God
Right.
And since we created God, we're The Masters of the Universe.
Cue He-Man music.
We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
101–110 of 610 posts
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#102Sabine 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 th…
> She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it. 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?
Well it's not so hard to break apart all the presuppositions in that sentence, but I know you're not looking for this.
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.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#103Things like the big bang seem to be things after the beginning of the universe. In the same way, the issue with a god is "who created god, and who created that who created god...". If he's eternal, who/what made him eternal? We have the same problem in science, and I think any explanation/theory would have the same problem. Also, I dislike that when some physicists explain this they say, "sure, you can get something…
the issue with a god is "who created god, and who created that who created god..."
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:
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#104Quoted post unavailable.
I found it interesting as an early example of a similar line of reasoning with a similar conclusion.
The Wikipedia link mentions that: “Astronomer Carl Sagan quoted it in discussing India's "tradition of skeptical questioning and unselfconscious humility before the great cosmic mysteries."”
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#105What if it never began and has simply always existed? That is the likely scenario, as the moment you think about it beginning, you again face beginning from what? What was that called before the universe other than the universe?
Our human brains cannot grasp the idea of "it simply always existed".
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?!"
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#106Sabine 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 th…
Sabine, wearing her science communicator hat, necessarily has to simplify a lot. Everything of hers that I watch or read is simplified science (including her branded Brilliant course), and it has to be simplified for me to follow it because I'm a software engineer not a scientist and I can't yet do the tensor differential calculus of relativity nor the complex-valued calculus of quantum mechanics. But even without th…
I mean gene unfolding, meterology, lhc, fusion, space research, ect have all been served tremendously by computing. Granted one could say they are temporarily less useful due to a local peak of optimization, buut that's a long way from throwing out all the sine waves and commiting to perfect metaphysics.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#107But isn't Webb calling the BBT into question? 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.
> But isn't Webb calling the BBT into question?
Only in newspaper headlines. Gell-Mann amnesia effect applies.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#108What 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.
If one redefined nothing as something, then the universe can arise.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#109We may not know the answer to how the universe began, but a time loop at the beginning of the universe is my favorite explanation. Gott and Li proposed this model and you can see Gott explain it elegantly here: https://youtu.be/raTqAyLikLU
The thing about time loop is that, how and when did it began? I just can't wrap my head around something being here, there and everywhere at all times.
That's the thing about time-loops; you don't need to have a start and a beginning. There's a good movie about that concept; Interstellar.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#110What if it never began and has simply always existed? That is the likely scenario, as the moment you think about it beginning, you again face beginning from what? What was that called before the universe other than the universe?
Just because everything within this universe has some preceding cause doesn’t mean that the universe itself can’t have a beginning without anything preceding it.