We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
backreaction.blogspot.com
backreaction.blogspot.com
There's this phenomenon in science where you think something is arbitrary, it could've happened in any number of ways. Then you do some digging and find out there is actually only one possible way for it to happen, none of the other ways make logical sense. And it's not a matter of initial state or anything, but of geometry or something.
Sometimes, after I put down the crack pipe, I wonder if there is only one possible way for the universe to exist, and knowing it isn't a matter of observation, but of abstraction, that irreal logical constructions are actually not abstract enough to explain the universe, etc.
Maybe a variable initial state doesn't make logical sense at the end of the day. Maybe the numbers we have to plug into the models to make them work are like pi or the zeros of the zeta function, maybe they just fall out of some result in group theory or sth idk
Being a passerby on the street after hearing someone say that while they grind their next dose, I stop and comment that that was an incredible narcissistic observation for someone from a species who hasn't even colonised another solar system yet.
So the question of the origin is ill-posed. Yet there has to be an origin because an infinite history makes no sense.
In the end, nothing makes sense. God must be laughing at us.
> Yet there has to be an origin because an infinite history makes no sense.
The origin has infinite history.
> God must be laughing at us.
No, because God is, like us, the descendant of something else, or else has infinite history.
What if the history is cyclic? Then there is no origin.
God could have no beginning. This makes sense because God exists outside of our conception of spacetime. We have to have a beginning, because in the universe we live in the laws of time and nature say everything has to have a beginning.
Maybe we’ll eventually figure out that when something passes through a singularities event horizon, that is the superheated ‘all energy’ state the universe was/is/has always been born from.
It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that’s happened!
2) 'nature say everything has to have a beginning' uh?? If you imagine the Universe expanding then contracting cyclically where is the beginning?
I think mathematical statements don't have causes but constraints. Could be that the universe is somehow constrained to exist because of some incredibly abstract truth.
But what started the cycle?
I guess we as humans are the ones at fault here, because we can't accept something infinite as an answer in the real physical world.
> But what started the cycle?
It's a bit like asking where is the beginning of a circle, it doesn't make sense..
But it does have a beginning, you had to pickup a pencil, placed the carbon tip on the surface of the paper and then finally you were able to draw a circle.
So yes, it makes sense _before_ the circle even existed. Something created the circle, it didn't materializa itself out of nothing.
Yes, it does. It's just an uncomfortable notion for people raised in Western philosophy.
Similarly, it’s entirely conceivable that we may find independent ways to test which of the proposed modifications of the evolution laws is correct, for instance by using data collected from binary mergers. Then, these modified laws would lead to a modified story of what happened near the Big Bang. Alternatively, it may happen that all but one or a few of the proposed modifications do not play nicely with the other forces of nature at a theoretical level.
Or maybe not, but we certainly can’t rule out this possibility a priori.
Moreover, her point about not having a multi-universe data set would dismiss all of cosmology as mere “ascience” — again, including the notion of the Big Bang itself.
Instead, I think it likely that the present multiplicity of early universe proposals will be pruned as more data becomes available.
What's wrong with that?
The thing about science is that it cannot pretend that it knows. It needs to prove. To which end, I don't think we should be supposing that we're going to know. Otherwise we're doing religion.
The biggest difference from things more commonly referred to as "religions" is that science invites you to challenge all these assumptions and look for a better (and smaller, simpler) working set that still explains all the phenomena we observe at least as well as the sets of axioms we currently use. And it knows that all the knowledge we gain is simply the approximation of the real stuff, and that we can only work to improve those approximations.
No. No no no no no!!!
Science is a process. The result of that process is explanations for phenomena. And the reason this matters is that the particular explanations produced by the scientific process turn out to give you the power to make extraordinarily accurate predictions about (certain aspects of) the future, and thus give you a tremendous amount of leverage in becoming the master of your own fate.
It is absolutely not a religion, except insofar as it is the only thing mankind has ever come up with that truly gives us the gift of prophecy.
The fact that I recognize there are both faith and religious elements to science only makes it easier to explain how and why science is better than religion.
Note that science similarly includes a lot of areas where our predictions are not "extraordinarily accurate" (all the statistics-based science, like medicine, social sciences...) in any particular case, yet it's still science because we recognize the limits (eg. "with a large number of samples, this will mostly happen").
1. A doctrine whose source is authority (usually but not always a deity) rather than observation and
2. Rituals based on that doctrine
One might argue that the actual human practice of science sometimes involves the acceptance of authoritative doctrine (e.g. peer-reviewed papers) and associated rituals (e.g. conferences), but that is not quite true because the rituals are not based on the doctrine. Scientific conferences are not held because there is a peer-reviewed paper that says that they should be, they are held because empirically they help to advance the scientific process (or at least did in the past). Religious rituals exist entirely because of authoritative doctrine. There is no reason for (say) communion or baptism other than what is written in the Bible or proclaimed by the church.
> science similarly includes a lot of areas where our predictions are not "extraordinarily accurate"
Sure. Science isn't perfect. The view it provides us into the future isn't flawless, it's just vastly better than anything else humans have ever tried.
Part1:
For the sake of the argument: Have you seen evidence of scientific fact-x? (For example x=“water is made of H2 + O”)
Since set of “x” is so wast, no matter who you are, for most of “x” the answer will be “NO”. Time, accessible equipment and brain-capability constraints force us to outsource the evidence check to others. (even smartest scientists read papers instead of reproducing all experiments)
Part2:
I would like to distinguish two meanings/aspects of word “Science” used by in various contexts:
- scientific method - hypothesis, experiment, …
- “institution of society” -distinct group in society, view/expectation by the rest of society, education, trusted sources and similar
Methods of science and religion are very different. But as “institutions”, they do have some parallels.
- Both offer basic explanation of reality.
- In both cases people trust stuff written by others.
- Both have consistency if you accept some basic truths.
To sum it up:
I (and most) believe that “carbon has 6 protons“ without evidence. The basis of this belief is trust in science (the institution of society) based on its authority, stated principles&process. But in the end laypeople don’t have evidence for that.
You can buy a complex device like a microwave oven or a chemistry lab and experiment with them, checking how they map to scientific knowledge, and asking on physics/chemistry SE about your findings and getting answers from people completely uninterested of fooling you, who are not knowledgeable of what you’re doing besides what you described.
It’s harder with C=6, but by messing with chemicals you can at least make some natural sense of what 6 means in that theory.
Religion at its face value cannot be experimented on at all. Any coincidences (if you find what to experiment on) are so irregular that can only be explained by statistics, even if you won’t. The only way to “study” religious knowledge is to fall for an interpretation of the day, which is always based on some experimental knowledge which others extracted from nature, because these people are interested in converting more adepts from a general population.
You’re correct that there is no direct way to learn and proof to yourself due to materialistic limitations. But when you take plausible interests and statistical phenomena into account, you can easily see yourself what has much more evidential depth and innocence of presupposition.
Our model of the atom allows us to accurately predict chemical reactions. Religion has no predictive power whatsoever, and none of its unique "truth" claims are provable or falsifiable.
People who uncritically trust "science" as regurgitated by pop-culture media are more akin to theists.
This then has practical, real-world implications. Praying harder never seemed to stop a bridge collapsing but a better understanding of physics allowed humanity to build bigger and stronger bridges.
Eg. natural numbers are defined by assuming that there exists one, and that there is a successor to one: everything else flows from that (this is an older system, but more approachable than the set theory one).
Basically, we never, ever prove that one indeed exists, or that it has a successor: these are assumptions that have so far proven to work well, but we can never tell for sure.
In the past, axiomatic systems have been found to be "wrong" when matched against reality (most notably the axiom of parallelism and hyperbolic geometry), so there's nothing to say that any of the other ones are "correct".
So we have faith that one exists and that it has a successor. Without evidence, just like you say.
Again, none of this makes science useless: it is an approximation of reality that we always work to improve. But some things we can't prove, so we have just assume they are so (otherwise known as faith).
Otherwise I agree. It will always be our approximation and until we meet aliens and do science with them we can’t be sure all of reality isn’t a construct of the human mind.
* Your brain is storing and processing the entire universe all the time * Your brain is constantly rewriting its own memory on a mass scale to pretend the universe is consistent
Both of these seem way more complicated than just “the universe exists and you’re a part of it.”
(Yes, I know our brains rewrite history but not on the scale required to make all of reality seem consistent in this way)
Sure, but you have to start from observations of the binary merger, not from what you'd like the Big Bang to be like, like most of these theories do. Starting from predictions about the origin of the universe is unlikely to produce good testable theories, since there is nothing to test there. You have to look at phenomena that are actually still happening in the universe to guide your research, and only then extrapolate.
It is largely a matter of training and temperament if you think it's more rewarding to start from the observations of current phenomena that all have some uncertainty and laboriously work backwards to predict an early universe that doesn't match the observations and then have to start over, or if you think it's better to start from the distant past and work toward the now only to find a problem and having to start over.
But this is only true if they are the right equations.
If you look at an existing phenomenon that maybe relativity doesn't describe well enough, and find some modification to these equations that explains it better; and then you go and check that indeed this new model explains all known observations better - you have a pretty solid new theory. You can then expand this theory into the early universe and see what consequences it would have for the inflation model.
However, if you start from the big bang and want to modify Einstein's equations, what will guide you to a better model? Most likely you will use your intuition on how the universe must have begun - but then, chances are, your modified laws will predict entirely the wrong thing about the current universe; or, you can add terms to the existing equations that have no influence in the current universe, but then, by Occam's razor, your theory should just be discarded since it explains all observable phenomena equally well, but is more complex.
To be very clear this also happens when you start with a theory that describes the local universe well, indeed the fact that when general relativity extrapolated backwards gives blatantly unphysical results is the entire issue we are trying to solve!
Of course, for any theory that applies within a certain domain, there’s always the question of what happens beyond that domain (“what came before that… and before that… and before that…?”). But this infinite regress isn’t particularly noteworthy. If I understand her correctly, she is claiming to be able to draw a particular line and to say that we can know things on one side of this line but— even in principle — can never know anything past this particular line.
She certainly understands her stuff. But I respectfully disagree with her conclusions — I see no reason to think that we might not make progress on the question through the normal process of science.
This argument isn’t invalidated by possible future discoveries. It’ll still be possible to generate competing elegant mathematical models that only differ in ways that are unobserved.
I see no reason to place the frontier of "what happened right at / before the Big Bang where vanilla GR breaks down" in a different epistemic category than all other frontiers of science, as the blog post seems to do. i.e., I see no reason that we should not build models and collect data in order to expand into this frontier, as we profitably do in other areas of science.
But, after all, who knows, and who can say
Whence it all came, and how creation happened?
the gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it has arisen?
Whence all creation had its origin,
the creator, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
the creator, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows — or maybe even he does not know.
Genuinely thought I'd gone crazy for a moment and posted this with an alternate account.
- It's common for desi names to start with A or K
- It's common for desis to use initials when referring to themselves
- Some desi surnames are over-represented in the population
- People with desi names are likely to come in contact with South Asian culture irrespective of their environment or if they speak the relevant languages. Or rather, they are more likely to have these avenues to begin with if they ended up with such a naming scheme.
- There are only so many foundational or well-known texts in any culture, so if there is a relevant passage, it has a high likelihood of being cited
It's not that different from a Jay Smith and a John Smith quoting a relevant C.S. Lewis or Biblical passage and having a jsmith handle.
Or perhaps creation to the creator is like breathing to us. Do you remember how many breaths you took yesterday?
Or maybe there is no creator, only a self-creation.
We don't know if we will never know.
Per thermododynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable beginning.
Given this 10k year old pot
https://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20120207-JomonPottery.JP...
What is the name of the person that created this pot, What day did they create it? Were they in a relationship at that time? Did they have children? How many siblings did they have?
There's no way to know. You can theorise time travel to find out or you can weasle into believing we'll somehow make machines in the future that can measure every facet of every atom related to the creation of the pot in such a way as to be able to trace their trajectories through time backward but both of those are grasping at straws, things that are unlikely to ever actually come to pass.
The reality is we'll never know the answers to those questions.
The same is true of how the universe began.
The best we can do is follow our theories of how the universe works backward and see where they lead and then try to create those initial conditions and see if we get the results we expect. It may be impossible to create those initial conditions though and even so, we'd be guessing at what those initial conditions actually were as we'd be assuming that running our calculations in reverse is true describe the actual initial conditions whereas they really only describe assumed initial conditions.
Most of human history we will know nothing about. At most we'll find a few hints of complex cultures and technology spread out across time. These people were just as intelligent as you and I, yet their lives will forever be shrouded in a mysterious past.
Sabine literally addresses this in the piece:
>"As I said earlier, you can always do this, because for any evolution law there will be some initial state that will give you the right prediction for today. The problem is that this makes a simple explanation more complicated, so these theories are not scientifically justifiable. They don’t improve the explanatory power of the standard cosmological model. Another way to put it is that all those complicated ideas for how the universe began are unnecessary to explain what we observe. It’s actually worse. Because you might think we just have to wait for better observations and then maybe we’ll see that the current cosmological model is no longer the simplest explanation. But if there was an earlier phase of the universe that was indeed more complicated than the simple initial state that we use today, we couldn’t use the scientific method to decide whether it’s correct or not. The scientific method as we know it just doesn’t cover this case. Science fails!"
There are countless of competing models you can invent that explain the beginning of the universe and everything you see, provided you make them sufficiently complex. The problem is, that's not science.
It's like saying: the standard model explains everything but the beginning. Let's say God caused the universe and then he went away. Technically that's an explanation, it doesn't violate physics as we know it, but it's not scientific. And given that we can't run repeated experiments on the early universe because we only got one, assuming the standard model explains everything but the early universe implies it is out of the reach of science.
Also Interstellar had information passing from the future to the past which isn't really what's typically sufficent to consider it a time loop.
I'd also suggest watching it before reading that plot synopsis.
Imagine a flatlander universe. Package up time in another dimension and you can represent their entire existence as a static 3d cube. Timeloops would just be a static torus in the cube.
The same is true of a 3 spatial dimension + 1 time dimension universe. You can view it as a static 4d tesseract. Timeloops are just a 4-taurus. Where did that 4 Taurus come from? It's the same something from nothing problem.
Faith is not a shortcut to knowledge. "Hey, we can't yet find the answer to big questions through rational means, so let's try irrational means!"
Islam has proof and evidence (e.g. http://provingislam.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTsEZXx8kRg, https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/hxn276/here_are_some..., and much more). Don't present a false dichotomy between science and faith where there isn't any for us in Islam.
Both are hard to wrap your head around.
Everybody reading this differs from you by only small degree. You differ from yourself-of-yesterday by a typically smaller amount, and -of-last-year by a less-small amount.
The most satisfying answer for me was that you must first define nothingness. But the moment it's been defined nothingness ceases to be. It seems to me at least that somethingness (suchness) [1] and nothingness are cross-reference negation of the other. So it can't be one or the other but must be both.
This probably is not making an sense. Later I stumbled into Buddhism [2] which seems to have this undefinableness as a core of experienced reality.
Big assumption to make there. The big bang is a theory and it is not at all proven to have happened.
If you look at an ant, do you ask yourself "Why is this ant here?".
“We will never know” sounds overly pessimistic to me; I could imagine someone from the 10th century claiming we will never know the trillionth prime number.
Then as people studied nature more thoroughly and systematically, they started observing laws that simply can't be crossed - conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, the increase of entropy , the limited speed of causality, the uncertainty principle - to name some of the bigger ones. All of these have put limits on something we used to think of as unlimited.
There are many more non-existence proofs in math as well - so even in pure math, you can't escape this accumulation (probably the most famous such problem, one long attempted that ultimately proved impossible, is "squaring the circle", or in modern terms, the fact that pi^n is irrational for any rational n).
There are tons of stuff we as human beings we'll discover and be pretty confident about it. There are other things we'll never know. I think that's part of being human, to know our limits.
That being said, discovering things is fun, so as human beings we should not stop doing science/religion/philosophy/etc ever.
It's also important to note that the big bang theory completely leaves open the question of what there was in the tiny tiny universe before inflation. Basically, the current BBT describes how the universe evolved starting from some time t=t0 + 10^-36 seconds. But that leaves a gap after t0 but before this time.
Finally, the question of existence from nothing is traditionally extended to the supposed singularity that existed at t0 as well, though that is on shaker ground.
That is, in our usual life, everything that exists comes from something else that exists. But we can't easily apply this rule to the very beginning of the universe (be it the big bang or whatever other model).
So, the question is - how do we handle this? Thomas Aquinas said that this is itself proof of God's existence: the universe did not exist at some point, then God created the first thing. Of course, the next logical question is - ok, then how does the rule apply to God? And the religious say - well, the rule doesn't apply to God, only to creation.
But, if we accept that the rule isn't universal, then we can also choose not to apply it to the beginning of the universe. Instead, we can tweak the rule to say that everything except the singularity at the beginning of the Universe is created by another existing thing; the singularity itself was always there and requires no explanation. This is perfectly consistent with the Big Bang theory, and is in fact how most scientists conceptualize it (or, they say that questions about the origin of that singularity make no sense, since time itself began once the singularity started inflating, but this is philosophically similar).
Of course, we can posit anything we want about that singularity and its past (if any), and we will never contradict another theory, since there is no remnant in the existing universe of what came before inflation, so whatever theory we want will be consistent with the current universe.
Did a different universe collapse into that singularity, perhaps one with slightly different constants of nature? Sure, why not. Was it a regular black hole in another, larger, universe that still exists, but which is too far away from us to be detectable in any way now that space-time has expanded so much? Possibly, why not. Did gods and demons fight until they a powerful sorceror cast a spell to imprison them into single point, where they and there magic were ground to dust and exploded in the inflation? Perfectly coherent with all known physical theories.
This blows away all religious arguments trying to plug a creator in there: since the universe was never created, it doesn't need a creator.
In other words, the properties of that which is uncreated would need to be defined so they can be distinguished from something that is created. These properties have to be understood and accepted as an exclusive set that cannot be "distributed" or "shared" among other beings; in order to dispel the notion that there can be multiple uncreated beings or beings that are created that share attributes with The Creator.
The reason for easiness in regard to the complete otherness of His Essence and His unrestrictedness is this: most certainly, the Maker of the universe is not of the same kind as the universe. His Essence resembles no other essence at all. Since this is so, the obstacles and restraints within the sphere of the universe cannot hinder Him, they cannot restrict His actions. He has complete disposal over the whole universe and is able to transform all of it at the same time. If the disposal and actions that are apparent in the universe were to be attributed to it, it would cause so many difficulties and so much confusion that neither would any order remain nor would anything continue to exist; indeed, nothing would be able to come into existence.
For example, if the masterly art in vaulted domes is attributed to the stones of the domes, and if the command of a battalion, which properly belongs to its officer, is left to the soldiers, either neither of them would ever come into existence, or with great difficulty and confusion they would achieve a state completely lacking in order. Whereas, if in order for the situation of the stones in the dome to be achieved, it is accorded to a master who is not a stone himself, and if the command of the soldiers in the regiment is referred to an officer who possesses the essential quality of officership, both the art is easy and command and organization are easy. This is because, while the stones and the soldiers are obstacles to each other, the master and the officer can look from every angle, they command without obstacle.The underlying assumption to the question is why only one thing is allowed to be uncreated .. ? Are there others like them, much like here on Earth where we have many authors writing many books? The Bible doesn't answer those at all, it starts in media res (despite its first three words!)
(I have other complaints about such a God but)
Isaiah 44:6-8 ESV
Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts: "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. [7] Who is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and set it before me, since I appointed an ancient people. Let them declare what is to come, and what will happen. [8] Fear not, nor be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? And you are my witnesses! Is there a God besides me? There is no Rock; I know not any."
contradicting science is no great flaw. "Science" contradicts itself from time to time.
What I think the parent means by contradicting science is rather different: the Bible says things which go against ideas which we believe have been verified by evidence, but the Bible won’t be changed to reflect that understanding. On the other hand, science will change its idea of what it thinks to be true as more evidence becomes available. Nobody changes things in the Bible.
Pslams 95:3 ESV
For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.
Psalms 97:7 ESV
All worshipers of images are put to shame, who make their boast in worthless idols; worship him, all you gods!
Deuteronomy 32:8 NRSV (less henotheistic in other translatins)
When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods;
And there are others. We know pretty clearly from historical sources that the early Jews were henotheistic (recognized the existence of other gods, but only worshipped YHWH), and that is preserved in the oldest parts of the Old Testament. Even Genesis often uses a plural when God talks about his works - today that is often explained as talking about himself and the angels or even the holy trinity, but it is very likely it originally referred to the god of Israel and the other (lesser) gods in the heavens.
Because how can we even apprehend anything existing outside of time?
It is if you assume God is bound to the chain of causation, but obviously any creator is likely unbound by the system of laws in which his creation exists, the same as when we create a video game we stand apart from it. I always liked the Dr. Quantum Flatland as an example of god-like capabilities wrt dimensionality:
(I can’t watch the video right now.)
Why not say that God was created by God_1, who just already existed?
Time, and causuality, is a construct inside of our universe. Asking who created the creator is like asking which way is down when you are in outer space..
"caused" can mean a different thing. Imagine causualty in a 3d FPS video game, and the creation of the game itself. Though they are similar in semantics, one is different from the other.
The reason will have no consequence to the beings in the game, and thus they will only be interested in the causuality mechanism within the game..
"... if the universe expands today, this means if we look back in time the matter must have been squeezed together, so the density was higher.
If the universe expands today, how does it follow that it was also expanding yesterday, or a million years ago? Maybe universe expands, then contracts again cyclically?
It's possible, but you're going to have to come up with a theory for why whatever 'force' is driving the expansion goes from negative, to positive, and back.
The universe is not a little trickle of water down the wall in the bathroom you can easily redirect with your little finger, the universe it really big, so you need something equally big to make it change behaviour.
> The reason tides always rising is plausible if we see tides rising now is simply that's it's far more plausible nothing so special ever happened as to change the motion of the entire ocean.
> The ocean is not a little trickle of water down the wall in the bathroom you can easily redirect with your little finger, the ocean is really big, so you need something equally big to make it change behaviour.
But even beside that, the reasons why the ocean has tides are very big indeed. You could try making the argument with a Tsunami, but those also require huge motions of the Earth to happen at any impressive scale.
Finally, the ocean remain big even now!
Honestly I don't get what you were going for, it like an argument version of when sideshow bob is trapped in a field of rakes, every step brings pain.
The universe is not only expanding, it's expanding faster and faster... it's very hard to see how anything could explain the rate of expansion could have started off negative, then instead of just collapsing into itself, it reverted somehow and then started accelerating. The simple explanation is that it has always expanded, though at a slower rate, just like in the future it seems it will continue to expand at a faster rate.
Big Bang itself is a counter-intuitive explanation: Something came out of nothing.
No scientist says that. If evidence ever comes up against any scientific theory (and that's why we call it a theory) it's readily replaced with the most seemingly correct theory.
> Big Bang itself is a counter-intuitive explanation: Something came out of nothing.
Can a theory of creation exist that does not involve something coming out of nothing?
There is another theory, which says universe expands then contracts, then expands and so on and it has always, always been like that. I understand many scientists today don't vote for that theory but I think it is less counter-intuitive than something coming out of nothing.
It's a bit weird because if we try to think about the end of space our brain immediately asks "well what is beyond the end?" and so implicitly expects there to be more and more - ad infinitum.
But on the other hand if we think about something being infinite then our brain immediately tells us "hold on! that seems fishy, I've never experienced something infinite, it has to start somehow" and so implicitly expects there to be a limit to everything.
We are used to just going forward, if there is an obstacle it can be removed somehow. And even if we go around Earth and arrive back to where we started we can then realize: Hey I should be going up instead, not in 3D circles.
If then space itself turns out to be curved and round, based on what we have learned so far, we can reason hey there must be some extra dimension (something like "up") which I am missing so far. I must go there to truly experience infinity.
Maybe infinity is indeed more natural to us since our brain accepts and indeed expects that there is something unknown just to be discovered.
But I guess we are coming back to the point of the video/article. There does not seem to be a way to know for sure and we can think and argue about it till the end of time :P
* God is not a good hypothesis for any secondary cause. The creation of space-time as we currently understand it must have had a secondary cause. Let's patiently keep looking for a scientific hypothesis (theoretical or empirical) that is an incremental improvement on what we already know.
* Religious people who conceive of God as the creator, believing that the word 'creator' refers to the creation of the universe at some point in the past, are completely misunderstanding the use of the word and need to do some more homework.
* Non-Religious people should stop conflating 'metaphysical' statements with religion. Can we agree that we need to make metaphysical statements from time to time if we are having a conversation to understand something 'about physics'?
Can you explain what you mean here - I couldn’t follow
Aka, I've used someone else's redefinition of the word away from the vernacular understanding, to redefine it to support my view of the world. See also "recession."
I tried to add clarity in the response above. Thanks!
There are two senses to understand the word creator. I'll illustrate both by analogies to the way 'we' create as people:
(1) A violinist is creating the music that you are currently hearing. Here and now in the present. (2) A painter created a painting in the 19th century, and you can see the artifact on the wall in a museum.
In the case of (1) the creator brings the song into being out of nothing. More or less, don't squabble over sound waves. :^). When the violinist stops playing, the music stops. Here and now in the present.
In the case of (2) the painter finished the work 'at some point in time' and we can have all sorts of interesting conversations about when exactly the artifact was created. Did the painter really paint it in the way some book said that he did? Does the painter maintain any connection to the painting after it's finished? etc.
You see, if the proper sense of the word creator is actually (1). Then all discussions about (2) are distractions.
So, it's important to remember that, for example, knowledgeable Christians refer to God as the creator in the sense of (1). There may or may not be some interesting discussions to be had about whether God is a creator in the sense of (2) but they are conversations about secondary causes, and very much irrelevant to God's existence and the role as the primary cause.
I am very curious why you think that - given that the Bible and all common teachings of it that I've ever seen very explicitly define God as the creator in the second sense (Genesis very clearly describes past events - not just Let there be light and so on, which could be taken as metaphors for every day dawning, but also Adam and even and all of their descendants, which are described and were understood throughout history as ancestors, not metaphors). The Jewish calendar is even numbered since the year of creation.
Also, while I'm now atheistic, I received at least basic Eastern Orthodox education in school, and the very explicit notion there was that God was the creator of the universe; I also know modern Catholic teaching explicitly names God as the cause of the Big Bang itself, or whatever else science finds to be the mechanism by which the observable universe formed.
Also, while many do accept the possibility of miracles, even some commonly recurring miracles (like the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ during Holy Communion during every Sunday Mass), the working of the natural world is accepted as ordained by God, but not personally directed by Him - this is quite explicit at least in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, where any direct intervention of God on Earth is seen as a miracle, usually related to a Saint.
Note: I am not saying that there are no Christians that believe what you are saying, or that it somehow runs counter to Christianity. I am only saying that I don't think it is a common understanding of Christianity, even one limited to more literate/knowledgeable Christians; e.g. I don't think the Pope believes what you are saying.
You will not find this idea directly stated in the Bible anywhere – these terms were developed in mediaeval scholastic philosophy (although the concept arguably goes back further). Among Roman Catholics, it is certainly the standard view–indeed, I think it is actually an official dogma that God continuously sustains the universe in existence (creates it in esse), as opposed to the deist view that God created it in fieri but its continued existence no longer depends on him.
Many Protestant philosophers invoke the same distinction. Philosophy of this kind is less popular in Eastern Orthodoxy (especially in recent times) – but when Orthodox thinkers have taken an interest in these kinds of philosophical topics, their views on them tend to be broadly similar to Catholic views, so I'd expect them to endorse the distinction as well.
> I don't think the Pope believes what you are saying.
This stuff is standard in seminary training for Catholic priests – so I'm pretty sure Pope Francis knows it – and although we can't know what's going on in his head, why would he disagree with it?
It gives a nice quick and better overview of the point I was trying to bring out. The video here is produced by the Dominican House of Studies in Washington DC.
> I don't think the Pope believes what you are saying.
I can't speak for the Pope, but you can quite confident that the definition of creation expressed in the video is the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church and very likely identical or essentially identical to the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox church.
> I am only saying that I don't think it is a common understanding of Christianity
You're Right! And I stand by my statement. :^) Common Christians need to do more homework.
How does this relate to the idea of creation in 7 days? Doesn't it imply that creation is something that happened in a particular point in time (ie the first 7 days in time), like (2)?
But the point is that there is this other sense, (1) above, in which God is the creator. This is the dominant sense and is present throughout the Bible as well as the classical tradition that unifies the teachings of the bible with basic philosophy. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.'
Reason is that which can be known and where it ceases becomes Faith. They are separate parallel structures, to mistake one for the other is folly.
We know that everything we can see originated as a single point of one uniformly distributed substance.
We know that everything we can see will return into one uniformly distributed substance (Heat and red-shifted light).
Belief is Necessary to fill in the gaps between creation cycles (Or its rejection entirely).
https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
You can believe anything based on faith, therefore, it's not a reliable path to truth.
Only reason is.
The faster our civilization gets rid of faith, the better off we'll be.
Nah. Reason is just the best model we have at the time, given the evidence that we have.
For example, Newtonian physics is a pretty darn good way of looking at the universe and it works well. It was thought of as "known". But of course, I'm sure everyone here knows that Einsteinian physics replaced Newtonian physics with a more accurate model of the universe.
Faith is different in that it is based on no evidence. For example, in christendom, they say there's a heaven, with no testable evidence, or that there's a god, let alone the one that they think exists as opposed to Kali or Uhuru-Mazda, or the other hundredss of thousands of gods that have been professed to be real.
>Belief is Necessary to fill in the gaps between creation cycles (Or its rejection entirely).
eh....despite what the author says, it is conceivable that a scientific solution could be found for the creation. But with faith, just saying "God done it" is something that requires no work, no new knowledge, and not even an attempt at new knowledge. Belief is something necessary when one is just too lazy to try to figure out the actual solution, or to disprove one's belief and accept that it is wrong.
By analogy he describes how, due to the expansion of the universe, Milky Way residents 100 billion years from now will be unable to observe the cosmic background radiation or any galaxy but our own. Civilizations wil evolve, invent science, use the best tools possible, and incorrectly conclude that the universe consists of one single galaxy alone in a vast sea of empty space.
When we triply rewrite hard drives, we understand that information can be destroyed. Sometimes the universe does the samething. Sometimes information is irretrievably lost.
Tough for finite things to try and understand much less comprehend such a simple and complex quandary.
What happens if there really is infinite no beginning and no end. Or what if there is an Alpha and Omega - such a beautiful thing to not understand.
If it was "before the universe" then it wasn't called anything, because there was nobody here to give it the name "universe"?
Imagine a non-human being (e.g., "god", "beings from another dimension", "beings from an advanced civilization", etc.) telling us the theory of everything (with maths and all, if you want), and the end saying: "btw, there is no origin, and no end. Realiy has always existed". Do you think our scientists (or any other kind of curious human being) will say "Alright, got it. Won't keep investigating then. Thanks!". That won't happen, our human brains cannot understand that concept, and there will always be the "but how does it work?!"
Everything we observe in the universe has a sequence of linear causes stretching backward in time. However we can't be sure from these observations that Universe (or multiverse or something similar) itself has been caused in a similar way. -- I hope I got that right.
But is the physical universe (or multiverse or something similar) that we experience a good candidate for the uncaused base reality that just exists?
A good reason to think not is that universe is composed of stuff and parts that change relative to each other. If something changes, ie goes from potential to actual, then there is something that is more actual, or more real, from which we should be able to explain the change.
Another way to say it is that we may not know what base reality is, but in order for it to be a good candidate for 'the' base reality, it should be completely simple. And the universe as whole, by all appearances, is quite complex.
But if there exist an infinite number of copies of myself, all exactly the same - why should I consider myself to be any one of them individually, as opposed to all of them equally? If they are all the same, are they not identical? In which case - the past isn’t infinite after all - rather time is finite and circular.
Another way to put it - any finite spatial volume must contain finite information (see the Bekenstein bound) - hence can only exist in a finite number of distinguishable states. Given infinite time but only a finite number of possible states to visit in them, it has to visit the self-same states again and again - an infinite number of times
Right now, the prevailing model of cosmology (lambda-CDM) basically says that the universe can never return to an earlier state, as it is constantly expanding (and that expansion is accelerating). In this model, the universe has an infinite number of possible states, and is in fact guaranteed to never visit a previous state, even though it has an infinite future ahead of it.
What's the actual difference between these two positions:
(A) the universe was in state X for an infinite amount of time, then suddenly transitioned to some other state Y
(B) time began at t=0 with the universe in state X, and it immediately transitioned to some other state Y
They seem effectively identical, with seemingly no way for us to tell them apart. (B) seems simpler than (A), so by Occam's razor we ought to prefer it to (A), unless we have some specific reason not to. What could such a reason be? Well, I suppose (A) might lead to simpler mathematics. However, in actual fact, I don't believe that's true; and even if it were, it still might be reasonable to conclude that the "infinite static before-life of the universe" was just a mathematical artefact, without any physical reality.
Other problems with this view: (i) time is usually understood as a succession of instants which are somehow distinct – could an infinite succession of instants, all exactly the same as each other, actually count as "time"? (ii) why, if the universe had existed forever in a single state, did it suddenly transition to a new one? That seems harder to explain than the universe just existing with a finite past.
So, I think an infinite past only really makes sense if the infinite past involved an infinity of distinct universe-states – which I think might lead to the consequences I was suggesting.
> In this model, the universe has an infinite number of possible states, and is in fact guaranteed to never visit a previous state, even though it has an infinite future ahead of it.
Let me present a variation on the Boltzmann brain argument: the universe is vast, yet the volume of it which is actually relevant to humans is quite small. Humans cannot ever know or care about the state of the universe as a whole, only that subsection of it we can somehow observe–which is at most the observable universe; but, if we accept the possibility (even only as exceedingly unlikely) that nature is deceiving us (other galaxies don't really exist, it is just randomly arranged photons which by amazing fluke are exactly the same as what we'd observe if other galaxies did), the knowable subsection could be a lot smaller. No matter how stupendously unlikely such as scenario may be – so long as its probability is not strictly zero, in an infinite future, any constant non-zero probability is going to converge to unity.
Consider the current state of this galaxy – does Lambda-CDM guarantee that the universe will never visit a future state, which contains a Milky Way-sized volume, whose state is exactly the same as the state of this galaxy right now? You can repeat the question for "solar system-sized volume with exact same state as our solar system has right now" or "Earth-sized volume with exact same state as Earth has right now". Or a volume with the same size as the current observable universe, and the same state as it?
When this blogger starts by pushing back on philosophers, I think they may mean scientists like Barrow, which is a shame because he makes for very compelling reading. In fact, have I not seen warnings here, from reputable posters, about this Backreaction blog?
In any case, I recommend the ahem “philosophy” book heartily.
But how can we ever understand how out of a state of nothingness came something? That is where the science "ends" and the door to philosophy opens.
Those are similar problems like "Why is there not nothing?", "Why are the laws of nature not different?" etc.
It's not obvious that there "should" be nothing, rather than perpetual something. It's not obvious we should work with integers and not the reals. Or the rationals. Or the rationals without zero, which cannot exist as a denominator (in the common definition of the rationals). It's not obvious that we've ever detected zero. And why a line? Why not a circle? And even if a line, couldn't it be the limit of a circle whose radius tends to infinity? Etc.
I thought that was very insightful. Today people try to pawn of all sorts of opinions as “science” by covering them with the language of science.
First, we would need to solve time. I am not sure if we are able to grasp it. Then we must figure out what happened at T-1 or T-2, which I think will be simple once we understand time.
The theory creates a start and then explains the progress from there. but not what caused it.
In theory of the cylinder than the universe travels to that is good but it does not explain how everything came to be.
We have a simple to state problem. There was nothing, then there was something.
Much like in Genesis ""And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.""
Instead:
Science says there was a big bang and from that everything was created. and we have figured out a model to explain (most) of the evolution since the big bang. Which means we can say no god did it.
But the way the story begins is in my opinion quite similar.
In one version god is used to explain what created us. Which then leads to the question of who created god and to answer that we need to figure out time.
(I am aware that there are equations that explain what was at t-1 or explain that there was nothing and even asking the question of what was at t-1 is crazy. I do not have the background that could allow me to understand the equations, but every which way you do it you end up with a question of what started it, or what was before what was the trigger to get it going.
Perhaps you can say that the universe has always been there, forever, sometimes it shrinks sometimes it expands, and we have a nice perpetuum mobile.
IIUC, the hypothesis is that everything was packed into one super-dense black hole.
Wouldn't there not be any time?
Where did this super dense black hole come from? What caused it to be? What was it before it was a black hole?
Our current theories for the origin of black holes as far as I know does not include the spontaneous appearance of a black hole for no reaosn.
> However, you play around with words the same question always remains what was before.
> Where did this super dense black hole come from? What caused it to be? What was it before it was a black hole?
There are a lot of open equestions. It is work in progress.
> Our current theories for the origin of black holes as far as I know does not include the spontaneous appearance of a black hole for no reaosn.
I think it's a mistake to treat the scientific method as the only plausible source of knowledge. My opinion is obviously based on a particular worldview, but so is a claim that the only useful source of knowledge is the scientific method.
Natural language is woefully inadequate to express these issues, but believe it is a mistake to state the problem like this. There can be no concept of “before” if there is a T0. Perhaps the “why is there something rather than nothing?” version comes closer to what we are asking.
So a spaghetti god monster could have created it? It could but you would never be able to prove it.
The only observation is that currently we don't know. Could it be the spaghetti god monster? Maybe. Maybe not. We simply can't tell at the moment.
There are things we don't know the answer to. We just have to keep looking.
Still leaves the same questions as to why a bunch of universes are being created or where the energy comes from.
End of day there isn’t anything I’ve seen other then a true all powerful God or equivalent being responsible.
Grafting god onto science by cherry picking things that were guessed while throwing away all the incorrect statements is a bit disingenuous, no?
That was around 9 billion years before the Sun.
But before we try to understand how the universe began, maybe a better starting point would be: how did we begin?
Finding out what exactly happened to us that made us different than the rest will lead to answers to greater mysteries of this world.
"We don't know how to defend ourselves against beasts, and we'll never know."
"We don't know how disease spreads, let's just hug it out, we'll never know."
"We don't know how to fly like a bird, we'll never know."
"We don't know how to land the booster of a rocket, we'll never know."
"We don't know how to cure that form of cancer, and we'll never know."
What a ridiculous defeatist attitude. History has proven that, so far, we've been very reliable at figuring out things that were deemed impossible.
I'd say we already know. It would be infinitely arrogant of us to think we're the originals. We're likely inside an inescapable but observable simulation, inside a simulation, repeat for any unknown number of times. That's probably how "the universe" (our universe) began.
Our parent universes probably have far more complexities to them that have been stripped from ours, for the sake of computational simplicity. Perhaps the actual originals, or any of our parent simulators, know exactly how the universe came to be. We might figure it out, too.
You present an interesting semi-fictional point on simulation.
That's just deferring the question. If we're a simulation inside a larger universe, then how did that universe begin? Although I'd argue if we're in a simulation then we're still a part of the host universe, even if kept in isolation, and it's that host universe we should ultimately care about when asking the big questions.
Roger Penrose's Cyclic Universe theory is quite intriguing to me, but unfortunately still doesn't answer the question if there was an initial created universe or an infinite amount of prior universes (aeons).
The speed of light is only a limit on how fast matter/energy can move through space-time.
Additionally, mass deforms space-time such that a little bit of your motion towards the future is directed to the center of mass instead.
To a monkey an iPhone is just a rock.
To humans the universe is equivalent to a piece of chorizo on a telescope.
Evolution doesn't seem to stop. Science is advancing at an increasing pace and the boundary is pushed forward each and every day. What might become of humans in a million years?
All it takes is one person with a mutant super-intelligence gene to bring forth a new step for human kind or one scientific discovery on how to hyper evolve a new babies intelligence.
And we have several billion more years before the sun shuts down, so hopefully that will emerge.
This sentence jumped out for me. Is there some kind of crusade going on that I have missed the beginning of? This feels like a strange sentence in this piece and feels like a (misguided) attack.
If she was a software developer we'd rightly start to wonder about grand pronouncements coming from someone no longer practicing in the field.
When your market doesn't exist if you actually agree with anyone, the incentives start to be questionable.
What are you talking about?
She is still publishing proper research papers as recently as this month!
https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=author&query=Hossenfeld...
Some people pick up weird ideas about her and I really wonder why.
However her broad ranging commentary which tends to take the tone of "this field should listen to me but doesn't" as is the case with this article (and a few others she's done such as about the LHC[2] or black-hole information loss[3]) leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
[1] https://www.fias.science/en/fellows/detail/hossenfelder-sabi...
[2] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/10/particle-physicists...
[3] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/i-stopped-working-o...
Maybe save the unanswerable questions for after.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09428.pdf
Suggests that the universe may be older than the Big Bang theory predicts. There are a lot of qualifiers on both sides of this, so I would suggest sitting back with some popcorn and enjoying the spectacle of a lot of primate descended life forms earnestly debating something that in many cases they couldn't even be bothered to read up on.
If so: https://youtu.be/I7lxzS6K9PU
Whether time has an origin, and whether we can measure how distant it is from us are questions that could be answered.
Our best cosmological theory applied backwards results in singularity. That's bad. See her droplet example.
According to maximally projected Penrose diagrams in singularity time and space evert into the multiverse. You move in time and space flows around you. https://youtu.be/4v9A9hQUcBQ
And according to our other most successful theory, space-time is divided into chunks. And boiling. Opposite of infinitely divisible, smooth relativistic space-time.
Not to mention if we go with current astronomy theory, we end up with unexplained dark matter and dark energy, that give different answers depending on the methodology.
On the other hand, if you are working on theories that can extend into the early universe, it’s not unimportant to try and figure out where the model breaks down. Maybe t=0 isn’t possible, but t=1s? 1ns? 1ps? How much can we feasibly describe?
I’d argue that not exploring the limits of models is also bad science. Knowing the limits is a fundamental part of communicating a model.
The article we're discussing itself even links to one such paper [0]. All of the others she mentions are also published works - Penrose's CCC [1], the ekpyrotic universe [2], Hawking's no-boundary state [3] etc.
> On the other hand, if you are working on theories that can extend into the early universe, it’s not unimportant to try and figure out where the model breaks down. Maybe t=0 isn’t possible, but t=1s? 1ns? 1ps? How much can we feasibly describe?
Sure, but this is a different thing. Many of these are adding elements to the existing theories, and then predict a new initial state given the modified evolution laws.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10714-021-02790-7
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.01740?context=astro-ph
They're not publications of "what is definitely true", they are fundamentally explorations of what could be, or the more important "this is kind of interesting where could it lead?".
But the thing is, theories about the beginning of the universe will never be testable, they aren't just not currently testable.
So, if your theory has no novel predictions about the future, but it adds extra parameters to obtain a different prediction about a past which exists beyond what can be measured, then you're wasting your time creating this theory, and wasting reviewers' and readers' time publishing it; and you're wasting money researching it.
This is what Sabine usually writes and complains about - research money being spent on research that is at best unlikely to bear any fruit, and at worst navel-gazing, especially when there are very real problems in physics that are not receiving significant research.
This is why she complains about people researching the beginning of the universe, or black hole entropy, or grand unified theories, or the hierarchy "problem", or looking for supersimmetry or for WIMPs in ever larger particle accelerators.
Instead, she wishes more people were researching the measurement problem, non-linearity in quantum mechanics, high-energy physics through radio-telescopes instead of particle accelerators, to name a few things.
Now, I don't know anywhere near enough to say that she is right, but I do believe she is not trivially wrong, like you seem to be suggesting.
> So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics.
> 2.b. firm belief in something for which there is no proof
With respect to the Christian Bible reference, I don't read it as saying there's no evidence for what they believe; I think you'd have a hard time finding a Christian who does.
Even if we answer how it began there is still:
1) Why?
2) What was there before that?
3) And before that?
4( And before that? And so on.
It's the rabbit hole only hallucinogens can fill.
And the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not absolute and can be broken.
For example look at particle interactions. The vast majority of them you can play them forward and backwards and they look exactly the same. You wouldn't be able to tell which way the video is running. The only way we can tell there is an arrow of time is because at some point a field asymmetry occurred. In a universe where all fields are symmetrical the idea of time simply breaks down and has no meaning.
The history of the Universe channel touches on this in their latest video.
Linked the wrong video, this is the one I meant to link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9m0sz2sUfU
These thoughts are driving me crazy. There must be a piece of the puzzle we're missing.
There must be something about time that isn't or wasn't always linear. Otherwise there's no end to the "who created it" question.
It's similar to asking what contains the universe. And what contains the thing that contains the universe.
Not that I'm saying this is true (just an example), but is the Big Bang simply (?) the introduction of time into the then time-less universe? It just doesn't make sense to say "The universe started with the Big Bang" when what that was prior was the universe but in a different form (or so we guess).
So it seems that something else had to be introduced to change the nature of the old universe into the new universe. Else the "start" is more like a "transformation" and even that opens a ton of questions.
My head hurts.
Your pet theory is the view of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the Roman Catholic Church. The mistake that people make (you can even see it in this thread), is that they start with some preconceived conception of God, with all it's baggage, and then they attempt argue for, or against, this concept.
The more productive approach is to recognize and acknowledge the necessary existence of a base reality. Then you simply assign the English word 'God' as a reference pointer to this base reality.
const God = (the one base reality that exists necessarily)
You can, but I'm not sure how "then" onwards is going to help — the people I've seen conflating these things before will still conflate them after doing this.
Bob: "Yup."
Christine: "Sure. And because this base reality exists, that proves I was right all along about Jesus: he did die for our sins."
Dhvan: "You mean it proves me right about Brahma."
Eris: "…the horned god."
Freya: "…Ragnarök."
and so on.
The key idea though is that if you make a dispassionate analysis of what this base reality must be, you find that it has certain 'attributes'. So for example, anything that has horns would not be good candidate for base reality since the contingent concept of 'horn' would need to be explained by, and derive its very existence from something much more simple. So that simpler thing would be the less bad candidate. Etc.
I am stealing this.
Only in newspaper headlines. Gell-Mann amnesia effect applies.
I really love Grant Morrisons theory. Treat yourself, especially if you dont want to take that amount of drugs yourself.
https://youtu.be/KTMFBYXmvMk?t=282
edit: Alternatively the transcript starting at
>The universe we live in is designed to grow larvae.
till
> There’s not one adult on this planet.
http://dedroidify.blogspot.com/2013/09/grant-morrisons-must-...
Or at least I hope that's the outcome
Alternatively, and secularly: It may be the ONLY thing that matters.
It's theoretically possible that we'll one day find some other method of finding out the truth (perhaps a god will descend from the heavens and tell us? or perhaps we manage to find a bug / exploit in the simulation?) but personally I find it unlikely.
I think 'never' should be understood in this way—either there's something wrong or fundamentally incomplete about our theories, or we can not know certain things. Barring groundbreaking advancements in understanding akin to quantum physics and relativity theory, physics tells us so. Since the papers discussed do not establish such a new and testable theory but still go and discuss things current science cannot access, they cannot taken to be science. Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong or uninteresting. I don't think she excludes the possibility that a groundbreaking discovery could be made that changes that. But the papers were not written in a time that knows of such a discovery.
The implication is that we simply don’t have enough energies to recreate similar circumstance in a particle accelerator and we cannot “see” past microwave background radiation. As such, as of now, there isn’t a straight path to understand the Big Bang further in any context.
However, measuring the state of the singularity that probably existed before inflation, or even more so, measuring anything about how that in itself came to be, is explicitly impossible given our current theories. As impossible as building a space ship that travels faster than light, or measuring the precise position and velocity of a particle.
These are not technological issues: finding a way to do them would mean a completely new paradigm in science. So any paper that attempts to prove these things without presenting a new paradigm is doomed to the "we will never know" bag.
That's no contradiction though.
A contradiction would be "I know everything about X" and at the same time "There's a limit to our knowledge of X".
It's no contradiction to claim that there are limits to our knowledge but still claim to absolutely know Y about Z.
In other words, the idea that "there are limits to our knowledge" is not incompatible with the idea that we fully know this or that. You just mean that those limits only apply to other things.
(Heck, in math we can even prove that some things can never be proven, thus both implying limits to our knowledge and that we know something with 100% certainty).
No we can't. We can only prove that certain formal systems cannot resolve certain statements. We might still invent other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements.
That's irrelevant, though, because a mathematical proof or a statement X is considered in the context of a specific formal system (and any isomorphic system).
Proving that S can't be proven under formal system F will always be true regardless if you are able to prove the same statement in the formal system Z.
For example, you can't say "I just disproved that triangle angles add to 180 degrees" just because you've proved they add to more than 180 degrees under a non-flat surface or non-Euclidean geometry.
People saying "triangle angles add to 180 degrees" implicitly already mean "under Euclidean geometry and in a flat plane". It's just left implied, because it's goes without saying that they mean it within the system they expressed the problem and did the proof in.
I read into one a few years ago when I was trying to find when the last American slave died.
The problem is they were considered property so no documentation or birth records were produced. The lack of record keeping made this an impossible question.
The last documented one was in the 1930s but the last civil war veteran died in the 1950s, surely there was some baby of the 1860s that was born into the system that probably survived until at least the Montgomery bus boycott or Brown v. Board.
But this is something I discovered is a factual statement that's impossible to verify and will never be resolved.
For who is man to say, that man must only learn about God through objectively verifiable facts, because man said so? Perhaps this God wants seeking. If we were born without eyes, color would still exist, but we would never perceive it, and how would we believe it if someone said it did exist?
Strange that gods who were so occupied with matters on this planet, who live in a nearby heaven up by the firmament of stars, are also still credible candidates for "creator" of the universe.
The real universe is so much more vast and so much more strange than any scriptures had ever imagined. One could be forgiven for excusing that underestimation of the universe as a limitation of the imagination of man.
In other words, "the god of the gaps" has to keep finding new gaps to fill, and the gaps are ever less tenable.
Edit: Furthermore, this said God might point out on said day the lack of any aliens, or other life, as another sign that the universe was made for man, and nothing else, and the sheer enormity of it should be yet another sign. For if the universe was not large, would it be more easy to deny?
Edit 2: You might dismiss the above, and these aren't the best arguments that could be formulated, but it is more to show that your presupposition that a larger universe disproves his existence is untenable.
Theism is man's "theory". Either way, we enter a paradox, if you believe in gods then the theories of man ultimately came from gods, ie, a perfectly logical system only produces logical output.
This whole thread pretty much wound up like I predicted while reading the article. Author implies with certainty that science is uncertain in a specific field and it's invaded by people certain of their beliefs in other fields, ie, if science has a kink in it then gods exist for certain.
For god of the gaps argument never fails to amuse me.
I can say, we will never know what the first human that got to North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I think that’s as true as it could reasonably be. Sure maybe we’ll invent a time machine or some other technology in the future that invalidates it, but if you apply that logic then nothing can ever be stated as a fact.
What is the 20th birthday? According to which calendar? (Leap days etc)?
What is lunch? Not every people subdivide their meals in a predictable way that you can pinpoint to what "lunch" is
Etc etc
EDIT: forgot the most obvious: define what counts for human. It's not clear cut to distinguish boundaries between species
if there is a large mirror a few hundred light years away we might be able to see his lunch in the reflection ;)
All I'm saying is that making (nearly) absolute claims with incomplete knowledge is not a contradiction.
Gödels incompleteness theorem.
In that case, we know for sure that we will never find a list of complete and consistent axioms for all mathematics. We do not need omniscience for this, it’s something we know for sure we will never learn.
I think there are more examples, I remember one of my professors mentioning off the cuff he believes P vs NP will never be proven one way or another because it’s most likely one of those problems that simply don’t have a solution. Or, maybe the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is another example. We know for sure there are limitations on the knowledge we can have.
I don’t think it’s unfair to imply a limit to our knowledge. I’m not saying the universe’s beginning necessarily falls into this category, I honestly don’t know. But there are for sure classes of problems that by their very nature cannot be known, or cannot be known with certainty.
There are a lot of misconceptions about the Big Bang. The Universe is a metric space. The "metric" part here is deliberate, specific and technical. It really means that given two points the metric can tell us what we call the "distance" between them. Abstract maths deals with spaces that do and don't have metrics.
The best explanation I've heard of the Big Bang is not that the Universe originated from a single point but rather the metric between all points in the Universe at the time of the Big Bang was 0.
There's an open question about whether the Universe is finite or infinite. I mean the actual Universe not the observable Universe. This is almost a metaphysical question since we'll probably never know.
We don't really know how gravity and space acts in such extreme environments but with black holes (that we also don't understand at the quantum level) we have plenty of examples of admittedly less extreme but still exxtreme corollaries. It is kind of mind-bending though. One description I read says that time acts like space and space acts like time within the event horizon. As in, you can see light entering the black holes behind you but that's the past and we can view the past all around us (eg distant galaxies are us viewing the past). Towards the singularity is the "future" and we can no more see that than we can see any future.
We, as sentient beings, have a difficult time comprehending things beyond our existence. What I mean is that before we were born, we didn't exist. After we die, we don't exist. We can't really comprehend that intuitively because our perception of the world is predicated on our cognizance. The past is easier. Stuff happened before we were born. But now we do exist. So at some point in the future we won't exist. How can you comprehend your own lack of existence?
I feel in some ways similar about the Universe. Our observations are predicated on concepts like "time" and "space" that at some point didn't exist. How do you reason about the lack of existence of space let alone time when everything we know is predicated on that?
Still, I too feel like the author is too pessimistic about how much more we can learn here. Assuming we aren't extinguished in the next few centuries (which is actually more difficult than it sounds at this point) we are going to be here for an inconceivably long time. Given our understanding of the Universe, that's likely to be >10^100 years. That's a long time to figure stuff out.
Is it something you have personally verified and found to have been the case as you established the principles in play, or is it (at the other end of the spectrum) that a science paper says such-and-such and you read a summary on HN?
These people have (for better or worse) burnt the ships with the people of their generation who write grants and sit on tenure committees.
Hossenfelder’s pivot to “wildly over-credentialed pop-sci YouTuber” is interesting. My gut flinch reaction is like, “you’re better than this”, but… I have not walked a mile in her shoes, and if this is an end-run around a corrupt job market for particle/high-energy people who won’t won’t get on board with The Landscape? Maybe more power to her.
I give that context so that people will know (my opinion on) the backstory for why she’s in an adversarial relationship with The Academy.
The “will never know” phrasing might be unfortunate. But the epistemological principle goes back to Hawking at least: “asking what happened before the Big Bang or where it came from is like asking what is north of the North Pole”.
It’s a fun thing to theorize about, but the Big Bang is almost definitionally “the bound on observable causality”. It’s not a statement about what we won’t ever know, it’s a statement about what’s knowable.
"""How about you wait, and we talk again in 10 billion years."""
this is not so much a joke as a thinly disguised a deeply held conviction. There's no need for a secret cabal to explain why someone who clearly thinks the job should not even be done has trouble finding further employment in an extremely harsh job market.
She's obvious pissed off, and that should be taken into account when evaluating her assertions. Woit is way more pissed off, and probably the better mathematician. Smolin seems like, sad and resigned more than angry, but he also got a great gig wither Perimeter (which he might still hold?), which has to soften the blow.
Frankly my layman's knowledge of all this is badly dated, because after decades of avid interest going back to childhood I got so dispirited about it I've kind of stopped paying attention outside of a few bright spots (Deutsch/Marletto have my rapt attention).
So I don't doubt you that lots of people reject Stringworld now maybe even to the point of that being a fairly mainstream view, but 10 or 20 years ago that was a CLM at best and usually tenure-track suicide, and there's a whole generation of people who did in fact operate under the dictates of something that could, with a little poetic license, be called a "cabal". Dismantling the scientific method to admit the Landscape was, at least to an avid outsider, dogma not long ago.
I'm enheartened to hear that people are starting to try new stuff again, but it's not difficult for me to have sympathy for people who just kinda gave up.
Honestly I think the biggest problem is that you have the timeline wrong, string theory reached its zenith in the 90's, but already by 2002 Woit could give it a good public kicking and mostly get praise for it (if you trust his own account here: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/arxiv-trackbacks.html I find it deeply funny that of the two of the people he reports as being angry with his beat down, one is the infamous Lubos Motl! ).
As an aside, from the tone with which Woit recounts how people wrote possibly mean things about him in the comments of a blog, I suspect he might simply not be a very nice person to interact with which explains why he might have had trouble in his career.
For example, when reporting that he complained to the arxiv admins, he's careful to note he was polite, which I think sounds like someone who unprompted confirms they were wearing pants to an interview...
It seems to be a product of not realizing (or wanting to realize) how old I am! I just checked and Witten won his Fields in 1990, I would have sworn it was like 5-8 years later than that, to pick one key milestone. Getting old is an experience!
I think Sean Carroll for instance does a much better job at this when he interviews people whose views he disagrees with in his podcasts, which happens quite frequently.
Even if we answer how it began there is still:
1) Why
2) What was there before that?
3) And before that?
It's the rabbit hole only hallucinogens can close.
"So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics. It’s not wrong, but it isn’t scientific either. The Big Bang is the simplest explanation we know, and that is probably wrong, and that’s it. That’s all that science can tell us."
Currently perhaps. There’s a ton of big brains out there and even more yet to be born.
And since we created God, we're The Masters of the Universe.
Cue He-Man music.
That just throws the whole reputation of all those scientists into doubt with the average Joe.
Those who prefer blind trust in unchanging authorities will be disappointed.
Scientists are constantly finding better theories for explaining things and I think the population in general understands and accepts that.
She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it. Many solved or solveable problems in science are ghastly complex and computers improved or solved them. The LHC is a most-obvious example for that category. Do I even need to point out the counter-arguments or are we just taking Sabine at her word..
This thinking mirrors a cultural-faith shift and has little to do with the premise of the article, that we dont know and cant know the universe before the Big Bang.
A scientist who doesn't preach is worth their weight in gold, usually because they're too busy doing science to preach.
She is the red dressed woman on the Tiber River telling us how she won't let this stand anymore. Meanwhile the rest of us just get on with it. Accordingly saying this comment was a waste of time.
God wills the Universe into Being. I have explained everything completely. What qualities of a selection function do you have that would choose a different explanation?
One that doesn't require something more complex than the Universe to explain the Universe?
Arguing tiber-river style divine simplicity is best left up to the dominican monk gregory pine and his debate partners.
You might be disappointed to discover I was making a practical point, not using the ideal-metaphorical language of sabine and her culture.
Practically speaking no matter where sabine and the concept of simplicity, teamwork and the coming relational tribalism goes, one can work on the ghost of the tree she is trying to chop down or drag an incomplete, complex part of science through the bubble of 'simplicity' out to disrupt the other side.
Put more briefly, no matter how simple we all agree 'it' is, you can disrupt that bubble with infinite complexity, just as easily as she cuts down trees.
But even without that caveat, science has to be as simple as possible (and no simpler), because every extra equation or variable beyond the minimum is necessarily a worthless decoration adorning the core idea. Computers don't always let you brute force your way past that extra complexity, but even when they do, it never really helps to have it.
if (unix_time>>128) % 2 == 1 { explode(); }
Describe a metaphysical house that could never exist. One with mc esher stairs and melted clocks everywhere.
Who would do that? What would it prove to do that?
Yes computers can be a waste of time.. what's your point? You want me to tell you how to improve science with computing to save you from simplicity, or should I just instead do it...
> She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it.
The point of my example is to show that you don't add unnecessary complexity if you don't need to. But if you think that weather and plasma physics are examples of "ghastly complex" things, you're not talking about the same category of complexity as the one every scientist will argue against.
It's the difference between saying "go is hard" because it took until AlphaGo to make an AI to play it well vs. "go is easy" because the rules fit on a matchbox in a normal font.
The human body is incredibly complex and making simple theories about it doesn't help so much. As you said, Go is incredibly complex and it took ML to tackle it.
ML is a good case, is it simple or is it complex? The ideas we use to communicate the program are simple enough. It's polynomial regression or it's a neural network. Understandable ideal simple terms, but what the program practically executes is much more complex.
Why ditch understanding what's going on under the hood so that we can live in the land of ideal simplicities? Those usually come last after you get what's going on and have refined your practicalities down.
We need better tools for everything and we're not going to get there by ignoring the practical and complex parts.
Sabine is happy to kill off looking at complexity because Penrose is hypothesizing about the nature of life under the guise of pre-big bang physics.
Okay I get her relationship to Penrose.. why do I have to stop exploring complexity again? Cause it's not divinely simple.. and/or because she said so?
But again I admit I waste my own time and maybe yours, we wont merge our views. The eagle never lost as much time as he did, talking to the raven.
For science and scientists, it's the complexity/simplicity of the rules that matters.
You're arguing against a point Sabine doesn't make.
Nothingness is the space that holds everything.
From there it can be argued that the universe began with the adjacent possible of nothing.
Since the Big Bang is the beginning of space and time, it doesn’t make sense to say it “came from” anything - not nothing, anything. Nothing could have “caused” it because causality depends on there being a before in which the cause could take place. Causality breaks down with the beginning of time and that causes us a lot of conceptual confusion.
I like to imagine there's an anti-universe moving backwards in time from the start of the universe, and that's where all the unexplained missing baryonic antimatter ended up.
If you assume that 'nothing' is what cannot exist, then everything becomes a matter of scale and instrument sensitivity
Got proof? ...and isn't that the whole point of the discussion?
If anything, science is all about: "I have no idea what this is, but I have a model that seems to explain certain scenarios. Let's stick with it until someone more intelligent than us provides a better model". We may be "sure" about certain "laws" (e.g,, thermodynamics, speed of light, etc.)... but I think it's a mistake to be so absolute about them.
Math has a few left like the Riemann hypothesis, but the vast majority of new work that has been coming out is more like refinements (I say this as a PhD in math who as actually read them). We look at history and expect it to repeat itself, but if you closely examine math history you can actually see a decline. Take the time to truly examine "visionary" things that have happened in math and those events are actually getting fewer and fewer. I seriously doubt there is much left to do that is of interest to more than 5-10 people in each subfield.
So while we have a few more fundamental problems that most people have heard of like the Riemann hypothesis and the twin primes conjecture, don't expect to have any more of those. (Certainly the more recent ones are already so specialized that few people outside the immediate area would ever understand or even care about them).
I'm also not sure why there's such a negative view towards the end of progress on this site---a lot of people seem to take it as an axiom that currently "useless" things will eventually become useful but I simply do not believe that is the case (and this is coming from someone who has published quite a few papers in pure math).
Not to mention that both QM and GR in themselves have inconsistencies or infinities. GR famously has a singularity in the center of a black hole, which means the math doesn't actually apply there. QM has the measurement problem, and the (probably related) problem of making the laws of motion linear, when we can clearly see highly non-linear behavior in reality.
You can nurture in systems and cultures that break open the fundamentals again if you so wish. Most people don't wish it, they are happy living out incremental improvement in the city and surrounds.
In software engineering, we do have black holes, it's where the code is a mess, untestable.
So, in conclusion, the universe were born as a dense mess, from a "strange" matter , from there all basic physic atoms were born.