Tom Roberts wrote in message ...
Perfectly Innocent wrote:
The most delightful creation story is that, in an instant, out of
nothing, infinite space suddenly came to be. The infinite and
everywhere appeared instantly, inexplicably; and time was also born.
The second creation story is a plain and simple alternative to the
first. Space (the everywhere) was born finite, with zero volume and
grew from that; and time also came to be.

Within FRW cosmological models you have those two choices (with a
sub-choice for the first: flat or hyperbolic 3-space).

Physicists are stuck on the FRW cosmological models and they won't let
go because 1) legends are sacrosanct and 2) they're insulted by the
infinite variety of equally reasonable geometries that mathematicians
are familiar with. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/9804/9804006.pdf

But who's to say those models are all there is?

Albert Einstein wished to exclude every other realistic option without
offering reasonable justification.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/9804/9804006.pdf

In particular, it is expected that a real
theory of quantum gravity will have major things to say about this, and
presumably the evolution of the cosmos at early times will be
significantly different in such a theory....

Please understand that I'm referring to the basics of the creation
story. Space being created either infinite or finite is the only
essential point that I'm alluding to.

The birthing of geometry in time has associated with that space and
time, a flow of idealized, mathematical trajectories. Each trajectory
is easily pictured as the spatial trace of an abstract idealized clock
moving effortlessly through that geometric space, parameterized by its
own clock time. Each clock, therefore, is defined by a timelike
geodesic.

Sure. You can imagine such clocks.

The most glaring fact that I see in the simultaneous emergence of
space and time is the existence of the above mentioned global flow of
abstract coordinate clocks, all initially synchronized by God Himself.

Huh??? Those clocks "exist" only in your imagination, and it is up to
YOU to synchronize them. Go ahead -- it's easy to IMAGINE how to do
that.... But the only "God" here is YOU.

My use of the word _God_ was meant to be flexible enough to include
the initial conditions decided by Creation itself. I was kindly
accommodating both the actual and philosophical pantheism made popular
and acceptable by such notable physicists as Albert Einstein and
Stephen Hawking.

http://members.aol.com/Heraklit1/einstein.htm
http://www.harrison.dircon.co.uk/wpm/index.htm

It isn't the Creator's choice.

Speak for yourself -- because YOU are the "creator" here. This whole
discussion is about figments of your imagination. That is, of course,
what all mathematical models of physics are....

Thanks for that acknowledgement about mathematical models of physics.

It doesn't harmonize with creation.

Why not?

Going the route of conventional special relativity
would imply that imagining an event at some time in one frame of
reference would necessarily translate to the same event happening
in another frame before time even began.

But you're imagining a manifold that is not consistent with the
requirements of SR, so why should one be concerned that attempting to
apply SR yields nonsense?

I believe that if you think about this carefully, you will see that
Einstein's postulates of Special Relativity work perfectly fine on an
instantaneously created, flat, infinite space but that the Lorentz
transformation is not a natural law for that space. In this universe,
as a consequence of instantaneous creation, there must have existed a
natural initial synchronization for all idealized coordinate clocks in
all frames of reference. t=0 everywhere. I believe that this is a
straightforward counterexample to a false philosophy in relativity
that I was combating recently on another thread.

Eugene Shubert
http://www.everythingimportant.org