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

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201–210 of 299 posts

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

#201
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…

I agree.

The problem seems to be the word “Universe”. As soon as you assign a word to a thing, it gains boundaries that separate it from nothing and everything else.

My favorite description of origins of things comes from Spencer G. Brown in Laws of Form.

My own short poem about the origin of things:

First there is none, and so just one. Yet none and one are two. Once there’s two, they share a room, hence there now are three. Remembering the two before, the three completes the five, and on the numbers multiply until they are complete.

And a koan:

The student asks the master, please teach me. The master replies, how can I teach you if I have no tongue with which to speak, and no space within which to exist?

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

#202
post #31
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only disturbing if you believe everything is simple enough that humans could comprehend it straight away. If you accept that some stuff is beyond our understanding, and will be for quite a while yet, everything is much less bothersome. Accept that you are fallible and the universe is fine. I'm not saying this is easy though.

> If you accept that some stuff is beyond our understanding isn't that just an elaborate way to say 'give up'? I asked religious friends of mine about what god _is_, and the common answer is that it's beyond human understanding. I don't believe that people should take things on faith, and accept that anything is beyond understanding.

To some degree, it is the willingness to "know your place" in human history. No one in ancient Greece could have discovered cosmic background radiation or observed that all galaxies exhibit redshift, which would have provided evidence for the existence of a Big Bang.

Similarly, we have limitations to what we can observe and measure. We strive to continuously make improvements, but we also need to accept that not all questions will be answered within our lifetimes, and unless civilization collapses, schoolchildren will have a more complete understanding of the nature of the universe in 300 years than we do.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Big Bounce! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce To me it's more satisfying than the idea of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

I once heard of the hypothesis that once the last proton decays, the universe will once more be completely uniform in every way. With nothing to distinguish any part of the universe from any other part, space becomes meaningless and the universe has once more entered a state of nothingness much like how it was "before" the Big Bang. So, in a sense, the heat death is not so different from the big bounce. Unfortunately…

There is a great mini documentary made that tries to answer this question https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

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

#204

Pure nothingness has no potential for creation. The laws of physics don't invent themselves, so it would seem that true "nothing" never existed. I'm not talking about the quantum soup of the vacuum of space, because that is something. If we take Hawking's idea that the universe smoothed out to a zero point where there was no time and nothing else, how does that point because laws of physics, gravity, etc? What proper…

> Pure nothingness has no potential for creation. I disagree, pure nothingness has the largest potential for creation because by virtue of not being there (nor anywhere) it doesn't prevent anything at all from creating itself. if this sounds strange is because the concept of nothingness is strange. rather than asking why is there nothing rather than something, I marvel at how we can conceptualize 'nothingness' in suc…

You're misunderstanding potential.

Potential cannot exist of its own accord. It is secondary to something already actual and only then can it be actualized.

If in the beginning there was truly nothing, and I mean also the absence of any cause that could make things exist, then there is not only nothing to actualize anything since only actual things can actualize, but not even the potential to be actualized.

So no, absolute nothing can not produce nothing and can never yield anything not even in principle.

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word is 'speculation' not 'belief' that that's pretty much what all science is. The evidence usually comes later.

There I was thinking that the scientific method involved falsifiable hypotheses - so how are they going to prove or disprove their respective beliefs? I'm getting string theory flashbacks where half of the physics community is into it, the other half is not, and no-one can prove anything, but they still have a grand old time arguing about it anyway.

"There I was thinking that the scientific method involved falsifiable hypotheses - so how are they going to prove or disprove their respective beliefs?"

????

Scientists think out of the box, they speculate. They talk. They debate, they argue, they get ideas from one another.

Then they get an idea of 'what might work' and possibly form rough experiment to see 'if it makes sense'. Then if things look good, or they figure a few other things out, they might do a more formal experiment in the context of demonstrating the validity of the theory, and possibly try to get it published.

Or, maybe experiments are not possible, or too expensive, so they write their crazy speculations down for others to think about, riff on, and possibly do some experiments later in time.

That's science.

It's a ton of speculation.

I don't understand why you think these things are 'beliefs' and that speculative discussion is not part of the process.

FYI Einstein mostly only ever 'talked and speculated' about stuff.

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

#206

Pure nothingness has no potential for creation. The laws of physics don't invent themselves, so it would seem that true "nothing" never existed. I'm not talking about the quantum soup of the vacuum of space, because that is something. If we take Hawking's idea that the universe smoothed out to a zero point where there was no time and nothing else, how does that point because laws of physics, gravity, etc? What proper…

> Pure nothingness has no potential for creation In mathematics, at least, this is not true. For example, a set consisting of the empty set is not empty.

You're confusing formalism with metaphysics.

Emptiness isn't nothingness. Emptiness presupposes something that is empty of something expected to fill it, the absence of something not the total absence of anything. Absolute nothingness isn't empty because there's nothing that can be empty. Nothingness is not a something, but people here seem to be reifying the notion.

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

#207
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…

Btw, laws are not actually things. They're descriptions that are reified by some people. What you have are things in the universe that have natures that their natures lead to detectable patterns. A law of physics is just a shorthand way of saying "things of this kind behave in this way". It's very important to understand this instead of assuming the universe is some vacuous collection of natureless things that are governed from the outside by some "laws".

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a probabilistic point of view, we're observing with extreme selection bias: we only see the universe in which we do exist, not all the ones in which we don't, so no matter how incredibly unlikely existence is, from the perspective of existing consciousness it is guaranteed. This means it's possible for consciousness to arise from pure entropy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain .

Related question: how fast does time go in a “pure entropy” situation? Or, maybe more useful, what happens to time as you asymptotically approach pure entropy? Does it speed up? If so, it would make a Boltzmann brain inevitable. Or... not an inevitable brain, but an inevitable random low entropy state, right?

> what happens to time as you asymptotically approach pure entropy

Uh, maybe nothing? Depends on how you approach the pure entropy condition, and where the observer is and how it's moving compared to a clock.

Let's consider the measure of entropy in Boltzmann's relation : S = k log W or essentially that the quantity of entropy is the log relationship between the macrostate and the number of possible microstates that can represent that macrostate. A tree is a macrostate. Its individual cells, or the atoms that make those cells, or the quarks that make the nuclei, are examples of ever more micro microstates.

You are pretty low entropy because we can't take a cubic centimetre of one of your bones and swap it with a cubic centimetre around the mitral valve of your heart and expect the same macrostate to persist: you rapidly become a corpse. Empty space is "pure" entropy because we can take a cubic centimetre of vacuum and swap it with a cubic centimetre of vacuum elsewhere, and it will make absolutely no difference to the macrostate. We can swap all of the cubic centimetres of vacuum in an empty spacetime with one another, so the combinations at just that scale that produce the same empty spacetime is enormous. A black hole (assuming no-hair conjecture is true) can be represented by eleven variables, most of which vanish by a suitable choice of coordinates, leaving mass as the dominating item in the macrostate. But that mass can be all hydrogen atoms, or half as many helium atoms, or some arbitrary mix of gas and dust, but those all don't matter to the horizon that defines the black hole. The entropy of the horizon is enormous, because we can't distinguish between an isolated black hole made of nothing but atomic hydrogen to a different isolated black hole of the same mass, charge, and spin made of nothing but molecular hydrogen.

Now let's add a clock somewhere in these vast seas of entropy. How fast does it tick? It depends on who is looking! If we put it into otherwise empty expanding space, someone close to it will see it ticking faster than someone extremely far away from it. The latter, watching for long enough, will see the clock slow, dim, shrink, and ultimately vanish thanks to the metric expansion of space. The former, staying close by the clock, would see it tick at the same rate for an arbitrarily long time. But if we put it close to a black hole, what happens? The close by observer, staying close to it, will see it tick at the same rate for an arbitrarily long time. Observers at greater distance will see it ticking more slowly. If it were to fall into a very large black hole along with the close by observer, there is "no drama": the observer sees the same ticking rate upon them crossing the event horizon together. But the distant observer will see the clock slow, dim, and shrink until it vanishes. (Don't be tempted to think that a black hole is the same as an expanding universe because of this coincidence! We are definitely not inside a black hole, but we are definitely inside an expanding universe. The metrics are very different and lead to different trajectories for things moving through the respective spacetimes, even though the very different spacetimes coincidentally have boundaries that can in some circumstances produce similar observables for a clock near the boundary.)

We can complicate the picture by having the observer move relativistically with respect to the clock, especially if we introduce extreme acceleration.

So the thing about time in a relativistic context: how fast a clock ticks is observer-dependent, and in curved spacetime it's position-dependent too. It's the curvature of spacetime that makes the context relativistic; from the equivalence principle (non-gravitational) acceleration likewise makes the context relativistic.

If we lower the entropy of the vacuum by introducing things like galaxy clusters and cats, these less-entropic things generate curvature. So there are more places for a clock to slow down in a universe that has less entropy, than in a universe which has more entropy. Even in the black hole case, we can add another black hole and now there are two event horizons around which a clock will tick slowly from the perspective of a distant observer. Add more black holes, add more places where the clock could be ticking slowly for this observer. Of course, as you add more black holes, you are generating a more complicated macrostate, so entropy is dropping.

So the answer is: as a universe's entropy increases, there are fewer places for clocks to run slowly.

Even though a uniform gas has very high entropy, it still has less entropy than empty vacuum, and it is also subject to things like brownian motion and other fluctuations in density. Is a Boltzmann brain inevitable in such a gas (in the farrrrrr future of our universe, there may be a sparse gas of ultra-infrared photons with an even sparser gas of black holes and diffuse ordinary matter, and it may be uniform after a verrrry long time) ? No, but we can assign a low probability that the matter will fluctuate into a Boltzmann brain. The problem that obsesses Boltzmann brain cosmologists is that the low probability of a Boltzmann brain with false memories of having grown up in a universe like ours is enormously enormously enormously more likely than the ultra-low entropy of a hot big bang which evolves into a "real" brain with "real" memories of having grown up with cats and computers and so on, with entropy increasing as you get further from the big bang[1].

So does that mean you are a Boltzmann brain with false memories?

- --

[1] The early universe is almost certainly low entropy. If, when it is suuuuuper dense but with tiny variations, we swap some of it at "A" with some of it at "B", the stuff around "A" won't be dense enough to collapse into the galaxy it otherwise would have. Or maybe the stuff at "B" will suddenly be at a critical density to start collapsing gravitationally, leading to star formation and so on. The tiny variations are expected because of quantum behaviour at densities where quantum gravitation is important. Also, of course, it would be weird if the second law of thermodynamics depends on how close to the early universe you are: and that would be the case if the early universe had more entropy than the present universe (which is full of lots of nearly empty space, with a large and growing number of indistinguishable cubic centimetres between galaxy clusters).

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

#209

Pure nothingness has no potential for creation. The laws of physics don't invent themselves, so it would seem that true "nothing" never existed. I'm not talking about the quantum soup of the vacuum of space, because that is something. If we take Hawking's idea that the universe smoothed out to a zero point where there was no time and nothing else, how does that point because laws of physics, gravity, etc? What proper…

>Everything breaks down at that point, because trying to use mathematics or physics to explain something that existed before mathematics and physics doesn't work.

What is the meaning of this paragraph? Mathematics are not dependent on the existence of any particular universe

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is God a necessary thing?

A valid question, and not one that in my opinion (even though I am a theist) that has an argument that is both clear and compelling (look up various Ontological arguments to see the gamut). I think it is enough to say the following things: 1. The universe clearly exists, but it is also clear that it doesn't have to exist (i.e. the universe is contingent) 2. Therefore, there must be some thing that exists, and exists…

> We can call this thing God, but by that we don't commit ourselves to any particular religion. At most that gets us the God of deism.

Not so. The deist God is more of a Cartesian/Paleyian watchmaker, not the God of the philosophers classically understood. The God of the philosophers is very much in line with the Judeo-Christian God (not everything can be inferred through unaided reason, but much of it can). And God as "I am" ("ehyeh asher ehyeh") is precisely not a thing ipsum esse subsistens, or that who's essence it is to exist, and by which all things are. However, it precedes things and in doing so puts a stop to the infinite regress of having to appeal to still further things to explain the existence of things (which cannot work because we aren't trying to a chain of causes but the cause of their existence in the here and now).

Response to mythrwy:

If existence were a property, then it would follow that things precede their own existence, which it absurd. And as I've written above, things cannot account for their own existence, thus you must posit existence as distinct from the things that are by virtue of it. You must appeal to a causal non-thing to account for things and thus depend on that cause for their own being in the here and now.

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