Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magic - Peter J. Carroll 2000
Phenomenization I Time
Extrapolate your cosmological observations with classical relativistic theory and you will end up with such absurdities as the big bang and singularities in real time (and space), that negate the theory you started with.
Indeed, linear extrapolations make no large-scale sense in a universe that has spatial and temporal curvature.
Extrapolate with quantum chaotic theory and you will find that the ’big bang’ occurred with equal probability in imaginary time at every point in the entirety of space that we now observe, to phenomenize the apparent mass and corresponding characteristic lightspeed of a universe finite but unbounded in both real time and space.
(?)
Still wondering what we meant by that.
And neither do any kind of causal extrapolations make much large scale sense in a universe with a lot of randomness and emergence in it?
Commentary 40
It should come as no surprise that we can observe structures within the universe having a greater age than classical relativistic theory predicts for the universe. You can after all travel any distance you like in excess of 24,000 miles around the finite but unbounded surface of the earth without falling off.
Similarly, you can travel for as long a time as you like around the four dimensional hyperspherical surface which constitutes this universe; although, as on earth, you cannot ever arrive at the same spacetime locus twice. The universe does not have any meaningful ’real’ age, rather it has a temporal horizon of the order of 1010 years at all points of spacetime1.
Future generations will look upon the question of the ’real’ age of the universe with the same amusement with which we regard the mediaeval concern about the distance to the edge of the world.
1 Quite an accurate estimate at the time of writing. The calculations that have on many occasions over the last decade kept us up till the small hours, reveal an exact value of: 3.34 x 1017 seconds, plus or minus 15%, (about 11 billion years), and a corresponding hyperspherical antipode distance of 11 billion light years only.