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

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

#371

Post by tsimionescu »

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #333
barrysteve wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not really fair. For example, Galileo is often given as an example of someone who was persecuted by the Church for his ideas - without often mentioning that his ideas were championed by the Pope and the Jesuit order before some misunderstandings.

Also, a lot of the basis of science comes from members of the Church, occultists, or others living in deeply fundamentalist environments (Newton being a famous father of science who was deeply occult in his thinking; or Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, the father of algebra and whose name is the basis of the word algorithm, being a court astronomer and the head of an Abbasid Caliph's library).

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

#373

Post by galaxyLogic »

This is what I don't get:

"... if the universe expands today, this means if we look back in time the matter must have been squeezed together, so the density was higher.

If the universe expands today, how does it follow that it was also expanding yesterday, or a million years ago? Maybe universe expands, then contracts again cyclically?

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

#374

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#375

Post by [deleted] »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #254

I honestly never cared for Hossenfelder's science communication. She's far too dismissive and dishonest in representing theoretical views she disagrees with. And I don't necessarily have the physics understanding to pick these biases out too easily. I think Sean Carroll for instance does a much better job at this when he interviews people whose views he disagrees with in his podcasts, which happens quite frequently.

[deleted]

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

#376

Post by omegalulw »

martinko wrote: post #360
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…

> 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. if there is a large mirror a few hundred light years away we might be able to see his lunch in the reflection ;)

Not necessarily. The signal-to-noise ratio drops the farther you get away.

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

#377

Post by SiempreViernes »

benreesman wrote: post #368
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.

Hossenfelder is a polarizing figure. “Lost In Math” was a thought-provoking book in the tradition of the other string iconoclasts (Smolin, Woit, Rovelli, roughly “the Perimeter crowd”). “Three Roads to Quantum Gravity” was the last general audience book that Smolin did before he’d fucking had it and did “The Trouble with Physics”. Woit went straight for the jugular with “Not Even Wrong”. These people have (for better…

The trouble with Hossenfelder isn't so much that she rejects string theory, lots of people do that. No the problem is that she's pivoted into declaring the entire enterprise of cosmology and particle physics pointless, when she says

"""How about you wait, and we talk again in 10 billion years."""

this is not so much a joke as a thinly disguised a deeply held conviction. There's no need for a secret cabal to explain why someone who clearly thinks the job should not even be done has trouble finding further employment in an extremely harsh job market.

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

#378

Post by stakkur »

goldenkey wrote: post #347
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.

After requesting the crack pipe from my fellow traveler, I conclude that the answer doesn’t matter. The universe Is.

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

#379

Post by eis »

al_mandi wrote: post #358
eis wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

> There is no reason to believe that there was only one try. Exactly what he mentions in his talk, on what are you basing this belief? It's a metaphysical claim that is outside the realm of science. You just proved his point.

Erm, what? I disproved his point. He claims because us being in this unlikely universe is proof for a design. No, it's a logical fallacy as I outlined in the example of flipping coins. The video presenter is the guy who flipped 10 times heads and claims "See! God made this happen!" Can you please point to the exact time in the video where he mentions multiple tries? That would contradict his own point about the low chance and hence design.

He assumes there was only one "flip of the coin". There is zero reason to assume this and so his whole argument falls because when his assumption does not apply then mathematics tells us there is absolutely nothing special about finding ourselves in that "unlikely" universe because actually when taking a step back it isn't unlikely, it is pretty much guaranteed - completely without anyone designing it that way.

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

#380

Post by rwbt »

Reminds me of something Karl Popper philosophized about. I'm completely butchering it ofcourse, but it goes along something like this - Every scientific theory is waiting to be falsified by future generations. He concludes that everything in Empirical sciences cannot be proven, but instead they're only falsifiable.
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