Time, space, infinity and anxiety
I remember thinking about space (as in “three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction”) when I was a little kid. I asked my dad what was outside of the universe and he told me that we do not know for sure but most probably there isn’t anything. I couldn’t quite understand what he meant by that, so I asked him, and he continued to explain that there simply is no space. I couldn’t grasp that either, so I imagined that there is a very hard rock – so hard that nothing else can fit in there, and hence there is no space.
I grew older and abandoned the very-hard-rock theory. But I haven’t found a reasonable substitute for it. And it bothers me. A lot.
There simply is no reasonable possibility for space to even exist:
- Space is infinite and extends everywhere and never ends. I think I do not even need to explain why this sounds stupid.
- Space is finite. Then what is outside of it? There is no space outside. Then there is no outside. Unreasonable, too.
Please note that I am talking about space, not necessarily in connection with the universe. Just the concept of space and its infinity/finity confuses the hell out of me. And it makes me scared.
It’s similar with time. According to wikipedia, universe is the “entirety of space and time”. So, if I understand it correctly, there was no time before universe. And the universe is approximately 13.73 billion years old. Which means that 14 billion years ago, there was no time. Wait, what?