Weird Universe by David A. J. Seargent

Author:David A. J. Seargent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

A Universe for All Time?

According to the most recent data from the Planck space probe, the age of the universe is 13.82 billion (1,000 million) years. This is the length of time since, according to the prevailing cosmological theory, the Big Bang set everything in motion.

Now, it is tempting to ask “What happened before the Big Bang?” or “What existed before the time to which cosmologists refer as T = 0?” or, to phrase it a little more paradoxically, “What was around prior to the beginning of time?”

Many centuries ago, so the story goes, someone asked St. Augustine what he thought that God was doing before he created Heaven and Earth. The Saint replied rather facetiously that God was creating Hell for anyone who asked that question! Nevertheless, the question remained with him and, philosophical thinker that he was, he found that he could not simply pass over it with a frivolous comment. The more serious answer at which he arrived is one that relates the universe and time in a manner that has not been substantially improved upon in the nearly two millennium that have elapsed since Augustine wrote.

Augustine came to see that the question began with a false premise. It assumed that the universe was in time; that time existed in a sense “apart from” the universe and independently of it. If we take the creation of the universe as T = 0, Augustine’s questioner was actually asking what was happening at times before T = 0, as if time was already flowing before the universe came into being. Augustine saw this as a wrong way of thinking. Time, he concluded, was as much a property of the universe as anything else. Far from the universe existing in time, time exists in the universe! As we would say, T = 0 was not simply the beginning of the physical and spatial universe. It was the beginning of time as well. It really was T = 0; the beginning of the first moment of time and not simply the beginning of the universe’s first moment of existence in time.

The difficulty we have in coming to grips with this probably says more about how we think of time than about any intrinsic weirdness in the concept itself. Stating that “time is in (is a property of) the universe” rather than “the universe is in time” is basically no different from stating that “space is in (is a property of) the universe” as distinct from “the universe is in space”. Yet we are not normally tempted to ask “Where is the universe?” or to picture the universe as located in some region of space. We do not find it strange to understand the spatial dimensions as properties of the universe. On the contrary, we find it strange to think of them in any other way. So why should we find it so difficult to apply the same logic to the temporal dimension? Logically, there is no problem, but psychologically, there is.

Paradoxically, confining time to the universe in this way means that

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