Starship Asterisk*

Hello Starnut

Thank you for your post Mar. 30. I was hasty.....inexcusable. My apologies to you and the APOD Forum subscribers. You are correct about reading posts throughout the Asterisk for great info. And the link you kindly provided has been generous with knowledge.

Many thanks

Martin wrote:Skeptics:

How much time will pass after this very moment

The rest of it.




Time will end when entropy wins and our dimension of Time (along with Space, Mass/Gravity) is dissolved back into the interdimensional cloud.

Any time you want to really answer my question -feel free to do so. I'll check back later.

Hello All

I'm on the fence resting. NOW

I'm just wandering how this topic went off the wire.

Its like a chat room.

harry wrote:Hello All

I'm on the fence resting. NOW

I'm just wandering how this topic went off the wire.

Its like a chat room.

I prefer resting on a hammock with a cool refreshing beverage.

Wandering is just the way untethered dialog works - it's OK.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_f ... e_universe

If you don't like my assessments of Space/Time and Mass/Gravity, here's some quick summations of the most widely argued ideas. Pick your starting point.

Hello All

Hammock is good Dr Skeptic.

As for
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_f ... e_universe

Read it before.

Since I think the universe is recycling the fate is to be recycled as parts and not the total universe.

=====================================

I'm still reading Gravity and voids

You can refer to theories/speculation if you wish but you are clearly avoiding the question. Too bad someone didn't ask you earlier in the thread -it would have saved you some typing, eh?

Martin wrote:You can refer to theories/speculation if you wish but you are clearly avoiding the question. Too bad someone didn't ask you earlier in the thread -it would have saved you some typing, eh?

If you ask a precise/concise question you will be rewarded with a matching answer.

All theories are speculative or they wouldn't be a theory, one needs to compare, evaluate, assess the concepts to all related disciplines, weed out the impractical and and weight the speculative unknowns to the knowns - not all theories are created equal. I would wager that the "best aspects" of any/all of the unifying theories are wrong, but enough is known to determine the answer resolves inside quantum mechanics and not within Newtonian Physics.

Hello Martin,

Your question is intriguing. I didn't answer "none" to be wise or flip but because I was trying to express a concept. "After this very moment" I felt required it's own clarificationin in that one needs to define the meaning of "moment". Using a real "now" or a perfect "now" instead can change everything. A perfect "now" has zero for time. As in clock stopped. Time in other words does not exist.

I understand that at the speed of light time also does not exist. But now one is dealing with opposites of a sort. If one could stop light then, in theory,time should, for light anyway, be infinite. I think the two concepts are essentially identical in their respsctive natures.

In our reality, of course, zero time could never be. Time, like numbers, can always be divided into smaller and smaller increments and one is never able to attain zero! That being the case, there can then be no known point within "this very moment"to use as a reference to measure time FROM. Th erefore the quantity of time to the endpoint would be also an unknown.

Your question as far as I can see is unanswerable, at least in this reality. Also, one needs at least two defined points in order to establish a quantity. So even if a perfect zero "now" was possible my response would have to be "after this very moment" until what?

P.S. With regard to my answer in the previous post: a zero "now" would result in an inescapable dimensional reality. So there follows a zero past.....and a zero future. Amount of time passed? None. Or all, depending in how you want to look at it.

Astrolabe, Hats off to you for attempting it.

The question evokes uncertainty and it is difficult to adhere to any field of science when answering it in way that corresponds to fact or reality.

Thank you Martin,

I thought about this quite a lot today. After rereading my answer to you I saw that my reasoning fell far short of the mark of what was in my thoughts. I didn't really have it together enough to call Gen. Rel. into the dialog so my response was very incomplete and it probably will always be so! I do appreciate the question though and others that evoke pause for thought. Good job.

It seems that discussion in this thread moved well and truly away from the APOD (Light Echoes from V838 Mon) from about page 3, and onto topics more appropriate for the Asterisk Café.

I'll be splitting this thread into two, in the next day or so, with most of it going to form a new thread in the Café ...

Hello Neried

I agree

This thread was created by splitting posts from the Discuss an Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) thread Light Echoes from V838 Mon, diameter? (APOD 03 Feb 2008); the post in that thread immediately before the first post in this is the one by astrolabe at the top of page 3, with the timestamp Fri Feb 22, 2008 10:35 pm.

The title of this thread is rather inelegant; suggestions for a better one?