ken wrote:Noax wrote:Just to nitpick here: You repeatedly misquote Newton's third law in your posts, and imply that it is fact, which is strange for somebody claiming no beliefs.
If I did imply that it is fact, then that was completely unintentional. I specifically capitalist IF, sometimes, for that very reason that that word itself implies. It was only an IF. NOT a fact.
But you're applying a rule that doesn't exist to temporal cause and effect, which the rule does not mention. Action and reaction are not two things one of which follows the other. Every action is accompanied by the reaction, period, and that makes it simply a law of conservation, with no mention of cause and effect. You're applying the wrong rule.
The one you want is that every cause-event must eventually be the cause some effect-event, and while there is no such rule, if there was, it would only prove that time cannot end. It makes no statement about all events being effects caused by some prior thing. It does not preclude an initial state.
I found that 'If every action causes a reaction is true, then that fitted in perfectly with the other things I was finding and seeing
Assuming you mean cause and effect, I can think of things that don't ever effect anything. A photon emitted in a direction reasonably free of clutter (dust clouds mostly) stands a better than even chance of never hitting anything ever. So there's an except to the rule of every event needing to cause some later effect.
Fair enough, I will not use that. But I will just stick with what I have already written regarding an infinite Universe and wait for others to show how and why what is written is wrong, false, and/or incorrect.
Let me try: Every rock on earth that is not falling is being held up by the stuff under it, and that stuff held up by yet deeper stuff. There has been no measured exception to this. By the logic of everybody posting on this thread, there must be no limit to that, and Earth must go infinitely down. It is flat-Earth thinking, and spacetime has been shown over 100 years ago to be curved (an object with a center just like Earth), and it has a center from which it is impossible to express a deeper point. It (our spacetime) is no more in need of being caused than Earth is in need of being held up. Objects within our spacetime have the property of being in need of causation. Spacetime itself is not an object in spacetime, and it is a category error to apply the rules of object within it to the container.
I hesitate to use 'universe' here since in some contexts, the word includes things other than the spacetime in which we find ourselves.
Noax wrote:Strangely, the law would seem to contradict a beginning where there is suddenly a pile of energy from none, but in fact the total energy of the universe adds up to zero since a great deal of it is negative. Any mass in a gravity well has negative potential energy since there is no limit how far down the well it can fall, but one can go up only so far before hitting zero, a point where there is no more 'up'. In a heat-death of the universe, all positive and negative energy cancel out leaving nothing.
If what is being said here is true, then great that fits in with a theory of everything that I was seeing.
Fits, yes. Proves, no, but it counters the argument that the universe must be infinite else it would violate the conservation of energy principle (which is a property of our spacetime, not necessarily of a different universe, so again, a category error to raise the objection in the first place).