Recently, we’ve noted Kirk Durston’s and William Lane Craig’s demonstrations of the impossibility of an infinite past, according to rules of logic.
Peter Zoeller-Greer responds, from Germany:
I would say: If time and space is quantized (e.g. by multiples of the Planck-Space and -Time), then there cannot be an infinite past, since we would not reach our “here-and-now”. This is because the sum of an infinite number of finite things (e.g. Planck-Times) is always infinite, too. This follows purely by logic, not by physics.
The same is true for multiverses that “caused” somehow each other. Every infinite chain of events with an finite amount of time “between” them is infinite, except the time-amount could be infinitely small (e.g. in a continues model) and follows a geometric series (then an infinite sum of finite things can be e.g. =1). But if time is quantized, this is not possible and the sum is always infinite and we would again never reach our here-and-now 🙂
Sure but, in the pop science media, the multiverse banishes logic (and evidence-based reasoning) as a first step. The thought is: There must be a multiverse; otherwise, our universe would look like it was fine-tuned. Any proposition other than that, no matter how daft, is acceptable.
The part many thoughtful people have trouble getting past is that the conflict we face is, in the end, to a conflict between people who believe in logic and evidence and people who believe in a multiverse that just somehow must exist in defiance of them.
See also: Copernicus, you are not going to believe who is using your name. Or how.
As if the multiverse wasn’t bizarre enough …meet Many Worlds
and
But who needs reality-based thinking anyway? Not the new cosmologists
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