avxo
As usual, I am impressed by your thoughtful and knowledgable reply. Let me start with your last comment/question first: I happen to have met Glashow at an MIT forum. I was just an attendee (being an MIT student at the time), and I have no training in physics at all, just very interested in it, especially cosmology. The panel discussion part of the conference was lightly attended, which helped me get the opportunity to talk with him briefly afterward.
Quite awesome. I'm sure that talking to a physicist of that caliber is a mind-blowing experience.
Where we seem to differ is in a notion of time that includes the Big Bang as an event in a larger stream of events. I know it is hypothetical (to what degree is a matter of opinion) to talk about time this way, but, as I said, over the last ten years, physicists have been doing it a lot. Guth actually believes that such discussions are absolutely consistent with known physics, although he does qualify this slightly.
Interesting. I will have to read more on this to discuss his particular theories/ideas.
See his paper on Eternal Inflation (http://cds.cern.ch/record/485381/files/0101507.pdf), and specifically in discussing the beginning of the universe, see pages 11-14, where he refers to our universe as a "pocket universe" that came into being "far" from the beginning, and just naturally talks about events before and after the Big Bang. He even has a diagram with an explicitly labeled time axis that spans the beginnings of multiple pocket universes.
I'll pull the paper down on my Kindle and read it when I have a bit of free time. It might be quite interesting. Assuming these sort of "multiverse" or "universe in a bottle" theories are true, I wonder if there
has to be a correlation between a time-like property in the "outside" Universe as opposed to the inside.
Going off on a slight tangent, you may want to read "A New Kind of Science" by Steven Wolfram. Be warned: the book has a very very heavy dose of amour-propre and enough self-exultation to make one burst into flames. I don't think that he develops a new kind of science, but nevertheless some of what he writes is very interesting.
One concept that I found to be very interesting is his proposal that our Universe could be (or at least be modeled as) one huge cellular automaton, and that in such a construct, the concept of time, albeit quantized in nature, would be experienced as such by those inside the simulation.
This sort of thing intrigues me, and even Wolfram doesn't develop a new kind of science, and even if the model he proposes can be proven not to be able to model the Universe - one of the fatal flaws is that it cannot simultaneously handle both special relativity and Bell inequality violations) it still makes for some interesting thought experiments.
Please let me know how you think I am misunderstanding him.
I'm sure you aren't, but I'll take a read. It sounds very interesting.
