Absolutely. It has made many specific predictions, including the nature of the cosmic background radiation, the distribution of light elements, the red shifts of distant galaxies, and others. it has passed all of these tests, often with predictions made decades before the actual discovery.
Sure, many things can be imagined. It is easy to come up with all sorts of ideas that have no basis in truth. The hard thing is to come up with ideas that can be tested and verified.
It isn't 'limiting' to demand that ideas have some way to be tested. That is just a necessary prerequisite for...
Imagination is a necessary way to create new ideas. But those ideas then need to be *tested* to see if they are correct.
Imagination alone (without testing) does not lead to truth, only uninformed opinion.
Look at a globe. Take a point at the equator and draw an arrow in the direction of 'south'. Then go half way to the south pole and draw another arrow in the direction of 'south' at that point. Those two arrows will NOT be in the same direction. They are both tangent to the sphere and pointing in...
To what extent of surety? I could be just a brain in a vat with all my perceptions illusory. I don't believe that is the case and I assume that is not the case. My confidence that it is not the case is as high as any belief I have.
Not being observable in a physical sense is equivalent to only...
At least, under the standard model using only general relativity. When quantum effects are added, it becomes *possible* that there was earlier time and space. if so, we might be able to observe such through its effects on the past-BB universe.
Yes. And this is a technique that has worked quite...
Both of these views, as stated, have deep problems.
Newton did his work 350 years ago. We have learned a bit since then. Unlike the Newtonian description given, the universe of spacetime is not stratified sequentially. Instead, time is one of the dimensions we use to describe locations in...
The stars would not look significantly different on Mars. They are far enough away that the constellations would be the same. The motion of the planets would look quite different.
The directions of north, south, east, and west would also be different. The north celestial pole of Mars is in the...
No, it is not. Not any more than 'left' is a continuation of 2D space.
The phrase 'came into existence' is inaccurate. Spacetime *began* at the BB singularity (in the standard model).
No. The Southern Cross is a constellation in the southern celestial hemisphere. The sky looks like a sphere and it is in the southern hemisphere in the sky.
No, 'south' is NOT a direction in space. It is a direction *on a sphere*. There is also a southern celestial pole and you cannot go...
No, because it is in the southern celestial hemisphere as seen from Earth.
You are conflating different notions of 'nothing'. I am not saying that a thing called nothing existed prior to the BB. I am saying that there was no existence at all before the BB. Do you see the difference?
And, once again, people are attempting to get conclusions from quantum gravity on this issue. There is certainly no harm in speculating by extending known laws to new discussions and proposing new extensions. The problem is that none of the extensions to quantum gravity have been tested and they...