Doghead's Cosmic Bar

but then again

And here I thought I was keeping it simple.

"time only exists collectively but things can only exist collectively if there are singular units together"

You haven't been introduced to orders of infinity, have you?

"As for where it came from, when the Big Bang occurred certain physical constants were 'frozen' into the spacetime continuum. The most famous is probably c = speed of light."

But the speed of light isn't constant.

Fine, if you want me to be more specific: The speed of light in a vacuum is constant.

I was going to try and explain further, but I found the info here: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=630

According to my last roommate, it's not necessarily constant in a vacuum.

*does some web searching*

It looks like some physicists think it might change over time, but if it does, then Planck's constant changes with it, so that the speed of light times Planck's constant is always the same.

Hmmm... That's new. Looks like the change is pretty gradual, so far as they can tell. Interesting. *decides maybe it's time to start paying more attention to these things again*

actually I just read a article in new science about something similar and from what I got out of it that due to negative refaction the stars and galaxies may not even be in the postions that we see them thru telescopes. IF that is true then all of our measurements of the universe including light speed would be way off unless someone manages to come up with a mathamatical formula that takes the amount of neg refraction caused by black holes into effect.

and just to be a butt einstein's orginal equations about the universe minus the postive sign is supported in the bible. That theory is that the universe will eventually slow down and reverse direction. The verse states and I saw the stars folding up like a scroll.

Big Evil Grin.

They've measured the speed of light here on earth, ladydyke. Those measurements do not depend on knowing distances, etc. to the stars. In fact, they redfined the meter in terms of lightspeed. I suspect you're referring to the effect of dark matter bending the light rays, so the positions may be off. I'm not sure how much effect this would have on the distance measurements, since they largely depend on redshift. *shrugs*

Oh, and it's not certain that the universe will eventually collapse again. It's really up in the air, since they recently discovered the rate of expansion is getting faster. No one's sure what's causing that as of yet (most conjectures are related to dark matter). Even before this discovery, it depended on the amount of matter in the universe. In simple terms:
Enough matter = universe will eventually collapse
Exactly the right amount = universe will reach an equilibrium
Too little matter = universe will expand forever (heat death of the universe)

If the universe stayed around until it collapsed, or expanded, or whatever, humanity would be long gone by then. According to the Bible, when God intervenes and ends things there will still be people around.