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

341–350 of 610 posts

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

#341

Post by al_mandi »

eis wrote: post #250
al_mandi wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does having texts with some degree of interpretation have to do with whether those texts are true or not? Sounds like a genetic fallacy. > The existance of these monsters does not prove religions don't create issues. Or what's your claim? My claim is that without religion, we'd be in a far off worse place.

> What does having texts with some degree of interpretation have to do with whether those texts are true or not? Sounds like a genetic fallacy. You are putting words in my mouth. I said texts that are vague and open to a lot of interpretation can cause a lot of issues. Especially when those interpretations are used to make life choices and doubly so when making choices about others. > My claim is that without religio…

Not all texts are vague and open to interpretation. A proper religion with strong scholarly underpinnings like Islam has this issue figured out. The Quran itself calls out the issue, and Muslim scholars from the very beginning have a foundation on which to base rulings.

> so when making choices about others

By living in society, someone is making choices on the behalf of another regardless of whether that society is religious or secular.

> Please provide evidence for this

We're seeing it today. Look at the rates of depression, suicide, etc. in so called "developed first world" countries and compare them to war torn "third world" countries that are generally religious. Society is in moral and ethical decline, and it worries me how much longer this can go on before some chaotic event will take place.

Without an authority, the very question of what "good" and "bad" mean becomes meaningless. I recall one atheistic head (might have been Dawkins) who claimed that rape is not good or bad, it just is a phenomenon like the spots on a cheetah. Or Kraus (and others) who said that he could not find a moral justification against incest if there is consent from both sides.

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

#342

Post by goldenkey »

ithkuil wrote: post #308
yibg wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if the statement is correct in this case but in general saying “we will never know” about a subject which we have incomplete knowledge isn’t a contradiction. I can say, we will never know what the first human that got to North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I think that’s as true as it could reasonably be. Sure maybe we’ll invent a time machine or some other technology in the future th…

Furthermore there is the complication caused by ambiguous problem statements. In your example, how we define the first human that got to North America? Which immigration wave? What if there were immigration waves that were completely wiped out without leaving any effects of the subsequent populations? What is the 20th birthday? According to which calendar? (Leap days etc)? What is lunch? Not every people subdivide th…

Furthermore if a human time travels back to the past and then sets up shop and lives amongst the first humans, maybe they are the first human? Semantics and ambiguity have a way of making unspecific questions paradoxical

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

#343

Post by [deleted] »

eis wrote: post #194
al_mandi wrote: post #164

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…

[deleted]

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

#344

Post by wizofaus »

tresqotheq wrote: post #339
wizofaus wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

One of main reasons the scientific method has been so successful is because it forces us to challenge our assumptions that our perceptions of the world are correct.

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

#345

Post by chiefalchemist »

ben_w wrote: post #107
chiefalchemist wrote: post #49

But 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. https://youtube.com/shorts/1S2CxPUZDOY?feature=share

I'm pretty sure I saw something shared on HN last week or so. Essentially, what Webb is sending back doesn't look like that a BB should look like.

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

#346

Post by lambdasquirrel »

superposeur wrote: post #133

I’m a big fan of the blog, but disagree with this entry. Her argument could be applied to the idea of the Big Bang itself: we can never receive light from any further back than the “surface of last scattering”, so the notion of a hotter prior epoch is an extrapolation. The extrapolation is a good one as it uses independently-tested laws of evolution, at least to the point these laws presumably break down, as she poin…

> Her argument could be applied to the idea of the Big Bang itself

What's wrong with that?

The thing about science is that it cannot pretend that it knows. It needs to prove. To which end, I don't think we should be supposing that we're going to know. Otherwise we're doing religion.

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

#347

Post by goldenkey »

mxkopy wrote: post #111

John Wheeler popularized the term "it from bit" and the idea of a participatory universe. The limits of human observation aside, it could be that the universe itself doesn't really know how it began. If a superheated plasma is indifferent to being in a 5 dimensional black hole as opposed to a state where only space exists, then, in a sense, there isn't any difference between the two explanations (given that the plasm…

After I pick up the crack pipe from my HN brother, I come to the same conclusion. Most questions aren't even answerable in a cosmic context because they become ill formed at that level.

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

#348

Post by goldenkey »

kosh2 wrote: post #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.

In projective geometry negative infinity and positive infinity meet :-)

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

#349

Post by tsimionescu »

XorNot wrote: post #199
tsimionescu wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’d be surprised if either scientists were trying to publish articles like that — or if they were, that they could pass peer review. The article we're discussing itself even links to one such paper [0]. All of the others she mentions are also published works - Penrose's CCC [1], the ekpyrotic universe [2], Hawking's no-boundary state [3] etc. > On the other hand, if you are working on theories that can extend into…

The point of publishing those articles is...to publish them though. Like, you have an idea, you write it up, submit it and note that it can fit known data but isn't currently testable. Done, and important . Maybe it goes nowhere, maybe it inspires someone, but the point of journals is in the name: they're journals of work in the field, shared so the community can explore and benefit from them. They're not publication…

> note that it can fit known data but isn't currently testable.

But the thing is, theories about the beginning of the universe will never be testable, they aren't just not currently testable.

So, if your theory has no novel predictions about the future, but it adds extra parameters to obtain a different prediction about a past which exists beyond what can be measured, then you're wasting your time creating this theory, and wasting reviewers' and readers' time publishing it; and you're wasting money researching it.

This is what Sabine usually writes and complains about - research money being spent on research that is at best unlikely to bear any fruit, and at worst navel-gazing, especially when there are very real problems in physics that are not receiving significant research.

This is why she complains about people researching the beginning of the universe, or black hole entropy, or grand unified theories, or the hierarchy "problem", or looking for supersimmetry or for WIMPs in ever larger particle accelerators.

Instead, she wishes more people were researching the measurement problem, non-linearity in quantum mechanics, high-energy physics through radio-telescopes instead of particle accelerators, to name a few things.

Now, I don't know anywhere near enough to say that she is right, but I do believe she is not trivially wrong, like you seem to be suggesting.

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

#350

Post by al_mandi »

eis wrote: post #288
al_mandi wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are believes that relate to supernatural beings and sprituality. They cannot be proven or disproven. That's not 100% true. There can (and is) proof and evidence for validating religious claims. You're conflating belief in the unseen (with evidence) with blind faith without evidence, those are two different things. > I am not a religious person but I do have morals. He mentions that non-religious people can hav…

> That's not 100% true. There can (and is) proof and evidence for validating religious claims. You're conflating belief in the unseen (with evidence) with blind faith without evidence, those are two different things. Any religion who claims there is a God does not have proof of such. If there was real experimentally testable and unambigous proof than scientists would need to accept that. What does belief in the unsee…

> he then turns around and just claims religion can give you the correct answer which clearly it can't because there are different religions

His point is that experimental science is not in the domain of answering "why" in that sense. It's a metaphysical problem outside the realm of science. The question of finding which religion is true is a separate issue. You don't want to fall in the genetic fallacy when making such an argument.

> Well I think we're getting closer and closer to understand how the brain works.

No one is saying we shouldn't work on it. But this sounds like the "science of the gaps" argument that atheists make fun of theists for using when the former claim "God of the gaps" fallacy.

> Why can't we derive morals from logical scientific arguments?

Show me how. He talks about how different cultures agree that certain things are acceptable and others aren't. And he gave the example of harming or sacrificing children. If we agreed tomorrow that such practice is ok, in a secular society there is nothing prohibiting such action.

In Islam, we have something called the Fitrah, a natural disposition to certain things, such as acting "good" (we need a benchmark for that obviously, but in a Judeo-Christian Western world, it's quite obvious), or the innate belief in a Creator. This falls under that, and animals also have instincts.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. He states the argument at the beginning, and then gives examples. You don't have to agree with each and every example, but the point stands.

Experimental science cannot answer things beyond what it is designed to do.

Post reply on HN