I have always been leery of absolutes. Limits, restrictions for restrictions sake, always seem to me to be boundaries set by an arbitrary board of closed minded thinkers. For every respectable group that states a boundary exists there are those similarly seeming respectable groups that have just as seriously proposed boundaries that are laughable today.

I recall with a smile the quotes of that military expert who, on the dawn of the early days of building sized computers speculated that the entire world would only need at most a dozen or so computers. Or Bill Gates who I am certain was sincere when he stated that no one would need to store more than 640k of data in any one disk. From what I've heard, even he's embarrassed by the statement and denies that he said it, but, it made sense at the time that he would have said it. 

That's the saving grace of all those who've stated such mandated and completely logical at the time limits on reality. It made sense at the time, from their understanding of the universe. It is only after development in unexpected directions that there occur the breakthroughs that make such limitations meaningless. Just think of those who stated that the human body could not sustain itself at speeds above 35 miles an hour. It didn't seem illogical at the time since the rickety automobiles of the time were likely to blow up or lose all four wheels just standing at the curb, let alone rolling forward at speed. But now pilots are constantly tested for endurance above and beyond mach 5 on a regular basis.

Times and perspectives change.

And now there are physicists who are finding evidence that time itself is not bound by the boundaries set by physicists before them. (The article reported by the BBC here , and others, talks about finding evidence of a universe that existed before our Big Bang, a progenitor universe, so to speak. It gave our universe an ordered starting point neatly explaining- at least to other physicists- why clocks run forward.) I feel it is fitting. Time shouldn't be bottled up to just our universe. Let the genie out.

Of course, as a philosopher, I've always had a sense of time, in a metaphysical plane. I understand that time cannot exist without change. And so, in a very real sense, time as we know it cannot be stretched back beyond the big bang. There can be something before the big bang, but, our sense of time cannot be tied to it. Change must have a previous state from which to occur, in our simple concept of the concept. With that conception comes the necessity that there be a beginning. We've given that beginning the name "big bang" but we just of easily have called it "Fred". Since all things that we can now measure had to come from Fred and by definition Fred could not come from anything that we can measure, then Fred quite literally is a man of his time and no other.

That's not to say that there can't be other Fred's out there. And that Fred couldn't have started along the path of a Barney in mid stride along his own path. It's just that we'll never be able to measure time back through that connection and get any continuity. That is until someone conceives of a time structure that takes all the potential intersections and occurrances of these starting point concepts and integrates them into a grand unified theory of time that I hereby dub "Flintstone time." 

This is bigger, but, not really different than the idea that there are parallel universes "out there". It's a great concept which will serve as fodder for a lot of good and bad science fiction stories, but, few will lose sleep at night over it. Those that do will become great thinkers, in time- our time.

The rest of us will clutch at the door handles in white knuckled fear when riding in a car driving over 35 miles an hour. Especially with a teen aged driver who just got her permit last week behind the wheel.

Will you slow down already!? 

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