What god did Einstein believe in?

[Cypress]

As possible as anything else, I'm sure, but I can't personally mentally imagine a boundary with nothing outside of it or a moment with nothing before and after it.

The scientific hypothesis I tend to favor is that it's pointless to think of something outside the universe. The universe is all there is. It is the space between the galaxies of the universe that is stretching, the universe as a whole is not expanding into any preexisting space.

Time is relativistic. Our souped up chimpanzee brains perceive an arrow of time. But to a photon, time doesn't exist because it is travelling at the speed of light. So in principle, I don't have a problem imagining that my perception of time is not necessarily objectively true for all conditions.

 

[Margot]

The scientific hypothesis I tend to favor is that it's pointless to think of something outside the universe. The universe is all there is. It is the space between the galaxies of the universe that is stretching, the universe as a whole is not expanding into any preexisting space.

Time is relativistic. Our souped up chimpanzee brains perceive an arrow of time. But to a photon, time doesn't exist because it is travelling at the speed of light. So in principle, I don't have a problem imagining that my perception of time is not necessarily objectively true for all conditions.

You need to break on through to the Other side!

 

[NiftyNiblick]

Time is relativistic.

Time as measured in units of measurement is of necessity relativistic.
However, the concept of something before and after everything is independent of units of measurement,
at least in the way my perception of a mind is working.

Yet, before and after alone are still relativistic by definition.

As a geriatric, my intellectual curiosity is rapidly waning,
yet I can be moved to think about this stuff when you post about it!

Thinking that the universe is all that there is is precisely why I think that it's infinite.
If it's not infinite, there would be something outside of it, in which case it would not be a UNIverse.

What I DON'T understand is why the speed of light is regarded as a limitation on time.
I think that it theoretically is--
they don't teach that in either accounting or labor relations courses--
but we don't know for sure that something can't happen faster than that, do we?

 

[Margot]

What god did Einstein believe in, anyway?​

Einstein “was a pantheist who maintained certain Jewish traditions,” and he preferred to be called an agnostic and disliked militant atheists.

​

"I want to know God’s thoughts,” Albert Einstein once said. “The rest are mere details.” True quote. But what did Einstein mean by “God”?​

He was raised a Jew, and likely believed in the God of Abraham . . . at least for a while. So folk like to claim him as one of their “own.” But then, so do atheists.

In truth, Einstein was likely at neither extreme, according to this new article at Big Think. The article cites a 1936 letter a sixth-grade girl wrote to Einstein, asking, “Do scientists pray, and what do they pray for?”

In his reply, Einstein wrote, “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.”

Scholars generally agree that the theoretical physicist was an actual pantheist, believing that God is “in everything,” or that all is “at one with God.” In particular, as Einstein once told a rabbi, “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

Big Think concludes that Einstein “was a pantheist who maintained certain Jewish traditions,” and that he “preferred to be called an agnostic and disliked militant atheists.

What god did Einstein believe in, anyway?

Einstein believed in the unseen—like gravitational waves, ripples in space and time. Now, we can see this, as shown by the 2017 Nobel Prize physics winners.

bigthink.com

Einstein was a Jew! One of YHWH's Chosen People!

 

[Cypress]

Time as measured in units of measurement is of necessity relativistic.
However, the concept of something before and after everything is independent of units of measurement,
at least in the way my perception of a mind is working.

Yet, before and after alone are still relativistic by definition.

As a geriatric, my intellectual curiosity is rapidly waning,
yet I can be moved to think about this stuff when you post about it!

If scientists are correct that an arrow of time is an result of entropy and motion, then time is an emergent property of our universe. Time is not a fundamental physical universal principle. So when the universe originated, there is no fundamental principle that says time had to extend into the past before the origin point.

Thinking that the universe is all that there is is precisely why I think that it's infinite.
If it's not infinite, there would be something outside of it, in which case it would not be a UNIverse.

Energy and matter will curve space, so it's possible you can never reach the boundaries of the universe to find out what's on the other side. Nothing exists but the universe itself, and if you set off traveling in one direction, you would end up right back at where you started trillions of years later.

What I DON'T understand is why the speed of light is regarded as a limitation on time.
I think that it theoretically is--
they don't teach that in either accounting or labor relations courses--
but we don't know for sure that something can't happen faster than that, do we?

The speed limit of light only applies to matter and energy. Space can expand at any speed it wants, that's why distant parts of the universe are receding from us faster than the speed of light, and we will never see it because the light cannot overcome the recession speed to reach us.

The reason relativity works as a theory is because the speed of light is perfectly constant for everyone, no matter how fast they are going. It's because of this fact that for anything moving at high speeds space and time have to warp themselves (i.e., time slows down, distances decrease) in order to maintain the constancy of the speed of light c for that observer. The Lorentz equation tells us that for anything that travels at the speed of light time stops. So from the perspective of a photon the beginning of the universe and today occurred instantaneously.