RE: Is it possible that the universe could be eternal??...
October 9, 2010 at 12:16 am
(This post was last modified: October 9, 2010 at 3:55 am by Anomalocaris.)
The age of universe refers to the time since the universe first evolved to a state that is within the power of current state of art in physics to describe. Physicists, like religionists, don't have any robust framework with meaningful predicative power to describe what went on before. The difference is physicists tries to diligently advance the state of the art of physics to build that framework, and take pains to point out that until the framework is thoroughly tested, only speculation is possible about what went on before. Religionist, of course, flip a few pages of bible and "knows", undeterred by, indeed oblivious to, the sad track record of this method of "knowing".
I am not a physicist, but I have close contacts with a number of them. My understanding is that one of the frameworks being refined for eventual test is M theory. One version of M theory says universe indeed has no beginning, but instead undergoes infinite oscillations each with it's own independent time line of roughly 100 trillion years. We are 13 billion years into the present oscillation. In this theory, prior to the time when currently well established physics can look back into, there was not nothing. Instead there was something that was the direct linear ancestor of what we have now, only we need to further refine physics to describe it, and how that ancestor transitioned to our time.
I am not a physicist, but I have close contacts with a number of them. My understanding is that one of the frameworks being refined for eventual test is M theory. One version of M theory says universe indeed has no beginning, but instead undergoes infinite oscillations each with it's own independent time line of roughly 100 trillion years. We are 13 billion years into the present oscillation. In this theory, prior to the time when currently well established physics can look back into, there was not nothing. Instead there was something that was the direct linear ancestor of what we have now, only we need to further refine physics to describe it, and how that ancestor transitioned to our time.
