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glengarry
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In this post, I am going to assume the truth of the standard model of cosmology, which says that the universe is expanding as time progresses from some infinitely compressed state.
Has anybody heard anything like this? Any thoughts on how to "solve" it?
The paradox
At every point in time, the universe has an average mass-energy density, which is equivalent to saying that it has an average gravitational potential.
By General Relativity, we know that clocks move slower in fields of higher gravitational potential.
If we go backwards in time, the universe gets progressively smaller, thereby consisting of a progressively higher average gravitational potential. It follows that the average clock in the universe will get progressively slower.
As we approach the moment of the singularity, we can see that the rate of the average clock will approach zero.
As we finally hit the singularity, clock rates become infinitely slow, meaning that the universe has truly existed forever, and the universe could not have had a beginning.
The universe is therefore eternal, and the concept of the big bang is null and void.
Has anybody heard anything like this? Any thoughts on how to "solve" it?