[WIP] Causality

“What happens if I travel faster than the light?” or “What was present before the alleged Big Bang?”. Questions like these may not warrant answers. If you put the human back into the equation, if it’s an excited high school science enthusiast, some people take the pain to explain why it doesn’t make sense. Some people play along with the hypothetical, because who knows if the laws of physics actually are valid? They’re laws, not theorems. Smug university graduates generally get a weird face in response. Not a fan of being in the receiving end of the latter case. So, I decided Google it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Why exactly is that nonsensical? Is it nonsensical? Well, you get it. Also, there could be some interesting experiments like the one here - .

This needs basic ideas from set theory. For the cool kids out there, category theory. For any kind of “operation” to be performed between two elements of a set, said operation needs to be defined. A “morphism”, or a function. They’re a recipe to map elements of one set (the domain) to another set (the codomain or range). Going back to “What was present before the Big Bang?”, a reframed version of the question would be “If the Big Bang happened at time $T_0$, what happened at time $T \lt T_0$ ?”. Well, there’s a “complication” introduced by relativity.

The dimension of “time” is entwined with the 3 dimensions of space and all of these are a part of the universe. It’s not particularly clear as to what these 4 dimensions could mean outside of the construct of our universe. It’s like staring at empty space and asking “Is the D string of this guitar in tune?”. There has to be a guitar for you to inspect its strings. Similarly, there has to be our universe to inspect time and space. When you say “before” the universe, the word before just doesn’t is defined in that co-domain.