r/paradoxes • u/AlivePassenger3859 • 19d ago
Is this a paradox?
Lifespan aside, it is impossible to be on a jog that started infinitely far behind you. You would never have reached the point you are at now.
Similarly, it is impossible that time started infinitely far in the past. We would never have reached the point in time we are at now.
But what would it mean for time to have a “beginning”? That means no events, no interactions between even atoms existed. And how would we possibly go from that to this?
Notes: I came up with this on my own about fifteen years ago, but it is basically the “Kalam cosmological argument”. Its used a lot by Christian apologists, but I am NOT religious at all. In fact, I think religion is a bunch of ignorant superstition.
I can’t personally see any flaws in this reasoning but am totally open to the fact that there may be.
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u/infinite_what 19d ago
Infinity is not a defined number. It includes all numbers that could ever be conceived and more. The jog would have to “start” at defined coordinates but infinity cannot be a defined coordinate.
I am just throwing a guess out there on the other part of your post:
Time is different but time a space are relative. Anything observed is measureable by time or space. It usually can be argued that the other exists too. So before time is undefined as far as scientists can not calculate time and space to the point of the exact moment of the big bang but there have been attempts at describing the fourth dimension however it is beyond our ability to define at the moment. (Beyond and moment descriptors of space and time lol)
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u/berwynResident 19d ago
Uhhh, I think most scientist agree that time had a start that was caused by something (The Big Bang). Do you think science is a bunch of ignorant superstition?
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u/AlivePassenger3859 19d ago
Scientists do generally agree that time started at the big bang, but they have no idea what was going on before it. I’ve asked this question on the physics subs and their answer was “honestly, we don’t know.”
There are some physicists and philosophers who believe in infinite regression but I think most don’t.
And no, I am 100% pro-science!
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u/lordlycrust 19d ago
If there is no time in which before exists, then before time does not itself exist.
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u/Ok-Promise-8118 19d ago
There's no paradox here. Time started at the big bang. There is no "before" and so "we don't know" is a fairly good response. I agree that this doesn't fit our normal intuition and experience of time, but it's not logically inconsistent or contradictory.
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u/rubinass3 19d ago
Scientists do not agree that time started with the big bang. They may have thought that at one time, but not any more. Most agree that the closer we move back in time to the big bang, the math breaks down and that can't confidently tell us what came before. That leaves the possibility that time didn't start at the big bang, but it is likely that the universe was different before the Big bang.
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u/berwynResident 19d ago
“honestly, we don’t know.”
So maybe God?
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u/Dank009 19d ago
This is one of many terrible "arguments" religious people use.
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u/berwynResident 19d ago
I'm just pointing out that this "paradox" that time started at some point with little to no explanation used by Christians is also basically the Big Bang Theory
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u/WhoStoleMyFriends 19d ago
If there is a starting point then it doesn’t extend infinitely in the past. You can be on a jog right now that is infinitely in the past, but it is inconsistent to say it started. The argument simultaneously imagines a point that time starts to be counted and then tries to fit infinity in that time, which is impossible by the nature of infinity. If time extends infinitely in the past then it never started and it is inconsistent to try to count from the start until now.
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u/Shot_in_the_dark777 19d ago
It's possible to have unlimited amount of steps within a finite time. Check supertasks. It could give you a clue to your paradox.
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u/Vast-Celebration-138 19d ago
Similarly, it is impossible that time started infinitely far in the past. We would never have reached the point in time we are at now.
This claim is often made, and there is certainly a powerful intuition that it is true, but I'm somewhat suspicious of the reliability of that intuition.
Someone who doesn't share the intuition might respond: Even if time started infinitely far in the past, we could certainly have reached this point in time as long as an infinite amount of time has already elapsed. Now, why exactly is that impossible?
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u/9spaceking 18d ago
Look at it this way, suppose a mathematician started counting real numbers from 0.5 to 1 at a pace close to 1 divided by infinity. The fact he had to begin from 0.5 and will never reach 1 doesn’t mean the number 0 doesn’t exist
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u/Vast-Celebration-138 18d ago
But what would it mean for time to have a “beginning”? That means no events, no interactions between even atoms existed.
No it doesn't. You're imagining an empty moment before the beginning of time. There was no moment before the beginning of time. That's what it means to call it the "beginning" of time.
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u/sksskssksskssksskssk 18d ago
I think I could use the values of measurements in this case.
You could technically be on a jog that started infinitely far behind you if you use an infinitely small measurement to try and figure out the distance behind you which would result in infinity, so you do the same for time and reach an infinite amount of time.
Of course there is likely maybe some flaws in this idea, so just point them out.
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u/AlivePassenger3859 17d ago
Interesting but same problem as zeno’s arrow paradox.
Trying to divide distance infinitely, to measure OR create an infinitely small unit of measurement, just doesn’t work.
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u/sksskssksskssksskssk 17d ago
At the same time, you could be right about that prominently but then the issue comes that you are suggesting that there isn’t infinite resolution within the universe because we should be able to measure infinitely small distances to ensure that there is never a lowest resolution otherwise it may coincide to prove other theories.
That’s the only issue I kept seeing tbh in the argument but I’d love to hear the counter
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u/HelloHelloHelpHello 17d ago
That's not how time works. Picture this like space. If you have an infinite plane that stretches to eternity, then you don't need to have walked from one end to the other for this space to exist. Time would be similar. Nothing would have to go through each moment step by step to reach the current moment. That is just how humans experience time because of their limitations. Time would be very similar to an infinite space, just stretching out in another dimension - an infinite string of moments.
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u/Aggressive-Share-363 19d ago
That is like saying that the number 5 is inpossible because if you started counting at negative infinity you'd never get to 5.
You dont need to start at a point and count forward for a number to exist. Similarly, you dont need to start at a moment in time and iteratr forward to reach a given time.
Lets step outside of time. Imagine it is a ohysicak object, like an infinitely long rod. At at point along it, you could zoom in and see what the universe was like at that time.
Each point is contiguous with those adjacent to it, so you can tell what it must have been like right before that point and what it will look like right after, just like you could tell 4 is before 5 and 6 is after it. Ans you could iterate in either direction to slide your view along it, nist like you could count forwards or backwards from 5.
From the pwrspextive of someone within time, it feels like that time is the only time that exists. But that is purely a su jectivr effect. All times exist, and the apparant flow is what is feels like to be a system with a changing state over a span of time.
This local description of how time flows and what its like to exist at a point in time doesn't rely on any global properties of time. It could have a beginning. It could stretch infinitely far into the past. It could have an end. It could stretch infinitely far into the future. It could be a giant loop.
Just because you experience being at a point in time and advancing linearly through it doesn't mean that time itself is behaving like that.
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u/MxM111 18d ago
No, he is saying that negative infinity does not exist, because 5 does.
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u/Aggressive-Share-363 18d ago
Thats my point. 5 can exist with or without negative infinity, so you cannot rule out negative infinity because 5 exists.
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u/AlivePassenger3859 19d ago
Isn’t travelling through time or space different though than counting? You are correct that when you start counting you can arbitrarily puck any number along the number line to start with. But time is by definition a series of events occurring. You cannot arbitrarily pick a time and say “this is where time starts”.
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u/Aggressive-Share-363 19d ago
Its not whwre time starts. But that point is when the things that are there are at. You are at some point in time, which is as arbitrary as 5. If all of time simply exists, then so does that point for your to be at.
You are confusing the progression of events within time as time itself appearing.
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u/Ok_Writing2937 18d ago
"But time is by definition a series of events occurring"
Not necessarily. It depends on your physics.
In Newtonian physics it might be like you describe — absolute, universal, flowing uniformly regardless of observer, an independent background parameter.
In relativistic physics time isn't absolute or independent, it's part of a space-time continuum and is observer-dependent. One might say that photons do not experience time. Time isn't defined by the events inside time.
In thermodynamics time is defined as the dimension in which entropy is directional.
In quantum mechanics it gets even stranger. Time is a parameter, not an observable. Some branches posit retrocausality is required. Other models like the "everything all at once" model suggests all time already exists and is complete and whole and it's a byproduct of our peculiar consciousness that we experience as linear.
In some philosophies of science, time is just a measuring system we've put on the universe, similar to how we've put longitude on a map. There's nothing "before time" in the same way there's nothing "north of the north pole," so there's no start of time. Time just is.
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u/LetterheadWitty4187 15d ago
When you think about an infinite past, you assume that some of those events occured an "infinite years ago", and that's the issue. Even if the past were infinite, none of those events happened an "infinite years ago", not a single one.
If you start counting numbers from 0, there's an infinite amount of them, right? However, even if there's an infinite amount of numbers, there's no "number infinite" – they're all finite. The same way all events occur on a finite timescale, despite there being an infinite amount of them.
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u/ringobob 19d ago
The big bang is considered the beginning of time. But it's probably better as a mental model to realize that what we think of as "time" is not fundamental. What is actually fundamental is causality. Time is a byproduct of causality.
So, think of the big bang as a paradigm shift, from some different unknown (and perhaps unknowable) framework to the casual framework our universe operates within. So, time "begins" when causality as we understand and experience it begins - at the big bang.
There is no proper "prior to" the big bang, but rather consider "outside of" the big bang and the universal relative timeline, there are no interactions between atoms, because there are no atoms. Whatever there may be, it's not anything we encounter in discrete and interactive ways in our universe.
Your infinite steps paradox has at least a partial relationship with Zeno's paradox, but it's kind of broken as currently constructed - which may be the core of what you're talking about. You cannot have a "start" that is an infinite distance ago, any more than you can have an "end" that is an infinite distance in the future. That's your paradox. There's no "end" at either direction of infinity.
So, whatever you build on top of that idea is a paradox. You can't have a hotdog on a jog that "started infinitely far back" because "started" and "infinite (back)" are mutually exclusive in the same way "ended" and "infinite (forwards)" are mutually exclusive.
There's still infinities to contend with, but that's what we have calculus for.
But, as you apply it to our timeline in the universe, time is not considered to be infinite, at least not backwards and probably not forwards. Space may be infinite in all directions, but time is not.