21–30 of 84 posts
What a helpful way of thinking about it. I’m surprised I’ve never heard this before. Mind expanding, no pun intended.
How is this determined? I would think that the observable universe puts a limit on our view anyway.
Is it the redshift receding into infinite wavelengths? Can the instruments even detect this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah this is kind of a laughable position in the article. I don’t mean the conclusion, which might be right, but the method. The laws of physics as we know them are just reflections of … nothing more than what we know. The fact that we have no account of what came before the big bang is not evidence of anything except that we don’t know, especially when a very plausible theory is that what came before is totally diff…
Didn't Gödel prove that you can't prove a theory with its' own ruleset? In physics maths always go haywire durnig phase changes, as gas laws don't apply to liquids, and such.
Interesting stuff, can someone recommend a good book that deals more into this subject? Preferably a book that’s entertaining to read rather than engrossed in mathematics
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Reborn-Lee-Smolin/dp/0544245598
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/About-Time-Einsteins-Unfinished-Revol...
> even though there’s no first moment of time, we can still measure the age. This seems to be a contradiction? The time that's passed since some kind of transformation, but not the age? What is the age of something that has no beginning?
Curiously, Hawking still relates the hypotheses that (very roughly) calculate some kind of time that it would take for the soup to form into the proper universe—via Hilbert's spaces of configurations. I.e. these theories somehow count possible arrangements of matter in the soup, in the absence of space, and its movements from one arrangement to another, in the absence of time. That confuses me to this day.
> There’s another way in which the giant firecracker idea misleads us, because even scientists often talk about the “universe springing into existence.” Well, it didn’t, as far as we can tell. The opposite is true. There is no first moment of time, just as there is no smallest positive number. In physics we have equations and laws of nature that describe how one situation changes into another, but we have no equation…
Yeah this is kind of a laughable position in the article. I don’t mean the conclusion, which might be right, but the method. The laws of physics as we know them are just reflections of … nothing more than what we know. The fact that we have no account of what came before the big bang is not evidence of anything except that we don’t know, especially when a very plausible theory is that what came before is totally diff…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't Gödel prove that you can't prove a theory with its' own ruleset? In physics maths always go haywire durnig phase changes, as gas laws don't apply to liquids, and such.
No, he proved that under existing axiomatic systems, there are some statements which cannot be proven to be true axiomatically, even though they are true; such axiomatic systems are, in his terminology, incomplete. A subtle but important difference.