimensions (string theory) either compactified (Kaluza-Klein) or expanded from the Big Bang. And a very precious few are able to mathematically envision additional temporal dimensions (Vafa, Wesson, et al.) Also, some physical cosmologists are able to mathematically envision timelessness and spacelessness from which geometry must bootstrap in order for there to be a physical reality at all and in particular, physical causation.
But in all of this - it is only Christians and a few blessed others such as Plato - who actually are aware of being alive in timelessness while yet in the flesh (space/time.)
Indeed! The recognition that one is alive in timelessness is ultimately a spiritual insight. Plus time is not usually a topic that one examines or analyzes; it "just is" in the eyes of many, simply taken for granted....
But Wolfhart Pannenberg has taken the trouble to examine these concepts, and has some fascinating things to say about time and eternity in his Towards a Theology of Nature. He suggests that "the divine act of creation does not occur in time -- rather, it constitutes an eternal act, contemporaneous with all time, that is, with the entire world process. Yet this world process itself has a temporal beginning, because it takes place in time."
[As an aside, this insight seems to agree with my supposition that Genesis 1 does not refer to God's acts in time. I imagine that we don't see that until Genesis 2. That is, I imagine Genesis 1 refers to eternity, and Genesis 2 to time.... Just a thought that has struck me....]
In view of the relativity of the modes of time to the aspect of the human being experiencing time, this [results] in the assumption that all time, if it could be, so to speak, surveyed from a "place" outside the course of time, would have to appear as contemporaneous. This assumption is confirmed by a unique phenomenon of the human experience of time through the experience of an "expanded" present in which not only the punctiliar now but everything on which a position may be taken [e.g., past events, future anticipations] still or already is considered as present. The concept of eternity as the sounding together of all time, achieved in this way, is distinguished from the Greek idea of eternity of changeless existence, as founded on Parmenides and Plato. There the idea of eternity is constituted by the contrast to the world of the senses, to time and change. Understood in the sense of the suggestions above, the concept of eternity comprehends all time and everything temporal in itself -- a conception of the relationship of time and eternity that goes back to Augustine and is connected to the Israelite understanding of eternity as unlimited duration throughout time.Pannenberg also notes that human knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, participates in a certain sense (despite its position in time) in the perspective of eternity. "It does so by grasping sequences of events, which occur in time successively, beforehand in their structure of sequence and in their instances. Such participation in eternity, the brokenness of which would have to be discussed more exactly, seems to be confirmed also in the function of knowledge which causes unity. It results through the anticipation of the entirety of the processes occurring in time."The worldview of the theory of relativity also can be understood in the sense of a last contemporaneousness of all events that for us are partitioned into a temporal sequence. The four-dimensional continuum of space and time can be represented symbolically -- projected on a three-dimensional image -- as a cylinder or (under consideration of the progressive expansion of the world) as a cone or sphere. In these images, the entire world process is conceived as a single present. However, it could appear in this manner only from a point of view that would not coincide with any position in the world process.
Eternity so described must not be viewed as the mere sum of that which is scattered in time. Eternity can also be thought of as the production of the content of time which at the same time remains contained in it -- in eternity. On this basis the creation of the world would be identical with the creation of the total process of time, and this act can be described as the moment of the independent confronting of the finite moments of the space-time continuum. Thus creation can be conceived, on the ground of the theory of relativity, as an eternal act that comprises the total process of finite reality, while that which is created, whose existence happens in time, originates and passes away temporally.
Here is a most striking additional insight from Pannenberg:
...[T]he question arises: What is the relationship of the function of eternity, which comprises all that which is temporal, to the world process itself which takes place in time? Insofar as this is characterized by an increasing unification, eternity enters from the future into time. Of the modes of time, the one closest to the eternal act of creation would not be the past but the future. From the future is the world, even with its already past periods of world process, created.Just some food for thought here! I highly recommend Pannenberg's stimulating, provocative, and challenging book!
Thanks so much for your excellent essay/post my dearest sister in Christ!
Oh, you know how I love that metaphor, dear 'pipe! It is just so astute: the donkey is the time aspect of the human person, the spirit is his extension in eternity (timelessness).
Now you've come up with another brilliant analogy, that of the physical body as the "chrysalis" of the soul/spirit. The body is finite, yet the soul/spirit is not; it "emerges" in time (i.e., at death), but it does not belong to time (in which things must perish); for it transcends time (and so is imperishable)....
Wonderful, dear 'pipe!
Thank you so much for your very kind words, dear 'pipe. But you are making me blush....
I will persue Pannenberg's observations..
Blushing? Naw, you're probably smiling, humbly. With wisdom comes self-assurance, not something to blush over.
May I humbly ask, over what are you currently holding faith?
It'd be like me saying, I woke up this morning and the ground was dry, so that must prove that it doesn't rain around here.
Not quite. The shadowing is a verifiable prediction of theory. Failure to find it would casts doubt on the theory. A simple analogy is Eddington's expedition to detect the deflection of starlight during a solar eclipse. Failure to detect it would have thrown serious doubt on General Relativity. Unless a mechanism can be found to account for the lack of shadowing that is consistent with the Big Bang, then the theory must be modified or abandoned.
A better analogy would be if the weather report said it rained heavily in your town last night, but when you go outside in the morning, the ground and everything else is bone dry. You would begin to doubt the weatherman.
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