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Anonymous at Wed, 26 Mar 2025 11:06:31 UTC No. 16628903

A question about the nature of time

I was thinking about how time slows as an object approaches the speed of light, and at the speed of light it presumably experiences no passage of time.

There should be an inverse of this - an object traveling so slowly that it experiences all of time at once? That led me to think, the only thing that is not part of the expanding universe is the singularity at its beginning, the source of the big bang.

So I asked ChatGPT a bunch about this, if all of spacetime is compressed into a singularity, would the entire timeline of the universe be encoded within it?

It seems to point to two theories, one that time is a fundamental part of the universe, and one that time is an emergent property.

Another analogy would be that black holes encode information along their event horizon. Let's say the big bang began from a black hole so massive that it contained all the matter in the universe. I suppose it would not be like any we could ever observe, as any black hole within our universe only contains a portion of it (unless there's a "big crunch" in the far future). Perhaps such a massive black hole would also contain its own event horizon at a single point, and therefore all information, including all of time, was encoded at that single point.

The implication of this would be that time, as well as every other interaction in the universe, is analogous to a computer program executing. There are not multiple timelines or possibilities, only one sequence of events which is predetermined from the start. This isn't super relevant if true, because there's no possible observer to decode the information that was encoded in the singularity, at least not one within our universe, and I really don't want to get deeper into thinking about multiple universes, just focus on the one we know.