Re: The Problem with Atheism
Reply #321 –
Pondering the imponderable is a common pastime…
Regarding Time and the Big Bang:The scales of temperature lend themselves to less frivolous thoughts. Degrees Fahrenheit and degrees Celsius are proportional in size, five to nine, but they count up and down from different zero points. The bottomless negatives in these scales make no sense below -273º C, or -459.4º F, because at that point there is no heat at all; no movement of molecules. The Kelvin scale takes that point as zero and counts upward only, thus 0º K = -273º C.
What I find interesting, then, is that we can nevertheless devise bottomless scales of temperature that do make sense at all points. Thus we might take our zero as the old 0º C, and our 1 as the old 1º C, but then we might take our upward degrees as progressively larger than the Celsius degrees, and our descending ones as progressively smaller. Specifically, having taken our first degree above zero as 1º C, we might inflate our next degree by the slight factor of 1/273, and the next by that factor twice over, and so on up, while correspondingly shrinking all degrees from zero downward. The general formula is this:
n degrees on the new scale, positive or negative, is equal to 274n/273n-1 in degrees Kelvin.*What is interesting about this is that it shows the existence or nonexistence of a bottom temperature to be a question not of physics but merely of conventional measurement, even though the presence or absence of heat is a matter of physical fact. Our novel scale squeezes infinitely many degrees between 0º C and 0º K. It is a logarithmic scale. Or, we could retort, the usual scales are logarithmic relative to it.
A similar trick can be played on the measurement of time, for the comfort of people (not me, not you) who puzzle about what could have been going on before the Big Bang. By switching to a logarithmic scale, we can push the Big Bang back infinitely far, thereby declaring that there was always a world and never the Bang. Steven Weinberg's first three minutes expand to half an eternity. Scientific theory carries over intact, translated into the new units. But the translation calls for a compensatory rescaling of spatial measures, with the unwelcome result that past sizes are inflated and future ones are deflated. Atoms of the remote past take on cosmic proportions
(from the end of Quine's article on units, in Quiddities)
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* That's 274 to the nth power divided by 273 to the n minus 1-th power… (I couldn't get the blockquote to accept the expression! Help?