Horizon: Do you know what time it is? (BBC2)
Maybe the expansion of the universe, stretching or growing of interstellar space, either stretches or grows existence itself, creating the effect of time. Then if the universe stopped expanding, maybe there would only be space but no time. So my question is does expansion of space equate to duration?
We're told that the time referred to as the age of the universe, how long it has been since "the Big Bang", is all time during which the universe has been either stretching or growing, depending on whether you think space is being attenuated or increasing.
It is the medium of space, not matter that is being stretched, but matter is existing in a larger space the longer it exists. So each moment of existence is in either a progressively larger or progressively more stretched space. It could be either the feeling of space growing or the feeling of space being stretched that we know as time.
This thought came after watching the excellent Horizon program by Professor Brian Cox, who looks more like an emo pop singer than a professor.*
Helmut Kronk
<< Previous | Next >>
* It's one of those signs of aging when professors look like teenagers. (Time again!) Ed
1 comment:
Purely guesswork, but I suggest it's probably attenuating, as that is more intuitively consistent with the feeling of time, which "stretches". Outward growth, as in tree rings, would leave interior parts unchanged, unchanged equals frozen in time. Therefore, and I accept this is pure guesswork, I'm betting that space is attenuating, stretching, which begs some questions. We are being pulled so that our surface leaves our sort of roots behind, and it is the expansion of the universe that is literally stretching us. We exist only on the surface and cannot understand the stretched, smeared as it were, past nor the increasingly attenuated future, the reduction of possibilities that maybe ends in an infinitesimal point, vanishing point and slippage/snap back?
Post a Comment