Related papers: Did time begin? Will time end?
Did the universe have a beginning or does it exist forever, i.e. is it eternal at least in relation to the past? This fundamental question was a main topic in ancient philosophy of nature and the Middle Ages. Philosophically it was more or…
While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…
Time has always played a crucial role in cosmology. I review some of the aspects of the present cosmological model which are more directly related to time, such as: the definition of a cosmic time; the existence of typical timescales and…
While there is no consensus about the history of time since the beginning, in this paper I will discuss some possibilities. We have a pretty clear picture of cosmic history from the electroweak phase transition through the time of…
There are long standing questions about the Big Bang What were its properties? Was there nothing before it? Was the universe always here? Many conceptual issues revolve around time. This paper gives a novel model based on McTaggarts…
Contemporary research programs in fundamental physics appear to suggest that there could be two (physical) times---or none at all. This essay articulates these possibilities in the context of quantum gravity, and in particular of…
Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has grappled with the big questions of existence and creation. Modern cosmology seeks to answer some of these questions using a combination of mathematics and measurement. The questions people hope…
I would like to consider the Beginning of space-time in this paper. First of all, we do consideration historical thought. A lot of philosophers have considered the relation between this real phenomenal world and the basic world in which the…
Cosmology as an exact physical science is of new date, but it has long roots in the past. This essay is concerned with four important themes in the history of cosmological thought which, if taken together, offer a fairly comprehensive…
Based on the conjecture that rather than the second law of thermodynamics inevitably be breached as matter approaches a big crunch or a black hole singularity, the order of events should reverse, a model of the universe that resolves a…
How did it all begin? Although this question has undoubtedly lingered for as long as humans have walked the Earth, the answer still eludes us. Yet since my grandparents were born, scientists have been able to refine this question to a…
This is a comment on both Gruber et al (2022) and Bunamano and Rovelli (2022), which discuss the relation between physical time and human time. I claim here, contrary to many views discussed there, that there is no foundational conflict…
From a modern perspective cosmology is a historical science in so far that it deals with the development of the universe since its origin some 14 billion years ago. The origin itself may not be subject to scientific analysis and…
In the History of Ideas, a succession of philosophical and scientific achievements, concerning the concept of space and its dimensionality, were essential to contribute, after a long period, to the theoretical possibility of thinking…
Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is cosmological…
In this brief essay we consider the concept of beginning in cosmology. It can be applied to the Universe as a whole, as well as to various epochs in the cosmic history and major structures as we can see them today.
Every society has a story rooted in its most ancient traditions, of how the earth and sky originated. Most of these stories attribute the origin of all things to a Creator - whether God, Element or Idea. We first recall that in the Western…
The development of quantum cosmology, in which Stephen Hawking played a crucial role, has frequently encountered substantial conceptual and technical difficulties related to the problem of time in quantum gravity and to general issues…
We argue against current proposals concerning the non-existence of time. We point out that a large number of these proposals rely, at least implicitly, on the assumption of `closure' (or `partial closure') of the laws of Physics. I.e. the…
In general relativity space-time ends at singularities. The big bang is considered as the Beginning and the big crunch, the End. However these conclusions are arrived at by using general relativity in regimes which lie well beyond its…