Time before Time - Classifications of universes in contemporary cosmology, and how to avoid the antinomy of the beginning and eternity of the world
arXiv:physics/0408111
Abstract
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 less banished then by Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. But it used to have and still has its revival in modern physical cosmology both in the controversy between the big bang and steady state models some decades ago and in the contemporary attempts to explain the big bang within a quantum cosmological framework. This paper has two main goals: First a conceptual clarification and distinction of different notions of "big bang" and "universe" is suggested, as well as a multiverse taxonomy and a classification of initial and eternal cosmologies. Second, and with the help of this analysis, it is shown how a conceptual and perhaps physical solution of the temporal aspect of Immanuel Kant's "first antinomy of pure reason" is possible, i.e. how our universe in some respect could have both a beginning and an eternal existence. Therefore, paradoxically, there might have been a time before time or a beginning of time in time. - Keywords: cosmology, big bang, big crunch, universe, multiverse, time, general relativity, quantum cosmology, loop quantum cosmology, string cosmology, world models, quantum vacuum, cosmic inflation, anthropic principle, closed timelike loops, Abhay Ashtekar, Hans-Joachim Blome, Martin Bojowald, George F. R. Ellis, Maurizio Gasperini, John Richard Gott III, Alan Guth, Jim Hartle, Stephen Hawking, Mark Israelit, Claus Kiefer, Li-Xin Li, Andrei Linde, Wolfgang Priester, Eckhard Rebhan, Paul Steinhardt, Neil Turok, Gabriele Veneziano, Alexander Vilenkin, H. Dieter Zeh.
25 pages. - This is an extended and updated version of: Vaas, R. 2003: Time before Time: How to Avoid the Antinomy of the Beginning and Eternity of the World. In: Loeffler, W., Weingartner, P. (eds.): Knowledge and Belief. Kirchberg am Wechsel, pp. 351-353
References in corpus (33)
- First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Determination of Cosmological Parameters
- The Ekpyrotic Universe: Colliding Branes and the Origin of the Hot Big Bang
- First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Implications for Inflation
- The Pre-Big Bang Scenario in String Cosmology
- Reconstructing the Inflaton Potential --- an Overview
- Cosmic Evolution in a Cyclic Universe
- The statistics of string/M theory vacua
- The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory
- A Cyclic Model of the Universe
- Inflationary spacetimes are not past-complete
- Spin Foam Models for Quantum Gravity
- The Emergent Universe: inflationary cosmology with no singularity
- The Nature of Space and Time
- The Emergent Universe: An Explicit Construction
- Inflation and Eternal Inflation
- Brane New World
- Can the Universe Create Itself?
- Supersymmetry Breaking in the Anthropic Landscape
- Statistical analysis of the supersymmetry breaking scale
- Inflation versus Cyclic Predictions for Spectral Tilt
- How far are we from the quantum theory of gravity?
- Loop Quantum Cosmology: Recent Progress
- Loop Quantum Gravity and the Cyclic Universe
- Eternal Inflation
- The Cyclic Universe: An Informal Introduction
- The Oscillating Universe: an Alternative to Inflation
- Spin Foam Models of Quantum Spacetime
- The present moment in quantum cosmology: challenges to the arguments for the elimination of time
- A Singularity-Free Cosmological Model with a Conformally Coupled Scalar Field
- Is Vacuum Decay Significant in Ekpyrotic and Cyclic Models?
- Inflationary Models and Connections to Particle Physics
- The Structure of the Multiverse
- The theory of Multiverse, multiplicity of physical objects and physical constants