Way OT : time and tao

[Mark Wieder]

Jonathan-

Wednesday, March 23, 2005, 9:12:13 AM, you wrote:

LJ> However, if something caused this 4-D space to come into existence -
LJ> well, that was an action. For any action to actually happen, there must
LJ> be some sort of time.

Er... no. Humans have a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea
that time simply didn't exist "before" the big bang. Time as a
dimension came into being at the same... er... time... as the other
dimensions.

Trying to talk about time before the Big Bang is like trying to
imagine cutting a board to a length of -2 feet.

My favorite way to look at time, though, is to examine the Planck
length, theoretically the smallest unit of distance. So if there's a
smallest distance and the speed of light in our universe is constant
and limited, then there's a smallest increment of time; that being the
time it takes a photon to traverse the Planck length. If there's a
smallest increment of time, then time is quantized. This means that
time is not a river flowing from the past to the future, but a series
of motion picture frames blurring together into the illusion of
constant movement into the future.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net