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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

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between the two claims is whether they are verifiable.

I can’t reply to the question I was asked, so I reply here: How many have I verified? I’m not sure of the #, but I’ve verified much of classical physics, chemistry, astronomical observations, and lots of things in electronics (some of which rely on quantum mechanics) and electromagnetism. But as I said, they question is not whether you or I have personally verified everything, but whether they are verifiable in princ…

> The claims of a holy man are not.

How come? The claims of holy men are verified by other holy men.

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

#332

“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.

You can exchange "We will never know" for anything that we currently think of as impossible then.

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

#333
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the whole premise and foundation of religion is that you ought to believe things absent evidence and without good reasons (that’s what faith is). If you have good reasons to believe something you give the reason; religion does not and should not, especially with its centuries-long history of malice and suppression towards free and scientific thought, deserve any credibility when it comes to matters of facts.

This argument always depends on what kinds of evidence you accept and trust as valid for faith. One big test for that is trusting any of the holy books as evidence for something faithful. It's really weird to watch science and science-like ideas grow out of faith and religion, then the faith be blamed for 'persecuting' science after a certain philosophy took over in the late 19th century.

> It's really weird to watch science and science-like ideas grow out of faith and religion

While there are certain events that can be filed under this category, more often than not its the other way around. That is, the ideas come outside the religion, run contradictory until proven unquestionably, and then the religious texts are found to be retroactively always been proving the science that was found later.

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

#334
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Religions are based on a lot of completely made up stuff Did you survey all religions to make such claim? And it's not like you don't need axiomatic bases that need to be accepted as is to base science on. There's a lot of "I think" and assumptions in your post that are not backed up by evidence, and some even contrary to reality. This is a good starting point to expand your horizon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

> Did you survey all religions to make such claim? That is the definition of religion. They are believes that relate to supernatural beings and sprituality. They cannot be proven or disproven. > And it's not like you don't need axiomatic bases that need to be accepted as is to base science on. Correct, there are axioms - assumptions - which the rest of the logical system is based upon. Same as for example in Mathemat…

I finished it now. It did not get any better. Most of his arguments can be boiled down to "science can't explain that so it must be god". No.

Towards the end he shows a lack of understanding of statistics. He claims if any infinitesmally small change to the laws of nature would have caused an uninhabitable universe then it must have been specifically designed the way it is. He brings several examples that actually are all the exact same argument.

The mistake here is that he assumes that there was only one random try at creating this universe and that we cannot have been sooo extremely lucky. There is no reason to believe that there was only one try. What if there were a large number of tries? If all the other tries resulted in uninhabitable universes then of course us being in the lucky version must make us think this was not random chance.

Example: ask a large number of people to flip a coin ten times. Eventually you will reach someone that actually flipped ten times heads in succession. What would that guy think? Clearly that's not a normal coin and you designed the whole thing to be like that because what are the odds of him flipping ten times heads? He does not know about the other thousand people you had play this game that didn't get ten times heads.

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

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did - space-time can expand with unbounded speed, and that is what happened in the early universe. Remember that the big bang is not some point in space-time which we are moving away from, it is a point in space-time that has expanded to the size of the current universe (and keeps expanding). The speed of light is only a limit on how fast matter/energy can move through space-time.

The speed of causation is also so unintuitive imo, but also a must to make anything make sense logically. After watching many hours of youtube i still cant wrap my head around it. Say you're accellerating 1g forever you never reach the speed of light for other observers.. Whats cool about gravity is that the spacetime 'train tracks' are tilted slightly into the earth so youre pulled down, but the earth is resisting t…

I think the most intuitive explanation I've seen for c is that in fact everything always moves at a fixed speed, c, in space-time - either through space or through time (from past to future). You can neither increase nor decrease your total speed, you can only change its direction - the larger the space-only component is, the smaller the time component is.

Additionally, mass deforms space-time such that a little bit of your motion towards the future is directed to the center of mass instead.

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

#336

“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.

Do you mean omniscience?

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

#337
The only thing that can maybe be understandable for us is an infinite universe. What was before 0? -1. What before that? -2.

But how can we ever understand how out of a state of nothingness came something? That is where the science "ends" and the door to philosophy opens.

Those are similar problems like "Why is there not nothing?", "Why are the laws of nature not different?" etc.

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me, how many scientific "claims" that you rely on a day to day basis, have you verified personally? Or How many such claims can be verified with a single average person's limited resource?

See my sibling for my first reply. My second reply is that it’s important whether things derived from two different claims actually work. Make two hospitals: one which follows standard Western medical practice, and the other which does not and instead performs prayers over its patients. I can predict which hospital will have better patient outcomes.

> I can predict which hospital will have better patient outcomes.

That is quite besided the point. The point being every patient who goes there believes the hospital us doing western blah blah blah...

Let me simplyfy it even more. The common mans dependence of "science" is based on beliefs. Just as it was on religion at an older time.

That scientific method is more trust worthy, does not make that dependence not based on belief. That is the weakest link in the chain, and that link is common to both science and religion.

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

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me, how many scientific "claims" that you rely on a day to day basis, have you verified personally? Or How many such claims can be verified with a single average person's limited resource?

Why do you think that matters? You might as well ask "what makes you trust your own perception when you verify scientific claims"? As it happens, literally every time you switch on a light you are, in fact, verifying multiple scientific theories. Not to mention interacting with your phone or computer to type your HN comments.

>what makes you trust your own perception when you verify scientific claims"

Because it is with my own perception that I sense the rest of the world with it. So that is all that one should care. Let me know if you don't get this. I ll elaborate..

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

#340
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that I wasn't arguing against the big bang, or even cosmology itself. I was only pointing out that the concept of God doesn't add anything to the conversation. It's also important to note that the big bang theory completely leaves open the question of what there was in the tiny tiny universe before inflation. Basically, the current BBT describes how the universe evolved starting from some time t=t0 + 10^-36 seco…

I was just suggesting a reason why the solid state theory of the cosmos fell out of favor - evidence to the contrary.

Sure, but this thread wasn't referring to the solid state theory - it is referring to the philosophical problem of creation from nothing.

That is, in our usual life, everything that exists comes from something else that exists. But we can't easily apply this rule to the very beginning of the universe (be it the big bang or whatever other model).

So, the question is - how do we handle this? Thomas Aquinas said that this is itself proof of God's existence: the universe did not exist at some point, then God created the first thing. Of course, the next logical question is - ok, then how does the rule apply to God? And the religious say - well, the rule doesn't apply to God, only to creation.

But, if we accept that the rule isn't universal, then we can also choose not to apply it to the beginning of the universe. Instead, we can tweak the rule to say that everything except the singularity at the beginning of the Universe is created by another existing thing; the singularity itself was always there and requires no explanation. This is perfectly consistent with the Big Bang theory, and is in fact how most scientists conceptualize it (or, they say that questions about the origin of that singularity make no sense, since time itself began once the singularity started inflating, but this is philosophically similar).

Of course, we can posit anything we want about that singularity and its past (if any), and we will never contradict another theory, since there is no remnant in the existing universe of what came before inflation, so whatever theory we want will be consistent with the current universe.

Did a different universe collapse into that singularity, perhaps one with slightly different constants of nature? Sure, why not. Was it a regular black hole in another, larger, universe that still exists, but which is too far away from us to be detectable in any way now that space-time has expanded so much? Possibly, why not. Did gods and demons fight until they a powerful sorceror cast a spell to imprison them into single point, where they and there magic were ground to dust and exploded in the inflation? Perfectly coherent with all known physical theories.

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