(urth) Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod

[Jerry Friedman]

From: António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>

>
> Hi.
> 
> A person can't go away for a while!

Or even stay here.

> Time is part of the Universe. St Augustine knew that, physicists understand 
>that, and GW surely takes it into
> account. One can't really compare different universes according to some global 
>timeline. If a universe gnabs
> and a new one bangs from it, one can't really say the new one temporally 
>follows the first. 'Later', 'earlier',
> make sense within the same universe, but not across universes. And it's not 
>enough to claim that they really
> are the same universe, only contracting and expanding, because at the gnab 
>point time becomes so curved
> that there is no meaningful link between the margins. Only after one has 
>understood that can some meaningful
> discussion of this multiple universes thing be had.
...

As I recall, physicists believed that in an oscillating-universe of cyclical 
mode, each oscillation would have to last longer than the previous one because 
of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (there it is again).  Each universe inherits 
the entropy of the previous one, which is higher than the entropy of the one 
before.  So they did envision a causal "earlier" and "later".

Wikip tells me this point was made by Richard Tolman in 1934 in response to 
Einstein's original oscillating-universe theory in 1930.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model

On the other hand, it gives a somewhat different view of the history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang

Jerry Friedman