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Einstein's block universe?

excreationist

excreationist

Married mouth-breather
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Probably in a simulation
excreationist said:
Apparently Einstein believed in a block universe where the past and future exist eternally and are inevitable.

https://plus.maths.org/content/what-block-time

"The block universe theory, where time travel is possible but time passing is an illusion"
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science...eory-time-past-present-future-travel/10178386

This might be compatible with how people think God relates to the universe.

What do people think of that idea?
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Quantum fluctuations will fuck it up. Each time you time travel it'll be different. There's no way to, even hypothetically, go back and forward in time.

But more importantly... who cares about what Einstein thinks of anything? It's interesting to study Einstein for historical reasons. But we don't care what... let's say Socrates... said about things he was wrong about. We only care about the stuff that has held up. We don't let the stuff he was wrong about tarnish his memory.
 
DrZoidberg said:
....Quantum fluctuations will fuck it up. Each time you time travel it'll be different. There's no way to, even hypothetically, go back and forward in time...
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Maybe the part about time travel is not useful but the focus of this is about the block universe in general.

But more importantly... who cares about what Einstein thinks of anything?
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I do.

It's interesting to study Einstein for historical reasons. But we don't care what... let's say Socrates... said about things he was wrong about. We only care about the stuff that has held up. We don't let the stuff he was wrong about tarnish his memory.
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I think there are more modern supporters of the block universe, and like I said it could be compatible with Christians' views of the universe and God.
 
excreationist said:
I think there are more modern supporters of the block universe, and like I said it could be compatible with Christians' views of the universe and God.
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It's interesting why you would use the term "supporters"? You make it sound like it's a sports team or a religion. This is just science. Unless you're a scientist, nobody cares what you support or believe. If you, as a layperson pick a team, you have delusions of grandeur. To quote Niel DeGrasse Tyson. The nice thing about science is that it's true whether you believe in it or not.

Right now we have a bag of about 300 viable theory of everything hypothesis, which might all be wrong.

...and who cares if if a scientific theory is compatible with Christians views of the universe? Religion is just myth. It's not objective reality. It might resonate with you for poetic reasons and might describe a version reality that evokes feelings within you, but religion isn't science. Who cares if science is compatible with religion? Science is reality. Religion is myth. Science is reason. Religion is emotions. They're not remotely discussing the same thing. You can feel God's presence in your heart even if God, in a scientific sense, doesn't exist.
 
excreationist said:
Apparently Einstein believed in a block universe where the past and future exist eternally and are inevitable.

https://plus.maths.org/content/what-block-time

"The block universe theory, where time travel is possible but time passing is an illusion"
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science...eory-time-past-present-future-travel/10178386

This might be compatible with how people think God relates to the universe.

What do people think of that idea?
Click to expand...

If there is a real Universe where time is just an illusion, and God created everything, then God created everything at once. There is no A cause B cause C cause D etc. A is because God created A, B is because Go created B and so on. Thus God creates all moral evil, all natural evil. God then is evil. God then created Hitler and all his actions to the most infitesimal degree. We have no free will. All is just a bizarre puppet show performed by God for what end?

This block Universe idea is shaky on a number of fronts, but if we take it seriously for sake of argument, it utterly devastates the idea of God as understood by Christianity, Islam and similar religions with an omni-everything creator God outside of time and space.
 
I don't think it's true to say that Einstein was a proponent of the block universe as it is ordinarily understood. In the mind's eye, you can imagine this "block" as being a chunk of spacetime filled with events and extended in spatial and temporal dimensions, but existing statically or "all at once". This last part violates the central concept of Einstein's life's work, which is that there is no "at once" that applies beyond the reference frame of a given observer moving at a given speed. For a block universe to make any sense, there would have to be a stable axis of time, such that you could put this block universe on a meat slicer and shave off a discrete quantity of duration that is synchronized across the surface of the slice. Time doesn't work that way. The "present moment" of the Andromeda galaxy, relative to Earth, is effectively two million years long, with no privileged spot within it to properly match up to what we call "now" way over here. And that's our closest galactic neighbor! Anything like a block representing spacetime would surely dissolve into incoherence at the scale of the cosmos.
 
Interestingly, combining the block universe with religion pretty much destroys all the teachings of religion. Everything that has ever happened and will ever happen would be already set in stone by god so there can be no free will, no morality, no sin, etc.

All of an eternal universe would just be a four dimensional fixed piece of art that god could hang over the fireplace in his five dimensional den and occasionally admire when he has nothing else to do. This would make humanity much less than insignificant to the point of meaningless.
 
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skepticalbip said:
Interestingly, combining the block universe with religion pretty much destroys all the teachings of religion. Everything that has ever happened and will ever happen would be already set in stone by god so there can be no free will, no morality, no sin, etc.

All of an eternal universe would just be a four dimensional fixed piece of art that god could hang over the fireplace in his five dimensional den and occasionally admire when he has nothing else to do. This would make humanity much less than insignificant to the point of meaningless.
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"God Logically Implies A Block Universe Theory Of Time"
http://wmbriggs.com/post/22839/

cambridgeblog.org/2008/09/god-and-time/
"...In other words, what God sees is exactly the block universe. Since any theologian must believe that God knows things as they truly are, this would seem to give theological endorsement to the concept of the block universe...."

About free will:
https://www.skepticink.com/tippling/2012/09/24/time-free-will-and-the-block-universe/

Note I am an agnostic.
 
Sorry but neither of those two posts was a response. This is a discussion board, don't you have an opinion or thought? I can google and find tons of other people's opinion in blogs and articles about almost any subject, but that is not a discussion.
 
skepticalbip said:
Sorry but neither of those two posts was a response. This is a discussion board, don't you have an opinion or thought? I can google and find tons of other people's opinion in blogs and articles about almost any subject, but that is not a discussion.
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I am disagreeing with what you wrote like "...combining the block universe with religion pretty much destroys all the teachings of religion..." I thought other people's reasoning would be better than my own. Post #9 about time travel is disagreeing with DrZoidberg's "There's no way to, even hypothetically, go back and forward in time".
Personally I find referring to good quality web articles to be very useful because they are often well thought out - better than I could easily come up with on my own. I have only a high school level of education in physics so my solo reasoning about it isn't of a very high standard compared to many people on these forums.
BTW in discussions I've had on Facebook with creationists, I prefer them to find non-creationist articles on the internet to support their views rather than refer to nothing at all or pro-creationist articles.

"....don't you have an opinion or thought?...."

Well it often turns out that any opinions I have that go against mainstream science turn out to be flawed but I still like to explore those things anyway to get an understanding of things even if I'm not strongly supporting them.
 
That pain you are feeling on your butt, that is me kicking you tomorrow.
 
The passing of time in a block time universe is an illusion. Time doesn't pass or flow, it is a dimension, the fourth dimension.
 
excreationist said:
skepticalbip said:
Sorry but neither of those two posts was a response. This is a discussion board, don't you have an opinion or thought? I can google and find tons of other people's opinion in blogs and articles about almost any subject, but that is not a discussion.
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I am disagreeing with what you wrote like "...combining the block universe with religion pretty much destroys all the teachings of religion..."
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That's fine but you need to then argue why you disagree, not just post a link.

I'll expand further on my reasoning as to why it would destroy the teaching of religion. Imagine god creating a block time universe. When creating one of the individuals to be part of that universe, he would create that individual's past, present, and future complete with all actions that individual thinks he is doing and place him in that universe. Religion promotes the idea that there are individual free will, morality, sin, etc. How could the ideas of religion possibly be correct since everything down to the minutest detail that ever was, is, and will be was fixed and immutable when created? Individuals have no choice since everything is fixed throughout space and time as created. Without the ability to make a choice of action and thought there can be no free will, morality, sin, etc. There could still be a creator god but the creation would be rather sterile and immutable.
"....don't you have an opinion or thought?...."

Well it often turns out that any opinions I have that go against mainstream science turn out to be flawed but I still like to explore those things anyway to get an understanding of things even if I'm not strongly supporting them.
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There is nothing wrong with that. That is the point of discussions. No one is always right and we discover our errors in understand by trying to defend those understandings and being shown and convinced where they are incorrect. Alternately, we sometimes learn more that better support our understanding. Both is how we learn and that is a good thing.
 
This is a front cover article from New Scientist - Feb 14, 2018:
"Quantum time machine: How the future can change what happens now - The idea that the future can influence the past may finally explain the inherent randomness of quantum theory and bring it in line with Einstein's space-time"
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...e-how-the-future-can-change-what-happens-now/

Here is the full text:
https://www.sott.net/article/377599...what-happens-now-as-in-a-quantum-time-machine

It talks about the block universe.

skepticalbip said:
...I'll expand further on my reasoning as to why it would destroy the teaching of religion. Imagine god creating a block time universe. When creating one of the individuals to be part of that universe, he would create that individual's past, present, and future complete with all actions that individual thinks he is doing and place him in that universe. Religion promotes the idea that there are individual free will, morality, sin, etc. How could the ideas of religion possibly be correct since everything down to the minutest detail that ever was, is, and will be was fixed and immutable when created? Individuals have no choice since everything is fixed throughout space and time as created. Without the ability to make a choice of action and thought there can be no free will, morality, sin, etc. There could still be a creator god but the creation would be rather sterile and immutable.
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That article says "God plays sudoku" - so maybe "God" would fill in the initial conditions and places where he intervenes. Then physics (based on sudoku rules) would fill more things in, including physics involving people's choices.

BTW does the hypothetical God know the future? In the predestination book I have it says God knows the future - doesn't that mean that people are deterministic and unable to change their mind from what God knows will happen?
 
excreationist said:
skepticalbip said:
...I'll expand further on my reasoning as to why it would destroy the teaching of religion. Imagine god creating a block time universe. When creating one of the individuals to be part of that universe, he would create that individual's past, present, and future complete with all actions that individual thinks he is doing and place him in that universe. Religion promotes the idea that there are individual free will, morality, sin, etc. How could the ideas of religion possibly be correct since everything down to the minutest detail that ever was, is, and will be was fixed and immutable when created? Individuals have no choice since everything is fixed throughout space and time as created. Without the ability to make a choice of action and thought there can be no free will, morality, sin, etc. There could still be a creator god but the creation would be rather sterile and immutable.
Click to expand...
That article says "God plays sudoku" - so maybe "God" would fill in the initial conditions and places where he intervenes. Then physics (based on sudoku rules) would fill more things in, including physics involving people's choices.

BTW does the hypothetical God know the future? In the predestination book I have it says God knows the future - doesn't that mean that people are deterministic and unable to change their mind from what God knows will happen?
Click to expand...

You seem to be mixing several different and mutually exclusive ideas about the nature of the universe. I don't see that a block time universe would be so much a matter that god knows the future as it would be that the past, present, and future are all created together so all exist simultaneously. It would be a fixed, unvarying universe and if there's a god then he would be at least a five dimensional critter so sees what we think of as past, present, and future as one fixed unchanging block.
 
excreationist said:
This might be compatible with how people think God relates to the universe.

What do people think of that idea?
Click to expand...

According to some perspectives God always has access to the whole, which can mean stuff like: God has multiple save points, or God has many worlds evolving at different rates (so one of the differences in the many worlds is the rate that time passes in different worlds).

To riff on the many worlds interpretation: there could be a world (verse in the multiverse) that is now 10^-42 seconds after the big bang. Information could be inserted in this world that would change the evolution of the whole. There could be another world that is 10 minutes before I posted this message with a naked picture of me before the power went out. I'm hoping.


So when God learns something new- a new way of dealing with things, then God can insert this and re-evolve the universe from a past point. Parts of the universe will stay the same, parts will not (depending on whether there is a universal information update or not- and where in the evolution of the universe the "new" information is acting).



I don't know about a block universe- I think I have a block brain though.
 
skepticalbip said:
....You seem to be mixing several different and mutually exclusive ideas about the nature of the universe. I don't see that a block time universe would be so much a matter that god knows the future as it would be that the past, present, and future are all created together so all exist simultaneously. It would be a fixed, unvarying universe and if there's a god then he would be at least a five dimensional critter so sees what we think of as past, present, and future as one fixed unchanging block.
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That New Scientist article I linked to talked about a block universe and talked about "God" filling it in like sudoku rather than filling it in in one step.

Also could you answer this:
"BTW does the hypothetical God know the future? In the predestination book I have it says God knows the future - doesn't that mean that people are deterministic and unable to change their mind from what God knows will happen?"
 
excreationist said:
skepticalbip said:
....You seem to be mixing several different and mutually exclusive ideas about the nature of the universe. I don't see that a block time universe would be so much a matter that god knows the future as it would be that the past, present, and future are all created together so all exist simultaneously. It would be a fixed, unvarying universe and if there's a god then he would be at least a five dimensional critter so sees what we think of as past, present, and future as one fixed unchanging block.
Click to expand...
That New Scientist article I linked to talked about a block universe and talked about "God" filling it in like sudoku rather than filling it in in one step.

Also could you answer this:
"BTW does the hypothetical God know the future? In the predestination book I have it says God knows the future - doesn't that mean that people are deterministic and unable to change their mind from what God knows will happen?"
Click to expand...
That is what I was attempting to answer in the post you quoted... repteated here:
I don't see that a block time universe would be so much a matter that god knows the future as it would be that the past, present, and future are all created together so all exist simultaneously. It would be a fixed, unvarying universe and if there's a god then he would be at least a five dimensional critter so sees what we think of as past, present, and future as one fixed unchanging block.
Click to expand...

In effect I see it as god would know everything that has occured, is occurring, and will ever occur because it was all created together... it was all set, so since it was all set then nothing can change. This means predetermined to the smallest detail so humans can not change anything having no free will.

This is a universe that I, personally, don't see as possible but it is what the universe would be if the current model of block time is assumed.
 
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