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We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

backreaction.blogspot.com

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Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#61

Post by smolder »

philipov wrote: post #13
erlend_sh wrote: post #7

What we do know is that the universe didn’t begin from nothing . It’s impossible for something to arise out of nothing, so there has always been something . Nothingness is the space that holds everything. From there it can be argued that the universe began with the adjacent possible of nothing.

It's not impossible for something to arise out of nothing. Well, what I really should say is, it's not impossible for two somethings to arise out of nothing, as long as they have opposite charge and annihilate when they come into contact. 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.

Put in other words, something is a subset of nothing! This idea fits in well with the unprovable MWI as well. If every possibile configuration of spacetime exists, and in a symmetry where everything has an opposite, doesn't it all kind of "add up" to 0? This idea has been in my head since high school physics many years ago.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#62

Post by Ralfp »

hprotagonist wrote: post #42
jahnu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have a simple to state problem. There was nothing, then there was something. 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.

to which the current best though unsatisfactory answer is “because!”

Hawking’s history of time actually anwsers this question with „we don’t know and don’t have any information from before big bang we can access to use in research”.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#63

Post by cwalv »

kevinventullo wrote: post #36
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #21

I think that this is the TL;DR of the whole piece: > 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.

The key difference from religion being the word “could”.

We sometimes also rule out other ways it "could" have happened, because they're further from our current paradigm, or just harder (or maybe impossible) to verify. In this sense, it may not be a "religion", but there is an element of "faith"

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#64

Post by tsimionescu »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

"The issue is that physicists can’t accept the scientifically honest answer: We don’t know, and leave it at that." 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.

I think she justifies the "attack" towards the end of the piece, where she talks about the many theories that purport to explain how the universe began. Her point is that you can always create a coherent mathematical model that "explains" this, but since it is logically impossible to check it, you're not proposing a scientific theory.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#65

Post by nfRfqX5n »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

"The issue is that physicists can’t accept the scientifically honest answer: We don’t know, and leave it at that." 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.

from what i've read, physicists gladly accept what they don't know and make a point to admit that

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#66

Post by akprasad » 

  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.
-- Nasadiya Sukta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta)

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#67

Post by DiggyJohnson »

me_me_me wrote: post #57
ThinkBeat wrote: post #25

I dont think we can get there. 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 cam…

Unlike in Genesis, the light was not created before sun. Grafting god onto science by cherry picking things that were guessed while throwing away all the incorrect statements is a bit disingenuous, no?

Is this satire? Or are you literally being so literal?

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#68

Post by galleywest200 »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #59
jb1991 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quite disagree with this. Visionaries come along to unseat centuries of limitations, raising the ceiling forever. Those visionaries are rare, but there will be more.

Maybe, but if you look at the list of famous unsolved problems in math, it has been dwindling for a long time. The list used to contain problems that undergrads could understand. Biology is still like this -- you can take quite a few interesting unsolved problems in biology and explain it to most people. Math has a few left like the Riemann hypothesis, but the vast majority of new work that has been coming out is mor…

Are you suggesting there are no more unknown problems in mathematics, that "the list" will not be added to?

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#70

Post by barrysteve »

Sabine likes to swing an axe into a tree. Her preaching gets tiresome fast though.

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.

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