How void and time originates matter?

Question

- I'm a layman so i may seem confused and not even know what I’m talking about, but that’s why I’m here asking. Please explain this to me, it captivates me so much. If something exists it's affected by time and so if nothing exists does not exist time, the existence of space ("void") by itselft creates time, so, when something exists (like a planet for example) it's bending both void and time who are connect together. But, if the universe is infinite how does a planet is "created" with only void and time. And if it is finite how does it all started? How does void and time originates a existence such as "matter"?

Answer 1

OP: How does void and time originates a existence such as "matter"?

In my opinion a full origin theory has to explain how nature necessarily exists: A principle whereby the constituents necessitate themselves. Quantum vacuum theory Wikipedia takes a step in that direction but assumes the existence of space and does not explain why there is space. Whether string theory, e.g. SciAm, can go further remains to be seen.

On the other hand, philosophical origin ideas generally do not start with nature. They start with the rock-solid certainty of experience. Everything else can be doubted to establish this, as Descartes wrote in Principles of Philosophy (1644), Article 7:-

We can’t doubt that we exist while we are doubting; and this is the first thing we come to know when we philosophize in an orderly way.

Kant carried forward this position in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) where he consolidated Descartes' reservations in his Antinomies of Pure Reason, the first of which illustrates contradictions in the ideas of time and space.

1st Antinomy: Thesis: The world is limited with regard to (a) time and (b) space.

Proof (a):
1. If the world has no beginning, then for any time t an infinite series of successive states of things has been synthesized by t.
2. An infinite series cannot be completed through successive synthesis.
3. The world has a beginning (is limited in time).

Proof (b):
1. If the world has no spatial limitations, then the successive synthesis of the parts of an infinite world must be successively synthesized to completion.
2. The parts of an infinite world cannot be successively synthesized to completion.
3. The world is limited with regard to space.

Antithesis: The world is unlimited with regard to (a) time and (b) space.

Proof (a):
1. If the world has a beginning, then the world was preceded by a time in which the world does not exist, i.e. an empty time.
2. If time were empty, there would be no sufficient reason for the world.
3. Anything that begins or comes to be has a sufficient reason.
4. The world has no beginning.

Proof (b):
1. If the world is spatially limited, then it is located in an infinite space.
2. If the world is located in an infinite space, then it is related to space.
3. The world cannot be related to a non-object such as space.
4. The world is not spatially limited.

The Stanford Encyclopedia comments, in 4.1 The Mathematical Antinomies:-

we may want to know, as in the first antinomy, whether the world is finite or infinite. We can seek to show that it is finite by demonstrating the impossibility of its infinitude. Alternatively, we may demonstrate the infinitude of the world by showing that it is impossible that it is finite. This is exactly what the thesis and antithesis arguments purport to do, respectively. ...

The world is, for Kant, neither finite nor infinite.

Kant leaves the idea of the world in an indeterminate state and focuses on what he can deal with: the cogito, the self. He treats the perception of time as an intuition, which Heidegger refines into a form of time intrinsic to the structure of the self, as he writes in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), §34 (Churchill translation). In thinking, the cogito somehow affects a change on itself, and this change is the origin of 'authentic' time. (My comments indicated by "*")

Time is only pure intuition to the extent that it prepares the look of succession from out of itself ... This pure intuition activates itself with the intuited which was formed in it, i.e., which was formed without the aid of experience. According to its essence, time is pure affection of itself [*as in something which affects itself]. ...

As pure self-affection, time is not an acting [*external] affection that strikes a self which is at hand. Instead, as pure it forms the essence of something like self-activating. However if it belongs to the essence of the finite subject to be able to be activated as a self, then time as pure self-activation forms the essential structure of subjectivity.

Such self-activated subjects can proceed to observe the world and invent ideas about physical time: aka ordinary time, or clock time, in distinction to the authentic time of the cogito or Dasein.

In 1687 Newton held the notion of absolute time:-

According to Newton, absolute time exists independently of any perceiver and progresses at a consistent pace throughout the universe.

But now we use time based on the resonant frequency of the caesium atom, called the caesium standard:-

The official definition of the second was first given by the BIPM at the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1967 as: "The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom."

Time based on atomic resonance is tied to local spacetime conditions such as gravity, so time can flow at different rates in different places. It also means that time cannot be measured if there are no atoms such as in the plasma of the Big Bang.

That which cannot be known can be left as indeterminate. The position which is determined is experience. However the origin of experience, as that which comes before cogitation, is also indeterminate by definition (otherwise it would be determined, in experience).

Therefore the answer to the question "How does void and time originates a existence such as "matter"?" is that the indeterminate origin of experience as the void, the abyss, der Abgrund, (literally the groundless, uncaused) founds the self in its authentic temporality.* Then the activated observer can observe something, e.g. 'matter', which instantiates its existence, for this is how Kant defines existence in The Critique of Pure Reason A598/B626 (at page centre):

Being is evidently not a real predicate, that is, a conception of something which is added to the conception of some other thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations in it. Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgement.

That is to say, the judgement of a cogito on the copula [concept + predicates] of a thing makes its existence, which, in multiplicity, constitute the perceived things in perception, memory and understanding.

This may seem unsatisfactory. What about the pre-existing physicality of the 'matter'? Well, before it was observed it was undetermined. That is as far as the matter can be taken.

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* How does the self come from the abyss? The proper foundation of the self should not be a determinate thing, otherwise we would have to ask what is its foundation and so on. The foundation is therefore necessarily indeterminate: noumenal to the phenomenality of experience. As indeterminate it is without ground, ab-grund = abyss. (Likewise the origin theory of nature.)

This topic is summarised by Jussi Backman in The Absent Foundation : Heidegger on the Rationality of Being (2005), pages 11 - 15

For Heidegger, this necessary, implicit background of reality is, of course, nothing else than what he calls Being (Sein or, more consistently with the archaic orthography, Seyn)—Being not in the traditional sense of the being-ness of beings or of the objectivity of objects, but instead in the radical and archaic post- or pre-metaphysical sense. The question of the ground of being-ness as such is, fundamentally, the question of Being (Seinsfrage).

... the ground of being-ness cannot be a foundation in the traditional sense of a point of reference that is more real than immediate reality itself. What is sought in this other questioning of grounds is a ground that is other to and different from being-ness, presence or reality—and, in that sense, un-being, un-present, un-real—and lets being-ness occupy the foreground precisely in differing from it as its other.

Dasein is itself precisely in transcending its immediate present.37 This transcendence is also called “freedom,” for in “overcoming” the immediately given toward its transcendental context, Dasein is also “free” from the given.38 However, freedom is not the arbitrary absence of grounds. On the contrary, freedom as transcendence is the original relationship to Being as the back-ground of beings. “All the same, freedom as transcendence is not just a particular ‘kind’ of ground; it is the origin of ground in general. Freedom is freedom to ground.”39 It is precisely through its freedom that Dasein is able to encounter a meaningful reality where given beings are placed into a meaningful context, into a background, and thus “grounded” or “founded” (gründen) in Being.

The temporal freedom of transcendent Dasein is thus the origin of the principle of ground or reason that has haunted Western philosophy ever since Plato and Aristotle. “Freedom is the ground of ground. . . . However, as this ground freedom is the void [Ab-grund] of Dasein.”44 And as Heidegger puts it in the late 1930s, “As void [Ab-grund], Being ‘is’ at once the nothing [das Nichts] as well as the ground.”45 Being is the “void” (Ab-grund), the absent foundation, the back-ground which itself withdraws and only thus allows beings to occupy the foreground.

Answer 2

Mainstream physics says that all the mass and energy in the Universe has been there (in different forms) since an event we call the 'Big Bang', about thirteen billion years ago, when the Universe was extremely small and dense compared with today. Nobody knows what, if anything, caused the Big Bang, and we are unlikely to know unless we make some big breakthroughs in our understanding of cosmology. Of course, there are many ideas and religious beliefs about the birth of the Universe.

We know that matter and energy are interchangeable, a fact most famously associated with Albert Einstein, and that matter is made of tiny building blocks we call 'elementary particles' which combine to form atoms, which in turn combine to form molecules. You are made of billions of billions of billions of atoms- mostly hydrogen, oxygen and carbon- combined in a wide range of different molecules.

Physicists have a good idea about how the 'ordinary' matter that we encounter every day developed from more exotic forms of energy and mass as the Universe gradually cooled down after the Big Bang. The existence of large lumps of matter, such as the Earth, is the result of gravity, which is an effect that causes masses to tend to come together.

Answer 3

Ontologically Spinoza's explanation is quite revealing:

For him, everything you find in the universe is part of one infinite substance called god or nature. Every singular thing we experience is just one configuration of the infinite substance. We experience this substance (god) through two means: extension (what you would call matter) and thought.

Spinoza argues that god or the infinite substance is self-caused; meaning that it has existed forever and it will exist forever. There was no beginning of time and it will have no end, it's infinite.

So to answer the question:

Matter or substance is not created, it's always been there and it will always be there. Matter only ever changes form but it is not created or destructed. Substance is self-caused and therefore cannot be start or stop existing.

Answer 4

The prevailing hypothesis/model/theory (I'm not sure which word is the best fit...) is that the current quantum fields progressively decoupled from an original inflaton field, whose nature is echoed to some extent by the continuing and accelerated expansion of space via dark energy (which is possibly a result of a cosmos-scale Casimir effect). As for where the inflaton field came from, well, we don't know (if we really know that there was such a field in the first place). Kant said of time and substance that:

The schema of substance is the permanence of the real in time; that is, the representation of it as a substratum of the empirical determination of time; a substratum which therefore remains, whilst all else changes. (Time passes not, but in it passes the existence of the changeable. To time, therefore, which is itself unchangeable and permanent, corresponds that which in the phenomenon is unchangeable in existence, that is, substance, and it is only by it that the succession and coexistence of phenomena can be determined in regard to time.)

... and that an absolutely void space, which is void of causality, cannot cause itself to be perceived, ergo cannot be empirically perceived and thus does not form a knowable aspect or component of this empirical world. Similarly, then, a perfectly void time would be unknowable, so for us, it is necessary that we experience time as in some sense "filled up." This is speculative, then, but we might imagine that time crystallizes itself as initial matter (or, rather, the inflaton field) to fulfill this transcendental criterion of existence; but whether this explanation is finally sufficient is beyond us, at least from the Kantian vantage.

Two other speculations:

1. What if the matter/antimatter asymmetry is compensated for by an antimatter mirror universe on the "opposite (temporal) side of" the Big Bang?
2. The Hartle-Hawking state: "Hartle and Hawking suggest that if we could travel backwards in time towards the beginning of the universe, we would note that quite near what might have been the beginning, time gives way to space so that there is only space and no time."