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Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

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Re: Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

#91

Post by p_j_w »

GalenErso wrote: post #31
m3kw9 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who created that higher level construct

God, as creator of time, is outside of time. Since therefore He has no beginning in time, He has always existed, so doesn't need a cause. I long wrestled with the idea that the Universe could have existed forever, as a way to solve the first cause paradox, but I was never comfortable with the idea. So I've made a leap of faith and applied the same mental framework to an immaterial construct (God), and for the sake of…

That sounds very hand wavy and not at all convincing. You could just as easily say that time is an emergent property of the universe, so the universe has always existed and needs no cause. The problem in doing that with God is you have something intelligent and complex enough that it was capable of creating the universe with the metaphorical snap of its fingers. This is a harder pill to swallow than the universe just existing, because the universe is not intelligent, is less complex, and can't create things whole cloth.

Re: Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

#92

Post by b4ke »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #57
jliptzin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what got the cycle going in the first place?

Negation. The negation of nothing is something.

precisely, there has to be nothing for there to be something. also above someone mentioned our conceptual framework for modeling such an understanding as lacking, but it works well enough, it’s more difficult to accept that the entirety is a comics soup and this is what our limited sensory capacity can contrive of it. time is an excuse for this reality.

Re: Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

#93

Post by HybridCurve »

umvi wrote: post #17
GalenErso wrote: post #5

I know HN hates religion, but after being an atheist all my life, and graduating with a STEM degree (the 'S' part) from a top tier institution, I've started in the last year or so to turn to the church (Roman Catholic) and theism, both to find answers to some of life's mysteries, such as the origin of the Universe, and for personal reasons (I plan to start my initiation, starting with a baptism, within the next year…

I myself am partial to the Latter-day Saint teaching that matter/energy has always existed (and forever will exist) and that the creation of the world involved "organizing" existing matter in an iterative process. That matches the pattern of creation I've experienced myself where I take something that already exists and iterate on it until it is in a refined state that I desire. I find it hard to believe that the min…

Conway's game of life is a good example of how complex behavior can evolve from systems with a simple set of rules. Molecular dynamics follow a more complex set of rules at a much more rapid rate. This combined with the fact those interactions have been happening for billions of years in parallel at such a massive scale does not make it surprising that persistent and self replicating patterns emerge. On a large enough scale, even improbable events become likely.

Re: Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

#94

Post by pieter_mj »

GalenErso wrote: post #5

I know HN hates religion, but after being an atheist all my life, and graduating with a STEM degree (the 'S' part) from a top tier institution, I've started in the last year or so to turn to the church (Roman Catholic) and theism, both to find answers to some of life's mysteries, such as the origin of the Universe, and for personal reasons (I plan to start my initiation, starting with a baptism, within the next year…

The idea of a Christian god is self contradictory and logically impossible. If you want a god it can't be an Abramistic one.

Re: Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

#95

Post by [deleted] »

lastofus wrote: post #55
GalenErso wrote: post #5

I know HN hates religion, but after being an atheist all my life, and graduating with a STEM degree (the 'S' part) from a top tier institution, I've started in the last year or so to turn to the church (Roman Catholic) and theism, both to find answers to some of life's mysteries, such as the origin of the Universe, and for personal reasons (I plan to start my initiation, starting with a baptism, within the next year…

> I've started in the last year or so to turn to the church (Roman Catholic) and theism, both to find answers to some of life's mysteries, such as the origin of the Universe... Accepting God created the universe just moves the big questions one level of indirection upward: Why does God exist? Why does God exist with the characteristics that he does (e.g. why is God X instead of Y)? It's unclear how this is more satis…

[deleted]

Re: Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

#96

Post by pieter_mj »

markhahn wrote: post #58
truculent wrote: post #14

IANAP - why are these ideas so controversial? The article seems to suggest he has some (potentially) supporting evidence, and I don't have an intuition for how damning the counter-argument is ("This would necessitate making all particles lose mass as the universe gets old." Again, IANAP and physics can get weird).

it's fringe because it's almost certainly nonfalsifiable

I'm pretty sure Penrose won't accept his own theory if it's only nonfalsifiable. At the moment, it's only an idea but if it is unprovable he'll abandon it or be very clear about its non-scientific status.

He's not a second Josephson.

Re: Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

#97

Post by mrguyorama »

jmull wrote: post #27
GalenErso wrote: post #5

I know HN hates religion, but after being an atheist all my life, and graduating with a STEM degree (the 'S' part) from a top tier institution, I've started in the last year or so to turn to the church (Roman Catholic) and theism, both to find answers to some of life's mysteries, such as the origin of the Universe, and for personal reasons (I plan to start my initiation, starting with a baptism, within the next year…

Back when they taught me catholicism, the doctrine on science vs. religion was “truth cannot contradict truth”. They’d still say God created everything, but that science was a good way to understand God’s creation, from a certain perspective. (Things like Genesis were not considered literal.) So I’m surprised to see the Catholicism presented as an alternative to science. Maybe they’ve reverted since I was a follower?

Catholicism, despite their attempts, is not just one set of teachings. At the end of the day, each catholic only knows what their local church teaches. If your state's cardinal is aggressively homophobic, you can bet local teachings about the evils of homosexuality and pleadings to the flock to save their wandering fellows despite the literal Pope basically saying "maybe we should leave them alone a bit"

Re: Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

#98

Post by Apofis »

GalenErso wrote: post #5

I know HN hates religion, but after being an atheist all my life, and graduating with a STEM degree (the 'S' part) from a top tier institution, I've started in the last year or so to turn to the church (Roman Catholic) and theism, both to find answers to some of life's mysteries, such as the origin of the Universe, and for personal reasons (I plan to start my initiation, starting with a baptism, within the next year…

Keep working through the process. Talent is wasted without knowledge. HN doesn't hate religion, it's simply ignorant of it.

Re: Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

#99

Post by umvi »

rubicon33 wrote: post #30
umvi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I myself am partial to the Latter-day Saint teaching that matter/energy has always existed (and forever will exist) and that the creation of the world involved "organizing" existing matter in an iterative process. That matches the pattern of creation I've experienced myself where I take something that already exists and iterate on it until it is in a refined state that I desire. I find it hard to believe that the min…

Uh, what man? That “guide” was natural selection over millions of years. It’s literally random chance, and if a change is beneficial, it sticks. If we were really “designed” then there are so many failures and inefficiencies that deserve scrutiny. Chief among them, childhood cancers. Fuck a designer that left that bug in the system and shipped it.

I understand how natural selection works in the framework of evolution. But how did the evolutionary framework itself emerge? Natural selection can't happen without being contained in a larger self-propagating evolutionary system, correct? And it seems sophisticated enough for me to believe that an intelligent force helped create it. Of course, I could be wrong, but I'd need some pretty compelling proof of abiogenesis, not just isolated examples of self assembling or replicating molecules.

> Chief among them, childhood cancers. Fuck a designer that left that bug in the system and shipped it.

How is it the designer's fault if (for example) humans decide to build and detonate nuclear weapons, the fallout is blown across oceans and/or continents and precipitates into water supplies which then manifests as childhood cancers 25 years later (unbeknownst to the citizens)? That's not a "bug", that's just a natural consequence of physics and physical interactions of matter. Rinse and repeat with lead and other compounds which unknowingly are contaminating our environment and causing childhood cancers to happen in the aggregate?

Re: Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

#100

Post by bawolff »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #79
bawolff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an atheist, what other measure should we use? Like when it comes down to it we are all looking for answers that "satisfy" us. What else is there? Logic is just a complex way of verifying that the answers are convincing enough and thus satisfying.

> what other measure should we use? The truth, meaning accepting our best accordance of theory to observable reality, then acting on that? That means not just in physics but in ethics as well and any other area.

> The truth, meaning accepting our best accordance of theory to observable reality, then acting on that?

That sounds like satisfaction to me. You looked for the answer that made sense and satisfied your notions of reality. But its not like you have access to divine revelation or Truth. You are working on what you think is like based on your observations and throwing ideas that aren't in accordance with what you know away because they don't satisfy you as an explanation.

> That means not just in physics but in ethics as well and any other area.

Oh boy. This makes even less sense for ethics. There is no emperical basis for ethics. Its entirely around what people feel is "right". You can't get to even simple things like murder is wrong just by observing the universe.

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