Quotes About Time

As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions.

Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible.

I am very aware of the preciousness of time. Seize the moment. Act now.

We believe human begins have existed for only a small fraction of cosmic history, because human race has been improving so rapidly in knowledge and technology that if people had been around for millions of years, the human race would be much further along in it's mastery.

Each exists for but a short time, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe.

Or in other words, why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?

This means it will take about a thousand million million million million years for the earth to run into the sun, so there's no immediate cause for worry!

But the idea that God might want to change his mind is an example of the fallacy, pointed out by St. Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time: time is a property only of the universe that God created.

Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.

Cuando miramos al universo, lo vemos tal como fue en el pasado

There was a young lady of Wight Who travelled much faster than light. She departed one day, In a relative way, And arrived on the previous night. The point is that the theory of relativity says that there is no unique measure of time that all observers will agree on.

Quantum physics might seem to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws, but that is not the case. Instead it leads us to accept a new form of determinism: given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty.

The last chapter discussed why we see time go forward: why disorder increases and why we remember the past but not the future.

It appeared that each observer must have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.

Science seems to have uncovered a set of laws that, within the limits set by the uncertainty principle, tell us how the universe will develop with time, if we know its state at any one time. These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it.

Another prediction of general relativity is that time should appear to run slower near a massive body like the earth.

As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: "What did God do before he created the universe?" Augustine didn't reply: "He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions.

No boundary condition: The idea that the universe is finite but has no boundary (in imaginary time).

If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences.

An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job.

You can't get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no time before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn't have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in.

the future is unknown and open, so it might well have the curvature required. This would mean that any time travel would be confined to the future. There would be no chance of Captain Kirk and the Starship Enterprise turning up at the present time.

I realized that if one reversed the direction of time in Penrose's theorem so that the collapse became an expansion, the conditions of his theorem would still hold, provided the universe were roughly like a Friedmann model on large scales at the present time.

If so, we might be able to use them for rapid travel around the galaxy or travel back in time. Of course, we have not seen anyone from the future (or have we?) but I discuss a possible explanation for this.