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Universe from nothing ?
Posted on: August 13, 2011 - 12:42am
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Universe from nothing ?
Science seems to think so, again no need for the god thingy, have a look www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/07/how-the-universe-appeared-from-nothing.html This has always been my hypothesis, good to know its solid science now
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That video is quite a neat way to explain it.
The "God hypothesis" doesn't really get round the "something from nothing" thing anyway, because it requires that either God himself had to come from nothing, which, since he is supposed to be 'greater' than the Universe, is even less plausible, or that he just always was there, which could, again, more plausibly apply to the basic minimal stuff or energy field which is all that is needed for a Universe to come from, if it really did 'need' something to 'come from'.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
That was a pretty neat video! I swear I don't know why I'm always so surprised when science blows my mind yet again... something and nothing are technically the same thing? I mean, I can comprehend that tiny particles of something physical can make up any number of physical things, but tiny particles of energy? Is everything we think of as "physical" actually just very dense clumps of energy? ....Why do I feel like I've been told this before in a different context.... I never did pay attention in science class.
Also, after watching that I browsed the titles of other articles and saw one about a theory that everything is a hologram, and since I don't have a subscription to the magazine I googled it and found this: http://www.terredelsud.org/tuttoeunoeng.php which I found to be equally mind-bending. I'm sure this is not news to you guys (you smart people, you...) but I just can't wrap my head around it quite yet. Maybe after I've meditated on it a while...
agreed bob, and it actually makes sense, in a weird kinda way
Well, it helps that Spontaneous Creation is no longer merely a vacuous, ideological assertion and now is an actual scientific theory. I personally have had very little tolerance for science being substituted with ideology when theists -particularly fundamentalists- do it.
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)
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Well Kap, it still does not reach to the level of a proper theory. What science calls this is an hypothesis (otherwise known as a scientific wild ass guess or SWAG).
Don't get me wrong, that is really one of the most important parts of science.
Over your years, you have probably run into at least one text book version of how science works. It was no doubt brutally clean and efficient. However, scientists are still regular people. They just have jobs in that field.
An alternative and more human version could go something like this:
First, a scientist looks at what is out there and says something along the lines of “that is funny” or “that doesn't quite work”.
Second come the SWAG. This is arguably the most important part of the deal. Without SWAGs, we can't ever go anywhere else.
Now if the SWAG is true, then there should be consequences that we can check for. It might happen that it takes a few years before we can check for those consequences but if we check them and they work out, that is evidence for the SWAG being valid. At that point, we have a real theory.
Really, the fact that theists don't get that basic point is the reason why they get mileage from crap like “evolution is only a theory”. Sure, it is a theory. But that fails to tell what actually happened. Darwin made a SWAG. Right around the same time, Mendel made a different SWAG which led to the modern science of genetics. Yah, it took about 70 or so years before anyone realized that the two were connected but today, we have what is known in scientific circles as the modern synthesis.
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Believe me, I really want to go after Spontaneous Creation in the manner you just did ("SWAG",) because it's an idea that has so many holes and unanswered questions that it almost begs to be brutally deconstructed and ultimately struck down, in absence of greater detail, but I have a hard time finding actual information on it on the web, aside from Hawking's latest (useless, agenda-driven) book. Either way, it is an idea that has been pioneered relatively recently, and is quite radical given what was known previously. It also does not quite remove the possibility of a some great, mighty (invisible) wizard practically spell-casting an entire universe into existence for some purpose inconceivable by mere mortals. Why this particular idea is not treated as an untested, weakly substantiated suggestion by so many self-described skeptics, is beyond my meager powers of comprehension.
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)
The problem with these hypotheses, including string theory, is not that they have major holes in them - they don't - but that we have trouble coming up with ways to convincingly test them. String Theory is a real problem here, it has so many possible variations, all theoretically possible.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
SInce when is a hypothesis a wild guest ?
its been demonstrated that particles come into and out of the nothingness of space all the time.
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Since something which has been demonstrated is not a hypothesis but a theory. Really though, in my earlier post, I was specifically avoiding the sort of formalism that you would find in the first few pages of an introductory science book. That formalism usually misses the essential fact that at some point in the process, every scientist has to make guesses before moving on to what must follow from them.
Hopefully a scientist will make good, informed guesses or at least have an explanation why he thinks that old thinking needs to be substantially modified. If he cannot do that, then he is probably just making things up in his head, which has happened many times in the history of science.
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