One of the one that crops up when thinking about physics is the speed of light. Hard coded as it were, in this Universe to a maximum of 1,079 million kilometres an hour. For easy reference to speed freaks, a Bugatti Veyron has a maximum speed limit of 408 kilometres an hour.
As far as I understand, a Monotheistic God has Omnipresence as a aspect of them, and that is the aspect under the spotlight today. Omnipresence being defined as 'being everywhere at the same time'. But this runs into the physical limitations inherent to the created Universe. Even light cannot be everywhere at once. It can travel a great deal of distance in a short time, but it cannot be everywhere.
10/02/2011 Edit: Gear of War has just informed me that current Scientific theory is that gravity and things that alter its force are instantaneous. Still waiting on CERN for some gravitons. But this does address the original question of omnipresence. Gravity is omnipresent.
Credit: Gear of War
Source: http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp
Of course I must concede that if the term was omnipresence just for the Earth then perhaps that would be possible. But that doesn't quite equate to actual Omnipresence. So does such a theoretical omnipresent being reside in a pocket dimension some where. Or is it perhaps a five dimensional being? Existing on a higher plane than us. And if so, why does such a being bother telling you about masturbation. The train of thought on these things can get a bit rambling, but if there was a truly omnipresent being, that was beyond limit of light speed; why would it care about the life of a bunch of divergent simians with slightly larger brains? But that is a topic for its own post.
The interesting thing about the Universe is that time is a bit of a tricky prospect, I'm afraid I am of on a slight tangent but bear with me. As light has a maximum speed limit, the light in the night sky from the distance stars can be thousands if not millions of years old. And if one were to be able to magnify the incoming light from that source we would be able to look back into time as it were. Not that we could change anything, it has already occurred.
So the example is this, an alien on a distant planet. Very distant. Billions of light years away. Suppose he saw the light from Earth (unlikely, but bear with me here) and could amplify it so he could see the events that took place on the surface. As he moves closer to the light source he sees more recent things. As he steps away he sees light from earlier time periods. But this is just a shift in position for him with not the same equivalent time passing for him to see what has occurred on Earth. I'd imagine he'd mostly see a planet full of reptiles, some ice and mostly miss the part where at some point we diverged from a common ancestor with chimps and started typing on blogs and posting on the internet. On average, the quality of comments of posts on Youtube shows we haven't diverged much either. But I digress. It is all these little scientific things that make
(The reference book is not on hand and I will endeavour to correct and mistakes as soon as practical)
[Out now from Penguin Classics'Understanding the Cosmos' for only $10 AUD. Some recognition from Penguin for shameless plugging would be nice.]
As a postscript, here is a picture showing the scale of some of these mind-boggling stars.
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