Stump the Scientist: What started motion?
Thanks so much for sending in your questions. Remember, you can submit questions anytime to us via Facebook or Twitter. We have a great question this week about “motion.”
Michael Seidel sent in the following question:
If everything is in motion, and we are to believe Newton’s 3rd law to be true, what started the motion?
Response from Chief Scientist Jim Bray:
We can make this question hard or easy, depending on how we interpret it. The hypothesis “everything is in motion” is certainly approximately true, since, if we examine things around us closely enough, even seemingly stationary objects are composed of atoms which are moving because of thermal excitation (heat). For the reader, Newton’s 3rd law says “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”, and this means that the force needed to place anything into motion will also place into motion the thing which applied the force. So we can answer this question by saying that there are 4 forces (gravity, electromagnetism, weak, and strong) which act on all known matter and energy in the universe, and therefore it is natural that these combined forces will have caused “everything to be in motion”, since they act on everything. So the 4 forces started the motion, in the sense of Newton’s 3rd law.
We can make the question harder philosophically by asking whether there is any net motion in the universe as a whole, combining all its parts, and how the 4 forces got started. While physics is theorizing about how the 4 forces arose from the “Big Bang”, we have no generally accepted answer. Such questions also require speculation about whether there is any other thing outside our (known) universe to act as a reference for motion, another unknown.
Time, motion, and Thought.
To explain time you need motion. To explain motion you need Thought.
Remove all motion from the universe and what you have left is stuff. In the beginning the universe needed something to get the stuff moving. That something is Thought.
Thought is not stuff, but has always been and always will be
As motion and time began so too did all of matter. A single thought produced what we now call matter. That thought came from a whole bag of thoughts called Thought.
Thought is not perfect. Thought is not divine. But it is real. The only real thing that has no motion, no energy, and no dimension is Thought. Thought is as real as a hemorrhoid.
The Stuff of the universe had the capability of putting two and two together; it had a brain. Once kick started the brain multiplies according to a train of thought determined by Thought. The brain processes the thoughts and the stuff determines weather to become animal, vegetable, or mineral. Nothing is random, our train of thought first begat animals, then humanity.
A brain, like any robot, will not generate a thought on its own. Our brain is merely a register of thoughts accumulated from the bag of thoughts. Our special bag of thoughts is called “The Book of Learning”. As the brain registers these thoughts the register becomes Life.
Every thought in Life is given a unique number for registration. Think about the register at the time when we were all jellyfish. Our brain was called a neuron net. Billions of years went by before the miniscule jellyfish neuron net took shape. Then it took another billion years for our brain to reach the size it is today.
The bag of thoughts will never empty as long as there is motion. In another billion years our brains will weigh more than our buttocks and the bag will have hardly been touched. We will never know the last thought in the bag.
Nothing is random. Think about it, if there is such a thing as the big bang will the next universe contain poetry and hate? I bet it will. I also bet that such things as poetry and hate will dissolve over time into the recesses of our brain and new sensations will take their place.
Most scientists in the body of science believe that the universe is expanding. They have most of us believing it, and that includes me. They also believe that the expansion will someday stop and reverse.
They say that everything in the universe will someday compact into something…but they have not yet defined the width and breadth of the something. So I decided to call the something stuff.
And I have concluded that stuff is devoid of motion, that is there is no E=MC squared in stuff because there is no C, and when there is no C there is no time, and most importantly no M.
What science calls the expansion is the Big Bang. And I’m pretty sure that the body of science thinks that if it has happened once that it will happen again.
My conclusion concludes that when it happens again such thoughts as poetry and hate will happen again, too. And mathematic thinking will happen again, also.
Will stuff have thinking in it prior to the next Big Bang? Yes, I believe thoughts are real and older than time.
So here it is: it’s all happened before. Every thought is not new. All thoughts come from a bag of thoughts I call Thought. Thought as far as I am concerned for all purposes is perpetual. God knows how many times we’ve dipped into it.
Was the first thought after our Big Bang the same as the first thought after every other Big Bang? I think it was. I believe that the body of science will agree that our Big Bang was same as any other Big Bang and that each Big Bang begets the same universe. So, why not conclude that the first thought in our universe was not the first one in every other universe?
Thought is real. It is as active today as when time began. It was also as active before time began. Thought is the only real thing existing today as existed when time began.
It boils down to this; Thought is as real as a hemorrhoid. Thought is the only real thing capable of creating motion. Thought can create and end time.
Just conversation. Don’t take too seriously.