Matter and energy can be past-eternal

[bennyboy]

Now you're copypasting some snippets from a popular science book from 1988 and resort to insults instead of arguments. So you obviously have no clue at all what you are talking about. So long.

I wrote that the big bang itself is considered a singularity by contemporary cosmologists.

You responded by saying, “past singularities one encounters in cosmological models are merely points where classical relativity breaks down,” and then went on to ask me, “In which sense precisely "is the big bang" a singularity?”

Regardless of how one interprets this, the correct conclusion is you don’t know what you’re talking about. A singularity and the statement “classical physics break down” are not mutually exclusive. You actually said at the big bang physics breaks down, which means it’s a singularity, but then you went on to ask me how the big bang is a singularity. The mind boggles.

Then I’m called a troll for knowing what I’m talking about.

Then I quote Stephen Hawking who wrote, “At this time, the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe, would have been on top of itself. The density would have been infinite. It would have been what is called, a singularity. At a singularity, all the laws of physics would have broken down. This means that the state of the universe, after the Big Bang, will not depend on anything that may have happened before, because the deterministic laws that govern the universe will break down in the Big Bang. The universe will evolve from the Big Bang, completely independently of what it was like before. Even the amount of matter in the universe, can be different to what it was before the Big Bang, as the Law of Conservation of Matter, will break down at the Big Bang." -- Stephen Hawking

And this is exactly what I’ve been saying.

Now you want to run away. Very interesting.

By the way, just because a theory is old doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Number theory is old. The law of gravity was discovered by Newton in the 1600s. Regardless, this snippet isn’t from a book written in 1988. It’s from Stephen Hawking’s blog and it’s a lecture from 1996. By the way, at the end of the lecture he concludes with, “The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down.” Here’s the entry, by the way: http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html

By the way, he doesn't offer a retraction of his statements on his blog nor has he provided an update saying "just kidding guys."

So, yes, you don’t know what you’re talking about and yes, you should step away.

So many debate fails.  The non sequiturs, the red herrings, the appeals to authority.  Dude, at some point, you're going to have to stop copying stuff you don't understand, and put together a couple of your own ideas.  Cuz Alex knows more than you about physics-- that's an objective fact.  That you don't know this is going to make this a really unpleasant time for you. And yet you keep flailing away with your face thrust forward, like you're daring him to do it.