Comment by rramadass
5 hours ago
Later down in the essay, Dirac himself answers this;
With this kind of cosmological picture one is led to suppose that there was a beginning of time, and that it is meaningless to inquire into what happened before then. One can get a rough idea of the geometrical relationships this involves by imagining the present to be the surface of a sphere, going into the past to be going in towards the centre of the sphere, and going into the future to be going outwards. There is then no limit to how far one may go into the future, but there is a limit to how far one can go into the past, corresponding to when one has reached the centre of the sphere. The beginning of time provides a natural origin from which to measure the time of any event. The result is usually called the epoch of that event. Thus the present epoch is 2 x 109 years [actually 2x10^9].
One further point in connection with the new cosmology is worthy of note. At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the epoch, instead of as holding uniformly throughout space-time. This idea was first put forward by Milne, who worked it out on the assumptions that the universe at a given epoch is roughly everywhere uniform and spherically symmetrical. I find these assumptions not very satisfying, because the local departures from uniformity are so great and are of such essential importance for our world of life that it seems unlikely there should be a principle of uniformity overlying them. Further, as we already have the laws of Nature depending on the epoch, we should expect them also to depend on position in space, in order to preserve the beautiful idea of the theory of relativity there is fundamental similarity between space and time. This goes more drastically against Milne's assumptions than a mere lack of uniformity in the distribution of matter.
Show respect to Mathematicians/Physicists/etc. many of whom had studied Philosophy and i dare say had a better understanding/insight of it than mere academic Philosophers. Why? Because they don't go off into la-la land but try very hard to have both observed evidence and a mathematical model of it match cleanly via a Theory.
For your edification, read first "Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes" followed by "Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg".
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