(February 28, 2017 at 4:54 pm)SteveII Wrote:(February 28, 2017 at 4:28 pm)Simon Moon Wrote: As I already stated, the definition that physicists use for 'nothing' is not the same as used colloquially.
You do understand that many words have several different meanings depending on whether they are used by scientists or the general public, right? There's actually a word for this, it is "polysemy".
Examples:
Abstract, chaotic, confidence, constraint, flux, perturb, power, theory, salt, critical point...should I go on?
Sorry you fail to understand this, but it is the way things are.
Not if you are defining 'nothing' as, non existence. That is not how Krauss and other physicists define it.
Sorry, you are buying into a load of crap. 'Nothing' simply means not anything. It will never mean something else--for the simple fact that we need a word that describes not anything.
Krauss's theory is that the universe originated in a quantum vacuum, which is empty space filled with vacuum energy. It is a physical reality described by physical laws and having a physical structure. This is something. To redefine this as 'nothing' is a failed attempt to avoid the question of "where did the vacuum field come from" and the infinite regress that results in a logical absurdity. This is not complicated and Krauss has been called on it by other scientists.
So, it seems we are back to pondering why there is anything rather than nothing.
When Krauss says the universe came from nothing, he means that if you add up all the forces, mass, energy in the universe, they equal zero. But he does not say that existence, in some form, did not already exist.
Quote:So, it seems we are back to pondering why there is anything rather than nothing.
Yes, we are.
But Krauss's theory is not meant to answer that. It is only meant to answer why our universe, in its present form, exists.
Problem is, your answer does not have any explanatory power. It has plenty of explanatory scope, but no power.
Explaining a mystery (why the universe exists), by appealing to a bigger mystery (a universe creating god), does not actually EXPLAIN anything. And it only creates more questions. Positing a panacea to explain a mystery, explains nothing.
In other words, a hypothesis that explains everything explains nothing.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
