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Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

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251–260 of 299 posts

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#251

Pure nothingness has no potential for creation. The laws of physics don't invent themselves, so it would seem that true "nothing" never existed. I'm not talking about the quantum soup of the vacuum of space, because that is something. If we take Hawking's idea that the universe smoothed out to a zero point where there was no time and nothing else, how does that point because laws of physics, gravity, etc? What proper…

> Pure nothingness has no potential for creation. I disagree, pure nothingness has the largest potential for creation because by virtue of not being there (nor anywhere) it doesn't prevent anything at all from creating itself. if this sounds strange is because the concept of nothingness is strange. rather than asking why is there nothing rather than something, I marvel at how we can conceptualize 'nothingness' in suc…

The act of creation requires there to be something there beforehand. You can't create something from nothing, it doesn't make any sense.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#252

For me the hardest idea to grasp is the concept of “nothing”. It seems to me that is something the human brain cannot possibly comprehend. There is always something as far as our senses are concerned. I guess that’s why the idea of nothingness after we die so such a hard notion to comprehend.

It is stunning that this concept emerges as something physical in the form of an event horizon.

'Dark stars' have been around as a concept a lot longer than black holes.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pure nothingness has no potential for creation In mathematics, at least, this is not true. For example, a set consisting of the empty set is not empty.

"Pure nothingness" would be the empty set, not a set with something in it.

Yes, that's their point. Pure nothingness, the empty set, has the potential to create the set containing the empty set, and then the set containing that, sets containing combinations, etc etc.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#254
post #145

> Just as a shuttlecock has a diameter of zero at its bottom most point As a lay person this - right from the starting block - is what messes me up. I.e. something that exists cannot logically have a zero diameter part. Anything zero does not exist. Most related theories have similar kinds of initial premise that you must just accept.

> something that exists cannot logically have a zero diameter part Do elementary particles exist?

Elementary particles have size delineated by the forces that act on them.

The concept of a "physical size" has no meaning, since particles don't act upon each other that way.

But the forces do not have a zero size, and that's important.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pure nothingness has no potential for creation In mathematics, at least, this is not true. For example, a set consisting of the empty set is not empty.

You're confusing formalism with metaphysics. Emptiness isn't nothingness. Emptiness presupposes something that is empty of something expected to fill it, the absence of something not the total absence of anything. Absolute nothingness isn't empty because there's nothing that can be empty. Nothingness is not a something, but people here seem to be reifying the notion.

Because you can't get rid of the potential to reify.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#256

Possibly one of the most intriguing ideas I've ever heard is that there is no difference between "true" in the sense of "1+1=2" and "true" in the sense of "polar bears exist". The universe isn't described by the mathematics we have constructed to explain it, it is that mathematics. In that sense, the question of what happened before our universe is similar to the question of what happened before 1+1=2... sort of a st…

Note that this idea -- that the basis of the universe is math itself -- is attributed to the presocratic philosopher Pythagoras.

In the ensuing Platonic worldview, it was understood that the world began with total Oneness. In modern terms, that's treating the entropy of the universe as equal to 1; there is only one state for the entire universe to be in. Then, this increases to twoness, between the something and the nothing. As the something and the nothing interact, that interaction is the threeness; and from the three, the multitude. They then believed that this resulted in the formations of geometry which led to the elements, which they expected to consist of the simplest 3 dimensional shapes. They were pretty much spot on, except they didn't know that the spherical harmonics of atoms are even simpler than the platonic forms.

Not a bad cosmology for 2500 years ago. I think there is still a lot of profound thought to process and consider.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#257

This seems different than the concept of infinite time, where prior to the big band there was something the collapsed into a ball of energy and maybe someday our universe will collapse back again (which has lost merit since we've seen matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating .. meaning in a few trillion years, atoms may be so far apart that light can't reach anything .. the event…

> matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating How come this does not violate the law of conservation of energy which says there's a fixed amount of energy in the universe? For matter to accelerate would require energy right? Where is the energy fueling this universal acceleration coming from? According to Newton's laws, doesn't there also need to be an external actor causing this ac…

There is no matter being accelerated but space itself is expanding, which is why distant objects may accelerate beyond the speed of light, atleast that is what it looks like.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hot big bang is an event in spacetime. It does not generate the manifold itself, although the geometry of the manifold necessarily reflects it, especially near the event itself. There is no evidence to support finiteness of spacetime; there is no reason why there aren't events in the infinite future. The only reason to suspect there are no events in the infinite past is a classical picture of a gravitational sing…

What does it mean for a pair of events to be mutually distant?

Roughly, here I meant far enough away for the metric expansion of space to generate significant observables. If the cosmological redshift is not evident, then the pair of events are not "mutually distant" enough.

In the "mutually distant enough" case, if the expansion is similar to that measured in our universe, then a RADAR pulse sent out by object A to object B would not return to object A before, say, about half of a sample of iron-60 at A had undergone beta decay (half-life 2.6 million years), all assuming that A and B are both moving slowly compared to the speed of light. The returning pulse will be at a significantly longer wavelength than the outgoing pulse. By contrast, a RADAR pulse that returns before half of a sample of carbon-11 has decayed by positron emission (half-life about 20 minutes), the returning pulse will be at pretty much exactly the same wavelength as the outgoing pulse. Here object A and object B move very slowly compared to the speed of light: the redshift is cosmological rather than special-relativistic.

It works for neutrinos too, which have the advantage of always moving slower than the speed of light due to their small but nonzero invariant mass. In SI units, neutrino wavelengths vary from tiny fractions of a meter to several metres. We can measure these to an extent by looking for radiation from nuclear recoil reactions: shorter-wavelength means higher momentum and thus more and stronger recoil reactions. The less famous counterpart to the cosmic microwave background -- the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_neutrino_background -- is practically undetectable in this way.

I say advantage because lightlike intervals are always zero by definition (that's why they're also called "null" intervals), so one has to use an affine parametrization of the interval to or otherwise fix coordinates and units to compare how far apart in spacetime events connected by RADAR signals are. The intervals of events connected by neutrino beams ("nadar?") are timelike, and so we can more straightforwardly consider the contribution of the cosmological constant to the (nonzero) magnitude of the interval \Delta s^2. But neutrinos are still ultra-relativistic -- simultaneously emitted neutrinos and photons (say, from extragalactic supernovae) are detected practically simultaneously by instruments on and around Earth. (In practice, such simultaneously-emitted neutrinos can win races to our detectors because the universe is generally more transparent to them than to the photons emitted from the same event: the relative opacity slows down the latter).

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're speaking in tautologies. If you define "Nothingness" as "That which is unable to produce anything" and use that to conclude that it is not possible for there to be nothing at the start of the universe, you are begging the question. Your axioms trivially contain your conclusion, but why should we accept those axioms?

As a layman when it comes to physics, I've always had the impression that the nature of existence must be tautological. If the logic doesn't form a circle, then any attempt to explain the cause and effect sequence that resulted in our universe can always be met with a "well why did the first step occur"?

Logic is a human invention. The universe doesn't owe you the ability to explain the entire chain of cause and effect. Not being able to prove your axioms is what differentiates science from religion.
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