Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

backreaction.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 610 posts

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

#221

Post by indigodaddy »

gwd wrote: post #46
Ninjinka wrote: post #10

God

The conclusion of her article: "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."

“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.

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

#222

Post by jondeval »

My strong opinions, weakly held:

* 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'?

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

#223

Post by drran »

singularity2001 wrote: post #116

the radius of the visible universe is about 14.0 billion parsecs (about 45.7 billion light-years), while the age of the universe is 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years. I must have missed out on some caveats to the speed of light.

You just discovered the Big Bug theory.

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

#225

Post by twiss »

synu wrote: post #203
DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very narrow reading of it. There's always an implicit "to the best of our current knowledge" caveat with every sound scientific statement. And it's true, to the best of our current knowledge, we can never know what it's like inside a black hole or very close to the time our universe began because the physics that we know tells us no person or probe can ever go there and come back to tell. If you're no so gen…

I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don’t need to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having figured out what happened at the beginning of the universe because we can never know. This seems to explicitly exclude the possibility that there could ever be a discovery you might read about that would change that.

She explicitly says that the scientific method is insufficient to give an answer to this question. So reading anything written by scientists won't give a conclusive answer. I think it's implicitly hinted that you might as well read something by a religious person, or a philosopher, or anyone with a random theory, as none of the theories can be proven or disproven by the scientific method, and so all of their answers will be equally (un)satisfying.

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.

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

#226

Post by hota_mazi »

michaelsbradley wrote: post #168
jgrowl wrote: post #132

Therein lies the True eternal distinction between Reason and Faith. 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…

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth…” https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...

Faith is the justification that people give when they believe something for no good reason.

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.

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

#227

Post by tresqotheq »

eis wrote: post #170
al_mandi wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're following the religion of scientism.

Science is not a religion. If scientism means thinking that science is the best tool we have right now to explain reality then I guess yea I'm pro science. But it's very far from a religion. BTW science does not claim to know it all or even be able to know it all. In fact it is an important part of science to find the limits of science.

>Science is not a religion.

What is the difference between a holy man who claims to have the word of god, and a scientist who claims to have followed the "scientifc method"?

Modern human believes the latter. That is the difference.

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

#228

Post by sigmoid10 »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #191
IAmGraydon wrote: post #178

“We will never know” is such a contradictory statement. On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout the entirety of our future. Add it to your list of things to never write.

That's a very narrow reading of it. There's always an implicit "to the best of our current knowledge" caveat with every sound scientific statement. And it's true, to the best of our current knowledge, we can never know what it's like inside a black hole or very close to the time our universe began because the physics that we know tells us no person or probe can ever go there and come back to tell. If you're no so gen…

This just falls completely apart when you look at the history of physics. Einstein for example is usually considered to be one of the smarter people, and even he thought it would be impossible to ever measure gravitational waves directly. He simply could not foresee the future developments of quantum mechanics, like lasers or squeezed light states. And yet here we are. Even if the author was the best physicist in the world (and if you look at her papers she certainly isn't by a long shot), you should never trust any statement like that. This is not just detrimental to science outreach (these things capture young people's imagination after all), it's also pointless to argue about them when we know that we almost certainly just lack imagination ourselves. Noone alive today can tell what will be possible in 100 years, period.

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

#229

Post by jondeval »

ben_w wrote: post #202
jondeval wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My pet theory: Something has always existed. There was no beginning. No origin. No first cause. No t=0. No start. It's always been there. What was before that? That. And that. And that. Always that. 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, wi…

> 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. 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.

I don't follow you. Can you elaborate?

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

#230

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

synu wrote: post #203
DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very narrow reading of it. There's always an implicit "to the best of our current knowledge" caveat with every sound scientific statement. And it's true, to the best of our current knowledge, we can never know what it's like inside a black hole or very close to the time our universe began because the physics that we know tells us no person or probe can ever go there and come back to tell. If you're no so gen…

I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don’t need to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having figured out what happened at the beginning of the universe because we can never know. This seems to explicitly exclude the possibility that there could ever be a discovery you might read about that would change that.

Well to quote user mensetmanusman: "Per thermodynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable beginning."

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.

Post reply on HN