Sta Hungry Stay Foolish

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

A blog by Leon Oudejans

Space and time: the chicken and egg dilemma

21 May 2021

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The chicken and egg dilemma can be rephrased into a simple question: what came first? The same applies to space and time: what came first? There is no time without space. Does space need time in order to exist? Perhaps not if there would be no motion (eg, freeze-frame). Motion makes it more likely that both occurred simultaneously. Hence, the spacetime dimension.

Implicit questions in the chicken and egg dilemma are these: howwhen and where did chicken begin? Obviously, chicken might be compared to little dinosaurs. That would only rephrase the question: how, when and where did dinosaurs begin? Hence, my real question is: howwhen and where did time and space begin? As my blogs argue, everything follows Why.

The Big Bang theory explains howwhatwhen and where happened afterwards. It does not explain what happened beforeCausality would argue that something must have happened before. In general, explosions (ie, energy, motion) need matter, pressure, space and time. If something did happen before then howwhatwhen and where?

Perhaps, a more appropriate question is this one: does everything have a beginning? In other words: does t=0 even exist?

The number zero is a rather recent human inventionHistory: “Sumerian scribes used spaces to denote absences in number columns as early as 4,000 years ago, but the first recorded use of a zero-like symbol dates to sometime around the third century B.C. in ancient Babylon.”

Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion (sic!) is about causality and argues that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” (eg, BBCWiki). Hence, motion is at the heart of everything. Without motion there’s no causality; without causality there’s no spacetime dimension.

It could well be argued that motion equals life although there’s a catch: a sparrow is a bird but not all birds are sparrows. Hence, Life = Motion but not all motion may equal life.

The insertion of the variable Life in this (non-mathematical) equation requires having a worldview, a.k.a. “the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual’s or society’s knowledge and point of view.”

“Every worldview has to bring together reason and faith.” A quote by Ravi Zacharias (1946-2020), an “Indian-born Canadian-American Christian apologist”.

Down to Zero (1976) by Joan Armatrading

Note: all markings (bolditalicunderlining) by LO unless stated otherwise.

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