🚀 go-pugleaf

-- 
John Stein <jstein@tfs.net>

Haplo <pjjwever@euronet.nl> wrote in article
<3336d1f3.2150423@news.euro.net>...
> >Time as having no beginning and no end? Isn't this the description of
> >eternity? Timelessness? 
> As Dries van Oosten pointed out this doesn�t mean that time is
> infinte. It should be seen as a sort of ball, where you keep running
> around on the surface. 

So I just go in circles and keep coming back to the same place? I don't
quite follow this one.

> >If we understand time as something which measures
> >or expresses a relationship between motion, distance, and objects then a
> >temporal plane such as the one in which we live is separate from an
eternal
> >one by the nature of the two. 
> I don�t exactly get what you mean here, but when do you think "time"
> ends?

Oh, man. What a question. Maybe instead of objects, we should say points. I
want to go from point A to point B. It's a distance of one mile. I move
there and it takes me one minute because I'm going 60 mph. Time, one
minute, is a way to describe measure the relationship of the distance, the
motion (velocity?), and the beginning and ending points of A and B. Perhaps
time begins as motion begins and ends when the motion ends. But is still is
part of a greater time continuum. Perhaps time begins when the universe
begins (Big Bang?) and ends when the universe ends.
 
> >I confess to vast unfamiliarity with
> >Hawking's theories, but my imagination tells me that to travel the
> >distances of space (as we measure distance), we not only must overcome
the
> >distance involved but time. 
> Agreed. It takes time to overcome the distance. So the distance isn�t
> the real problem, but time is.

Except that if things weren't so far away, we wouldn't need so much time to
get there. I think they both have to be considered.

> >This doesn't mean time as in going faster to do
> >it in less, but to travel in some way as to make our current
understanding
> >of time irrelevant. Perhaps this means, then, that we find some manner
of
> >entering eternity as a method of overcoming both distance and time.
> >
> You mean something like: 
> - Now I�m here.
> - Blink to eternity
> - Blink, now I�m there (say 1 sec. later, and 3000000 lightyears
> further)

Yes, I suppose so. Leave a temporal dimension, enter another where time and
distance are irrelevant, and pop out at your destination 3000000 light
years away. It's profoundly speculative. Is there anything scientifically
substantial to hint at such a concept?


> >This, by the way, is beginning to sound like a crossing point of
scientific
> >and theological constructs.
> >
> Hawking might have meant a God by his "higher" dimension. 
> 
> Ivo
>