The Big Bang and the UCFC are about the beginning of our reality. The phrase, “…back to the beginning of time,” is critical to my understanding of the UCFC. I propose that time is not a reality. Time is an abstract construct. The reality is change. Time is a construct of human thought that facilitates our understanding of our reality by facilitating our ability to express our perception of reality which is the reality of change. Time is our construct to measure change. Change, in being the reality that we are trying to understand, is better understood when we can measure change. History is the record of changes that has occurred during some given segment of the previous cause-effect chain of interest to the historian investigating that history. The Big Bang is the event that precipitated the cause-effect chain that led to intelligent life. In the case of A Brief History of Time, Hawking, who is acting as a historian of scientific events delineates those events from the Big Bang up to the writing of his text. He writes on page 136:
One example of the use of the weak anthropic principle is to “explain” why the Big Bang occurred about ten thousand million years ago — it takes about that long for intelligent beings to evolve. …our solar system…is about five thousand million years old. The first one or two thousand million years of earth’s existence were too hot for the development of anything complicated. The remaining three thousand million years or so have been taken up by the slow process of biological evolution, which has led from the simplest organisms to beings who are capable of measuring time back to the Big Bang.
I know that it is very, very hard to relate to thousands of million years because I can relate to one year of my life on my birthday but I can more easily relate to a day and a night and seven days for a week. My ability to relate to a month is less than my ability to relate to a day or a week. I can sort of relate to a year, better a year than five years. But do I really relate to three thousand million years ago? That is sort of saying the same as a very, very, long, long, long time ago and perhaps even longer than that ‘time’. Science, however wants to measure change. The first domesticators of plants developed a desire to measure change in such a way as to help with knowing when it is best to plant, grow and harvest. They, too, therefore, wanted to measure time related to their seasons.
A stick in the sand and the sun moving across the cloudless sky may have been the first sun dial and time enters reality in the sense that now the event of the sun moving across the sky from sunrise to sunset gains tangible meaning. A stick in the sand on a sunny day is the first clock.
Clocks measure time. Today it is common place for one individual to look over to a companion and ask quite nonchalantly, “What time do you have?” to receive a simple response, “Four o’clock.” Analyzing this short mundane exchange highlights interesting perceptions. First the question implies that time can be possessed by the person being asked. The companion has possession of time and that time is 4:00 as if 4:00 can be possessed.
The individual who states the time does not possess time. That person possesses a watch. If that person’s watch was running slow by fifteen minutes, the response would have been, “Three forty-five,” and it would have been incorrect because the clock that is possessed is incorrect. We do not possess time. We possess instruments that keep track of change, instruments that have moving parts that keep track of that movement which also have markings that divide that movement into sections. We no longer use spring activated clock works. We have atomic clocks. Atomic clocks measure and mark the oscillations of an atom. We no longer need to track the course of the sun across the sky.
With the distances needed to study astronomy, scientists require a different construct to measure distances from one spot in space to another very distant spot. The light year is defined as the distance light can travel in one year. The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second. Remember that the second is relative to the oscillations of an atom. So, in each and every use of time, one unifying event like the oscillations of an atom or the sun’s movement across the sky (which is really Earth rotating on its imaginary axis) is compared to another event such as light moving through a vacuum. Time is a construct. Events are the reality of which each of us are a part because each of us is in fact an event that effects and is effected by other events. Time is a construct that helps us make sense of the actual events of reality. Time is not real. Events are real. Events are about changes.
Sidebar: Time and a Football Game:
A football game begins with an event, the coin toss before the starting kick-off, and ends with an event, the the firing of a pistol, the blowing of a whistle, or the clock running down to 00.00. The reality of the football game is all of the events of the football game. What is also interesting to consider is when a penalty is called and a flag is thrown down to the ground by the referee. The clock is stopped while the referees discuss the events that caused the flag to be thrown.
The game clock is not moving but events have not stopped because referees are talking, making decisions, announcing their judgements and announcing the appropriate penalty. If the penalty requires the football to be placed at a different spot on the field, it is moved by the official. Once everything is in the appropriate place after the penalty was called and announced, a whistle is blown, the referee moves his arm in wide circular movements indicating the restarting of the game clock. Did time really stop?
Time did not stop because time does not exist. The reality of the football game is divided into three clusters of events — actual play by the two teams; time-outs called by the referees required for the assessment of penalties or to facilitate their appropriate management of the game such as an injured player lying on the field, and the time-outs called by both teams as they strategize reactions to events occurring during play.
The realty of a football game is the events that are divided into categories marked by our time-construct marking those different events. The events of the game are the determining factors for which team wins, looses or ties. Time is a construct used to manage the events of the game. Time is not real.
What we are trying to understand about the Big Bang is the change that happened at the moment of the exertion of the UCFC which had a size of zero and was infinitely hot just before the change that establishes the first cause of the cause-effect chain of events that led to us. We need a language set robust enough to encode our perceptions of the reality of that event. Such a robust language must include the language sets of the Arts and the Sciences. Recall Neils Bohr’s comment to Heisenberg, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.” As such the first sentence of this paragraph substitutes UCFC for the word “universe” in Hawking’s statement, “the universe is thought to have had zero size, and so to have been infinitely hot. I have merged the consciousness of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Stephen Hawking because each is focused on the same event, the same reality, just what the Pope did not want to happen. What should a dying man fear?
What my consciousness has gained from Aquinas is the Uncaused Cause of the First Cause. Aquinas has described attributes of the UCFC just as Hawking has described attributes of the Big Bang and the origins and nature of the universe. The language sets of both are different. I shall proceed with developing my own language set. Hawking express on page 136 of A Brief History of Time, the following:
God may know how the universe began, but we cannot give any particular reason for thinking it began one way rather than another. On the other hand, the quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: “The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.” The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.
Amazing! The universe would be and, therefore, is, self contained. The Uncaused of the First Cause (UCFC) by definition is also self contained; it is without a cause. The UCFC was neither created nor can it be destroyed. These two attributes of the universe are the same attributes present in the UCFC. Then, the last sentence, “It would just BE,” with “be” in all capital letters, is definitely a Zen affirmation. To my understanding, science and religion are merged in this passage. However, religion and science are presently still on different paths. This may be a glimmer of the possible truth put forth by my acquaintance when he recommended Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics that tracing Western science and Eastern mysticism to their ultimate conclusion will converge at the same place.