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Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

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101–110 of 299 posts

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#101

This seems different than the concept of infinite time, where prior to the big band there was something the collapsed into a ball of energy and maybe someday our universe will collapse back again (which has lost merit since we've seen matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating .. meaning in a few trillion years, atoms may be so far apart that light can't reach anything .. the event…

> There is also a theory there could be many other big bangs and universes next to our own, but they are all accelerating away from each other. I speculate that there is. And I assert that for our universe to be meaningful, it must birth a sentience into life in the fourth dimension. That probably sounds very wishy washy but does anyone get what I mean and agree with me on this? I’ve never told anyone about this post…

Must? Or the universe has no meaning?

That seems to me like you've grabbed on to a mysticism with no foundation.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#102

This seems different than the concept of infinite time, where prior to the big band there was something the collapsed into a ball of energy and maybe someday our universe will collapse back again (which has lost merit since we've seen matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating .. meaning in a few trillion years, atoms may be so far apart that light can't reach anything .. the event…

> matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating How come this does not violate the law of conservation of energy which says there's a fixed amount of energy in the universe? For matter to accelerate would require energy right? Where is the energy fueling this universal acceleration coming from? According to Newton's laws, doesn't there also need to be an external actor causing this ac…

"How come this does not violate the law that says there's a fixed amount of energy in the universe?"

It may. It is currently not clear if conservation of energy holds at the cosmological scale.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#103
post #17

The explanation I've found most persuasive is to take a purely philosophical approach: the universe had no beginning and will have no end because those concepts do not apply. The universe is everything. If there was something that "caused" the universe, it would just be part of the universe. If there is something after the universe ends, it would just be part of the universe. There is nothing outside the universe, if…

That's not an explanation, that's just a relabeling, moving the questions people have from the label "the universe" to the label "the observable universe", but neither answering them, nor making them any less relevant.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nonsensical to wonder what happened in our universe before it existed, but if our universe has an external superuniverse, it's not illogical to wonder what happened there that caused our universe to exist.

Can we follow this a little further? Let’s say you and me are little bits of algae which are floating in blob in the ocean off the coast. We are in a larger current which we cannot see. The current is such that we will eventually strike the shore together. We are in a cluster of material together. It’s not exactly algae, there are a bunch of random gels, some mostly decomposed skin parts. Some very fine grit. Of cour…

That was beautiful, thank you.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#105

I have very little knowledge of astrophysics, but I thought it would be an interesting idea if the universe constantly recycled itself. That is, every so often it collapsed in on itself and produced another big bang. Theoretically some parts of the universe would have already achieved escape velocity, but the rest of it is gradually gravitating towards some center of mass. Is such a thing even feasible?

Not sure if you were somehow subtly referencing this, but...

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” ― Douglas Adams

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#106
post #98

Say we could break any physical rules of our current universe, is there a good theory that would explain how something might have been created out of nothing? i.e. imagine for a second that we're in a simulation and that the current laws of physic are just arbitrary created by a "host". This "host" could have very different physical laws. Could we think of any theory that would explain the creation of something out o…

That is the most fundamental question.

Why does anything exist at all?

Conceptually, this question persist across all the big bangs, collapses, multi universes, or any other conception science has made informed conjectures about, doesn't require time, sequences, or cause and effect These are all processes suppose there is some underlying construct / process / force / structure. But nothing, not even the concept of nothing, not even ideas, maths, shadows on a cave wall.

It is unknowable.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#107

This seems different than the concept of infinite time, where prior to the big band there was something the collapsed into a ball of energy and maybe someday our universe will collapse back again (which has lost merit since we've seen matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating .. meaning in a few trillion years, atoms may be so far apart that light can't reach anything .. the event…

> matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating How come this does not violate the law of conservation of energy which says there's a fixed amount of energy in the universe? For matter to accelerate would require energy right? Where is the energy fueling this universal acceleration coming from? According to Newton's laws, doesn't there also need to be an external actor causing this ac…

Energy conservation is a consequence of time-translation symmetry (by Noether’s theorem), which is broken in general relativity. Hence, broadly speaking, energy is not conserved in general relativity.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-...

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#108
post #98

Say we could break any physical rules of our current universe, is there a good theory that would explain how something might have been created out of nothing? i.e. imagine for a second that we're in a simulation and that the current laws of physic are just arbitrary created by a "host". This "host" could have very different physical laws. Could we think of any theory that would explain the creation of something out o…

You might be interested in Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark. He tries to argue that, fundamentally, the universe is "just math." In other words (glossing over enormous complexity here) if the basic axioms of math are true, the universe must exist.

I have to admit I didn't fully buy the line of reasoning. But it's very interesting.

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#109

This seems different than the concept of infinite time, where prior to the big band there was something the collapsed into a ball of energy and maybe someday our universe will collapse back again (which has lost merit since we've seen matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating .. meaning in a few trillion years, atoms may be so far apart that light can't reach anything .. the event…

there is an assumption the shuttlecock is the Universe and there is nothing outside to observe the object. It's not an assumption, it's explicitly part of the model. Same with "What's south of the south pole." It ignores the stars and galaxies past Earth itself. If I say "the latex in this balloon is like the surface of the earth," I'm not so much ignoring the stars & galaxies, they're just not part of the analogy. I…

[deleted]

Re: Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

#110
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are restricted to the typical 3 dimensions of movement (and 1 through which we are non-optionally traveling) - you should either get to a physical boundary, or you end up in a loop, right? I mean, you won't travel so far you end up in Tuesday.

Sorta. We are in this thing called space-time. It came out of the Big Bang (we think). There is a finite amount of it (about 45 GLY in radius, maybe). You can only ever see about 14GLY of it due to some speed limits. You can't get to an edge or boundary of space-time because it's not 3-D, it's curved in this really weird way. There are a lot of holes in space-time that we're still thinking a lot about. For some reaso…

The hot big bang is an event in spacetime. It does not generate the manifold itself, although the geometry of the manifold necessarily reflects it, especially near the event itself.

There is no evidence to support finiteness of spacetime; there is no reason why there aren't events in the infinite future. The only reason to suspect there are no events in the infinite past is a classical picture of a gravitational singularity in the finite past, but we good reason to believe that quantum gravity will become important in the finite past, and that quantum effects prevent the singularity from forming. However, we do not have a trustworthy theory of quantum gravity with which to assess a number of ideas about how one might test predictions about the even more distant past.

Light-years are a measure of spatial distance; in spacetime we must use an interval for several reasons, including that different observers will disagree about the amount of time it takes a pulse of light at A to reach B; the distance will vary depending on where in spacetime observers are, and the geometry of the spacetime. In order to be generally covariant, intervals must be tensors. We can write the interval tensor in a linear form as \Delta s^2 = x^{\mu}x_{\mu} where \mu is an index of spacetime dimensions runnning 0, 1, ... depending on how many of them there are, x is a displacement four-vector (covariant with \mu below, contravariant with \mu above), and the whole right-hand-side is a Minkowski inner product. The interval itself is s^2; it is not the square root of this quantity.

If we discard general covariance by fixing flat polar coordinates on one observer, we gain the ability to discuss light-years (as measured at some point in time at the spatial origin in that coordinate basis) but invite mistakes in relating those units to physical systems. One runs into this a lot on hackernews, where someone inevitably resurrects the objection that e.g. a binary black hole merger detected at LIGO today akshually happened billions of years ago, and in the process makes a complete hash of the metric tensor.

Unfortunately, this is what is happening in your line about the time-dependent Earth-fixed Hubble radius and the line immediately after that. The metric, as you say in the very next line after that, is very far from that of flat spacetime, and light-years become tricky in general curved spacetime.

As said above, there may be an early boundary to the spacetime: there might not be an infinite past. Not all singularity-abolishing ideas involving quantum gravity require the extension of spacetime beyond the hottest densest phase of the universe, and not all extensions must be infinite. There may be a future boundary to the spacetime, but evidence is that the true metric (which we do not fully know; we only approximate it with an expanding Robertson-Walker metric in the standard model of cosmology) extends into the infinite future barring possible quantum gravity effects at extremely low energies.

> most of the stuff seems to fall up

No. Dark energy is not "stuff": stuff dilutes away with the expansion, and locally tends to slosh about in response to gravitation. Evidence supports the assertion that dark energy is a (physicists') choice of how to represent a linear element in the spacetime interval between any pair of mutually-distant events. That element is \Lambda, the cosmological constant.

As far as we can tell the gravitational interaction is only attractive for all "stuff"; the dilution only manifests when the gravitational interaction is extremely weak. The attractive interaction in the Friedman-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker model in the standard cosmology is represented as a pressure in a fluid dust of gravitating matter; it is calculationally convenient to represent the cosmological constant as a constant isotropic tension. However, the convenience comes with similar risk of misunderstandings, like with using light-years to talk about the intervals between two events separated by cosmological distances.

> a lot more stuff that falls down than just the stuff you are made of

One of the features of galactic halos is that they do not "fall down" towards the central parts of the galaxies they enclose. Ordinary matter collides or scatters electromagnetically or through the weak nuclear force, and and such scatterings radiate away momentum as photons, neutrinos, or other particles. The reduction in momentum allows the remaining matter to fall inward. The matter in the halo does not produce photons, and does not seem to produce neutrinos, so is effectively unable to fall inwards (except by dynamical friction, which is an extremely slow process for sparse gasses or dusts of small-mass particles).

Additionally, we cannot be certain that dark matter -- if it interacts non-gravitationally -- does not form bound states with ordinary matter such as the atomic nuclei inside our bodies. One could compare this to the "hot dark matter" neutrinos that are in your body at any given moment thanks to nuclear interactions (for example, in beta decays in the potassium in your blood). ("hot" because neutrinos generally move at speeds close to that of light; "cold dark matter", found in halos, moves much more slowly).

> There is still a lot of things to learn about all of this

Yes, you're right here.

> we're not really all that close to understanding it

But here I think you are wrong, if your use of "we" is meant to include working physical cosmologists.

Tying those two together, I'd happily recommend practically any of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_cosmology#Textbooks

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