One of man's greatest achievements (2023 Update)

For that matter, how can a question of the beginning of the universe not be a category error? The universe is existence itself, how can existence have a beginning or an end?

As to the nature of time at the "origin" of existence... what happens to time as nature is extrapolated back to the origin of existence? Does time fade away or cease to exist all at once at the moment of the singularity? Is the existence of time a step function or a continuous function or simply undefined at t=0?

No, there is no basis for assuming that time existed before the origin point.

What?? The universe could have been 14.7 billion years ago now, but it had to wait another billion years until the conditions (of nothing!) were ready. Only then, the Big Bang happened because it had to. So what changed?

It's BS. No Point or Bang, no Time, Einstein can reduce whatever he likes as long as the math works out, but something else is real and we're missing it.

It there's nothing there to do anything time isn't doing anything useful.

You are trying to put your own label - time - on axis that doesn't serve any useful purpose until there are events happening which could be put into some sort of sequence. No events means no time.

That "something else" is your capacity for self-delusion, and we prefer to set it aside.

There's no evidence that events, of some sort, were ever not happening.

Maybe. You can't get from there to 'events means time'. or to 'no time means no events'.

Somebody's will have to be set aside.

No events does mean no time, which is all that I was asserting.

Your delusions do seem to be remarkably incoherent.

Sorry, i have no idea what you are trying to say. You are talking about time existing prior to the universe existing. Why does time have to extend to infinity in both directions, or either direction for that matter?

I think you may have some preconceptions of the universe. We have data points over the course of a few hundred years. Now we are extrapolating billions of years back as if things must absolutely correlate. But as we find new details of our data set, the extrapolations continue to change.

How much longer before someone comes up with the next new big idea and the extrapolations swing wildly again.

You mean we have no evidence that there was nothing... or something happening before the singularity? Yeah, that's the nature of singularities. There's no evidence nothing happened. There's no evidence something happened.

What does time mean in an empty universe... or more accurately, a universe that isn't there?

And which one will keep the CHICOMs out of Taiwan?

Yes, that is a lie. Actually it was 20x over budget and 22 years late.

"Development began in 1996 for a launch that was initially planned for 2007 with a US$500 million budget.[21] There were many delays and cost overruns, including a major redesign in 2005,[22] a ripped sunshield during a practice deployment, a recommendation from an independent review board, the COVID-19 pandemic,[23][24][25] issues with the Ariane 5 rocket[26] and the telescope itself, and communications issues between the telescope and the launch vehicle.[27] The high-stakes nature of the launch, which is the planned backbone of the next generation of research in its[clarification needed] fields, and the telescope's required complexity, was remarked upon by the media, and commented on by scientists and engineers.[28][29]

Construction was completed in late 2016, when an extensive testing phase began.[30][31] JWST was launched 12:20 UTC 25 December 2021[32] by an Ariane 5 launch vehicle from Kourou, French Guiana and was released from the upper stage 27 minutes later.[33]"

's%20%2410,result%20in%20the%20deepest%20tragedy."The launch of NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope from French Guiana could mark a triumph in a tale that thousands of astronomers have been following for a generation. Or it could result in the deepest tragedy."

And to that much, I said Maybe! Aren't you trying still to assert that, until a Bang, no events were happening? You haven't gotten far.

Some languages have no word for time. Really, there has only existed one time, ever, the same one, which is Now. No 'years ago', no "in the future", those are helpers invented to allow us to process ideas in useful ways. Imaginary numbers are useful too, aren't they?

Yours are more coherent.

Flyguy will never know. TSMC is probably Taiwan's best defense.

A Chinese invasion would wreck it, almost certainly beyond repair - ASML wouldn't ship in any new lithography machines.

The damage to the world economy would be profound, and China would suffer more than anybody else, because they'd created the problem, and nobody would want them to be able to do it again.

Not true.

It's not the same project that was discussed in the initial plan. That's what 'major redesign' means.

So, finished in 2021 instead of 2007: that's not '22 years late', at all. 2021 - 2007 = 14 years

It also was never planned to launch the Webb in 2007; the space telescope design was under review until 2010, and only then did they know what to build and test. The 1996 project schedule wasn't the guide for this work.

Readiness to launch after build-and-test was about a year over first scheduled.

It may not be. It is quite possible that there was no meaningful definition of either space or time "before" the Big Bang.

OTOH some models hold that the Big Bang was the result of a for want of better words a collision between two higher dimensional structures or if you prefer a quantum fluctuation in some much larger scale pool. eg.

And it has more than its fair share of critics. I'm sceptical too.

One day perhaps even soon experimental observations will be able to distinguish between some of the alternative contenders and rule them in or out as viable theories worthy of further development.

It clearly did have a beginning when everything was notionally at a single infinitely dense point (at least in a mathematical sense).

(Pairs of) virtual particles flip into existence on borrowed vacuum energy for a time determined by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

There is no reason in principle why at a still higher level entire universes cannot flip into existence spontaneously (perhaps even as universe anti-universe pairs).

Eventually something has to give when cosmological length scales and gravitational forces become so extreme that quantum effects dominate. They can get very close to t=0 within 10^-43 s with our present physical theories (it gets a bit hazy prior to 10^-35) but no closer.

This isn't a bad introduction as to why we can't apply our current models when all of the forces of nature merge into a single entity.

If that was the beginning, what existed before? Yeah, a category error.

You are not understanding the issue. If you suppose the universe had a beginning, what does that say about prior to the beginning? This is an aspect that simple makes no sense when you apply it to "the universe".

"Something has to give", I'm sure that's exactly how the great minds of our times would put it. "She can't take much more of this Captain!"

You can't apply your time oriented thinking to the beginning of the universe or you get category mistakes. Perhaps you should read the links you provide.

"Hartle-Hawking model says that if we could travel backward in time toward the beginning of the Universe, we would note that quite near what might have otherwise been the beginning, time gives way to space such that at first there is only space and no time. Beginnings are entities that have to do with time; because time did not exist before the Big Bang, the concept of a beginning of the Universe is meaningless."

Is that more clear? Perhaps you should continue reading.

You are just providing an excuse for WHY it was over-budget, and not refuting the fact that it IS over-budget.

Again, you are just arguing what the launch date was. Big projects like the Webb are sold to Congress by low-balling cost and time estimates, and then coming back hat-in-hand begging them for more money later.

Yes, that's what I did. I did it effectively, and that 'excuse' (we call them arguments, though, in classical philosophy) is why there's a telescope in space today. Our representatives in Congress accepted that argument.

To be clear: the 'it' in the initial 1996 rough plan and the 'it' we've launched, are different items, and the costs (and benefits) are not comparable.

Rick C snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

They are just putting in words that most lay person non science fan folks will somewhat understand. They know about all you guys' arguments.

A lot of semantics stirred in.

The fact is we will see WAY THE FUCK BACK, and WAY THE FUCK OUT THERE. and REAL close spotlight glimpses of exoplanet atmospheres.

Why is everyone pissing and moaning about something that employeed top scientists and engineers around the world for decades and has advanced a lot of processes and methods we now use every day for what you would certainly call essential element of a modern life.

It can only get better from here. ...Errr there. at L2.