Let's not talk about the Big Bang

[Polymath257]

I was meaning the principle, the Casimir experiment itself involved zpe wavelengths large enough to 'push' metal plates together, but I am talking of wavelengths small enough to penetrate atoms and 'push' against all the sub-atomic particles in any mass in the path of the gravitational wave.

A nice idea. It doesn't work. Too bad.

Lots and lots of nice ideas fail. In the case of the Casimir effect, the details of what the force would be like don't match the details of what gravity *is* like. Once again, the conductors in the Casimir effect are crucial.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

you would need a lot of faith to believe that contemporary science already knows universe well.

All one needs is one's sensory faculties and reasoning faculty to understand just how much science has learned and how much man can do because of it. Those same two faculties also reveal the sterility of other approaches to determining what is true about reality.

Without knowing the cause of the existence of our universal home, it would make all visiting ET think Earthlings have the cart before the horse with their BB science.

We don't need to know such answers, and they might not be available.

So what alternate way of knowing apart from empiricism, which you seem to find inadequate, is it you are recommending to answer such questions? Faith? It would have to be, since all belief comes from sufficient supporting evidence (empiricism) or without it (faith). Belief by faith generates no knowledge.

I'll bet that you have no argument to support what you believe, so your approach must be to attack science as inadequate. But if science is inadequate, faith is in a coma. You attack a methodology on the basis of what it can't do, but would replace it with something that can't answer any questions at all if one doesn't consider unfalsifiable proclamations answers.

We see the same with the anti-evolution creationists. They have no positive argument to make. They don't talk about what their religions have discovered because what would that be? So, the hope is to discredit the science despite having less to replace it with. You're doing the same here. Science can't answer this and science can't answer that. Science can't identify the last common ancestor with the chimps or delineate the ancestral line leading to man, as if that puts the theory in crisis. So what? Unlike faith-based thought, science answers plenty, and we respect it for what it can do, not demean it for what it hasn't done or can't do.

"Unless you become as little children, in no way will you see the kingdom of God!"

You probably see that as a recommendation to think like children. I see it as a warning. Look at the kinds of things a child can believe that a more mature mind would reject. Religion is one, which is why the church is so vexed over losing public school access to the children of those not wanting to teach them its religion, and why some denominations warn against sending kids to college. Reason is the enemy of faith and vice versa. Aristotle understood this as well: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man." One he begins to learn critical thinking skills, the window for indoctrinating him begins to close. The church says, "Stop! Keep him thinking like a child," hence that scripture.

I thought you understood that I understood the 'all that is' universe, regardless of what constitutes it, is infinite and eternal, ergo, it never had a beginning

You guaranteed yourself ambiguity when you chose to use the word universe in two different ways. You could have chosen a different term for everything that is to avoid that - perhaps ultraverse or magnaverse to alert people that you mean more than what began expanding with the Big Bang.

 

[gnostic]

Thank you for that, you confirm there is a still a lot to learn about the universe, and my most important question is yet to be discussed, ie., was there a cause of the BB?

Of course, there are lot more to learn and to understand the universe, no one is denying that, including the bb cosmologists and just about every astrophysicists and astronomers.

You think they don’t know that?

Why do you think think they built all those observatories, and the space observatories from NASA & ESA. There are always more to learn.

But you still harping on the same-old, same-old about causality.

People have already given answers, but you keep ignoring them.

What exactly the answers that you want people to say?

Because the answers clearly haven’t satisfy you, since you have been repeating the same question incessantly to the point of ad nauseam.

You had dismissed the answers given to you, only for you to move the goalpost, and recycle your silly question over again.

Tough...did you really expect some to give you the answer “that you want”?

It would seem that you are waiting for answers that somehow it would make you happy. Is the only answer you would satisfy you are the ones that fit your personal preferences? How pitifully shallow and tedious are that?

 

[gnostic]

No, I thought you understood that I understood the 'all that is' universe, regardless of what constitutes it, is infinite and eternal, ergo, it never had a beginning. only manifested things have beginnings.

Likely means a considered opinion, but there is no objective evidence of this universe having a beginning, only theoretical claims.

There is the Tired Light Theory, which implies distance, not doppler, and I do not rule it out yet, despite refutation by BBers.

If the universe is a multiverse, that's fine, I've already told you I thought it was a possibility, if not, that's fine too, we shall see. I keep an open mind.

If you don’t accept the Multiverse, then you can always go back to Einstein’s original model - the Static Universe model (1917).

A model that Einstein had dumped, when Edwin Hubble discovered the redshifts of distant galaxies in 1929, as predicted by Howard Percy Robertson in 1924 & Georges Lemaître in 1927.

 

[YoursTrue]

Well, if there is a wall, it might mean you cannot walk where you wish. The laws of physics dictate that you can't flap your arms and fly, no matter how much you want to.

If you want to play tennis, but can't find anyone else who wants to play tennis, you don't get to play.

The rest of the universe constrains what you can do.

Oh I see. Thanks for explaining

 

[Ben Dhyan]

Of course, there are lot more to learn and to understand the universe, no one is denying that, including the bb cosmologists and just about every astrophysicists and astronomers.

You think they don’t know that?

Why do you think think they built all those observatories, and the space observatories from NASA & ESA. There are always more to learn.

But you still harping on the same-old, same-old about causality.

People have already given answers, but you keep ignoring them.

What exactly the answers that you want people to say?

Because the answers clearly haven’t satisfy you, since you have been repeating the same question incessantly to the point of ad nauseam.

You had dismissed the answers given to you, only for you to move the goalpost, and recycle your silly question over again.

Tough...did you really expect some to give you the answer “that you want”?

It would seem that you are waiting for answers that somehow it would make you happy. Is the only answer you would satisfy you are the ones that fit your personal preferences? How pitifully shallow and tedious are that?

Sorry I missed it, what was the cause of the BB that you think I ignored?

 

[Ben Dhyan]

If you don’t accept the Multiverse, then you can always go back to Einstein’s original model - the Static Universe model (1917).

A model that Einstein had dumped, when Edwin Hubble discovered the redshifts of distant galaxies in 1929, as predicted by Howard Percy Robertson in 1924 & Georges Lemaître in 1927.

I said a multiverse universe was quite possible, please pay attention.

 

[Ben Dhyan]

All one needs is one's sensory faculties and reasoning faculty to understand just how much science has learned and how much man can do because of it. Those same two faculties also reveal the sterility of other approaches to determining what is true about reality.

We don't need to know such answers, and they might not be available.

So what alternate way of knowing apart from empiricism, which you seem to find inadequate, is it you are recommending to answer such questions? Faith? It would have to be, since all belief comes from sufficient supporting evidence (empiricism) or without it (faith). Belief by faith generates no knowledge.

I'll bet that you have no argument to support what you believe, so your approach must be to attack science as inadequate. But if science is inadequate, faith is in a coma. You attack a methodology on the basis of what it can't do, but would replace it with something that can't answer any questions at all if one doesn't consider unfalsifiable proclamations answers.

We see the same with the anti-evolution creationists. They have no positive argument to make. They don't talk about what their religions have discovered because what would that be? So, the hope is to discredit the science despite having less to replace it with. You're doing the same here. Science can't answer this and science can't answer that. Science can't identify the last common ancestor with the chimps or delineate the ancestral line leading to man, as if that puts the theory in crisis. So what? Unlike faith-based thought, science answers plenty, and we respect it for what it can do, not demean it for what it hasn't done or can't do.

You probably see that as a recommendation to think like children. I see it as a warning. Look at the kinds of things a child can believe that a more mature mind would reject. Religion is one, which is why the church is so vexed over losing public school access to the children of those not wanting to teach them its religion, and why some denominations warn against sending kids to college. Reason is the enemy of faith and vice versa. Aristotle understood this as well: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man." One he begins to learn critical thinking skills, the window for indoctrinating him begins to close. The church says, "Stop! Keep him thinking like a child," hence that scripture.

You guaranteed yourself ambiguity when you chose to use the word universe in two different ways. You could have chosen a different term for everything that is to avoid that - perhaps ultraverse or magnaverse to alert people that you mean more than what began expanding with the Big Bang.

Thank you for your thoughts, when you know what caused the BB, please explain it.

 

[Polymath257]

Thank you for your thoughts, when you know what caused the BB, please explain it.

When you know that there was a cause, let someone know.

 

[Ben Dhyan]

When you know that there was a cause, let someone know.

I am not the one that says there was a beginning, the BBers make that claim, and so it follows that there was a cause, or am I mistaken and they believe that the BB is a causeless creation?

 

[Polymath257]

I am not the one that says there was a beginning, the BBers make that claim, and so it follows that there was a cause, or am I mistaken and they believe that the BB is a causeless creation?

That is correct. Those that believe the BB started everything also believe it was uncaused. How could it be otherwise if time started at that point?

But not all those who agree with the BB model thing that things were started in the BB. Some do think that time and physics can be extended to before the beginning of this expansion phase. But, at this point, anything prior to nucleosynthesis is mostly speculation and anything suggesting a 'before the BB' is pure speculation.

 

[Ben Dhyan]

That is correct. Those that believe the BB started everything also believe it was uncaused. How could it be otherwise if time started at that point?

But not all those who agree with the BB model thing that things were started in the BB. Some do think that time and physics can be extended to before the beginning of this expansion phase. But, at this point, anything prior to nucleosynthesis is mostly speculation and anything suggesting a 'before the BB' is pure speculation.

Yes great scientific theory, infinite BB universes can come into existence but no one knows why, nor can they ever, because time hasn't started.

There was no spacetime because there is no time pre-BB, but BB spacetime pops into existence from no time for no reason.

That is so unbelievably dumb imho, science ought to be ashamed for their deceit, they should know better, and so should any and all human beings who blindly believe this nonsense.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Yes great scientific theory, infinite BB universes can come into existence but no one knows why, nor can they ever, because time hasn't started. There was no spacetime because there is no time pre-BB, but BB spacetime pops into existence from no time for no reason.

The scientific community and those with an understanding of science consider the theory a crowning achievement in human intellectual history. It accounts for mountains of observational data and has made specific, unlikely predictions that have been confirmed. It's really a theory about the expansion and subsequent organization of the universe, not about the origins or prior history of whatever began expanding. In that sense, it relates to origins considerations the way evolutionary theory relates to abiogenesis. The Big Bang hypothesis is not weakened by not knowing more about what banged.

That is so unbelievably dumb imho, science ought to be ashamed for their deceit, they should know better, and so should any and all human beings who blindly believe this nonsense.

That's your humble opinion?

The science is correct in the main. The narrative will be tweaked, but most of it is correct beyond reasonable doubt. It doesn't matter that any given person agrees or disagrees. It doesn't matter that you feel uncomfortable with the idea. That is only relevant to you and is a reflection of you and your abilities, not to the rest of reality.

"Blindly believe"? That's an interesting criticism coming from a creationist. Blind belief isn't a deal breaker for such a person, so why does he criticize others of it like it were a weakness when it's how he decides what's true about the world himself?

 

[Ben Dhyan]

The scientific community and those with an understanding of science consider the theory a crowning achievement in human intellectual history. It accounts for mountains of observational data and has made specific, unlikely predictions that have been confirmed. It's really a theory about the expansion and subsequent organization of the universe, not about the origins or prior history of whatever began expanding. In that sense, it relates to origins considerations the way evolutionary theory relates to abiogenesis. The Big Bang hypothesis is not weakened by not knowing more about what banged.

That's your humble opinion?

The science is correct in the main. The narrative will be tweaked, but most of it is correct beyond reasonable doubt. It doesn't matter that any given person agrees or disagrees. It doesn't matter that you feel uncomfortable with the idea. That is only relevant to you and is a reflection of you and your abilities, not to the rest of reality.

"Blindly believe"? That's an interesting criticism coming from a creationist. Blind belief isn't a deal breaker for such a person, so why does he criticize others of it like it were a weakness when it's how he decides what's true about the world himself?

The universe is eternal, there was never a beginning, that's a given, if you can prove that is not true, then please try, but don't bring time into it because time is not an independent entity, it is derived from spacetime which represents the continuation of spacial existence.

 

[Polymath257]

Yes great scientific theory, infinite BB universes can come into existence but no one knows why, nor can they ever, because time hasn't started.

There was no spacetime because there is no time pre-BB, but BB spacetime pops into existence from no time for no reason.

The 'pops into existence' isn't accurate. Existence only goes back so far. There is no 'popping'.

Once again, you need to look at all of space and all of time as a single geometry that is four dimensional. When you do, you find that the geometry at the 'beginning' is a higher dimensional version of the south pole. At that point, asking what is before is precisely like asking what is south of the south pole.

Do you get that?

That is so unbelievably dumb imho, science ought to be ashamed for their deceit, they should know better, and so should any and all human beings who blindly believe this nonsense.

The scientists don't 'blindly' believe this. It is the consequence of a very precisely mathematical description that comes from the very well tested theory of general relativity. It is also a description that has passed any number of detailed observational tests.

At that point, the fact that you don't understand it is pretty irrelevant. Unless and until you learn the specifics, you are simply not qualified to judge.

Now, if you *want* to learn the specifics, I can point to some good books. But you will have the learn calculus, differential equations, some calculus of variations, and some differential geometry to understand the books.

 

[Polymath257]

The universe is eternal, there was never a beginning, that's a given,

Why is it a given?

if you can prove that is not true, then please try, but don't bring time into it because time is not an independent entity, it is derived from spacetime which represents the continuation of spacial existence.

And when we look at spacetime, the geometry at the 'beginning' is like a higher dimensional version of the south pole. There is no 'before'.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

The universe is eternal, there was never a beginning, that's a given

No, it's not, whatever you mean by universe (wasn't it you that had a private definition of universe that include more that our universe?). This is a problem for pure reason, because it cannot be answered empirically yet, and maybe never. That there is something rather than nothing requires either that something has always existed or that something came into existence uncaused. Whatever the case, it seem to me that it must be one or the other of these, and not neither or both (see MECE).

if you can prove that is not true, then please try

Unless you can explain why you believe that the universe must be eternal, there is nothing to rebut. Is your argument that something coming from nothing is absurd because it's counterintuitive to you and just feels wrong or impossible? If so, that needs no rebuttal. OK, that's how things seem to YOU, but why should that matter to the critical thinker who sees that that incredulity argument is flawed?

don't bring time into it because time is not an independent entity

I already did (see above and below).

You believe in the existence of a deity that created everything else, correct? If so, does that include time? Does it include consciousness and intelligence? Do you consider that deity the source of those things?

Incidentally, like you, I sense that there is likely more to reality than the bubble of spacetime that began expanding almost 14 billion years ago, and that the totality, which includes its source, has always existed without beginning. But it is only an intuition, not a decidable matter, and I don't consider it correct, just possible, and for me (for reasons I cannot provide) seems likelier than the only alternative.

 

[Ben Dhyan]

The 'pops into existence' isn't accurate. Existence only goes back so far. There is no 'popping'.

Once again, you need to look at all of space and all of time as a single geometry that is four dimensional. When you do, you find that the geometry at the 'beginning' is a higher dimensional version of the south pole. At that point, asking what is before is precisely like asking what is south of the south pole.

Do you get that?

The scientists don't 'blindly' believe this. It is the consequence of a very precisely mathematical description that comes from the very well tested theory of general relativity. It is also a description that has passed any number of detailed observational tests.

At that point, the fact that you don't understand it is pretty irrelevant. Unless and until you learn the specifics, you are simply not qualified to judge.

Now, if you *want* to learn the specifics, I can point to some good books. But you will have the learn calculus, differential equations, some calculus of variations, and some differential geometry to understand the books.

I understand the 4D reality, the 4th dimension time is the continuity of the 3D space geometry, and you seem to be saying that it is not logical to ask how this 4D reality came into existence from the non-existence of 4D reality.

The absence of 4D reality means absolute nothing existed.

Btw, 4D reality means the BB universe must have edges.

My oh my, what a mess.

 

[Ben Dhyan]

Why is it a given?

And when we look at spacetime, the geometry at the 'beginning' is like a higher dimensional version of the south pole. There is no 'before'.

Because to postulate that our 4D universe was caused by an absence of 4D reality is nonsense.

You are confirming it, if there is no 'before', absolute nothing existed, and from that absolute nothing, you are claiming the 4D universe has its genesis.

 

[Ben Dhyan]

No, it's not, whatever you mean by universe (wasn't it you that had a private definition of universe that include more that our universe?). This is a problem for pure reason, because it cannot be answered empirically yet, and maybe never. That there is something rather than nothing requires either that something has always existed or that something came into existence uncaused. Whatever the case, it seem to me that it must be one or the other of these, and not neither or both (see MECE).

Unless you can explain why you believe that the universe must be eternal, there is nothing to rebut. Is your argument that something coming from nothing is absurd because it's counterintuitive to you and just feels wrong or impossible? If so, that needs no rebuttal. OK, that's how things seem to YOU, but why should that matter to the critical thinker who sees that that incredulity argument is flawed?

I already did (see above and below).

You believe in the existence of a deity that created everything else, correct? If so, does that include time? Does it include consciousness and intelligence? Do you consider that deity the source of those things?

Incidentally, like you, I sense that there is likely more to reality than the bubble of spacetime that began expanding almost 14 billion years ago, and that the totality, which includes its source, has always existed without beginning. But it is only an intuition, not a decidable matter, and I don't consider it correct, just possible, and for me (for reasons I cannot provide) seems likelier than the only alternative.

You say one or the other, and I go with the eternal, there was no beginning to the universe, only created things have beginnings, and they are made out pre-existing stuff.

You have not proved that the universe is not eternal, you would have to prove the universe came from nothing to do so.

You may see me as a Panetheist, all that exists, ie., the eternal Cosmos/absolute universe, is alive and aware, hence fits the concept of Deity.