(March 3, 2018 at 9:10 am)Hammy Wrote: It's not really quite nothing. And Lawrence has been rightly criticized for the term 'nothing' by both philosophers and other physicists.
But I guess, "A Universe From Almost Entirely Empty Space Teeming With Quantum Activity" isn't as punchy of a book title.
Well to be fair to Lawrence, scientists throughout history get misunderstood when laypeople confuse their use of the same word.
Theists constantly confuse the word "law" as needing a "law giver, law maker". In scientific language they are not talking about a super cognition writing a law like you would through congress. In scientific language "law" is a description of scientific observations that get confirmed over long periods of testing, and peer review.
Einstein is also constantly misunderstood when he used the word "God". It was not a literal super natural being, but his own idea of the natural behavior of the universe. It was metaphor.
But, even si fi fans fall for misunderstanding what real scientists say. A few years ago NASA wrote an article about the possibility of the "warp drive" as depicted in Star Trek. The part they ignored was "ON PAPER ONLY", but if they had not ignored the article, it said it was highly impractical and unlikely because of the amount of energy it would take to do.
The same mistake is made even with doctors who believe in claiming a patient "came back from the dead." Clinical death only means the staff cannot detect activity, it is possible to fly under the radar and still have just enough undetected activity to allow you a full recovery if you pull out of it. BUT, once enough of your cells break down beyond repair you DONT come back.
Lawrence is basically saying at the QM level the variables are "under the radar" as far as we can measure at this point.
I don't think it is inconsistent to say "nothing is unstable".
It is simply far more reasonable to say that, than to cling to the comic book super heros of old mythology in all the world's religions.
If one is going to claim their God came from nothing or did not have a start, then the universe itself could be explained with that as well, without the problem of infinite regress.
As I said in my prior post, infinite vs finite can both exist when it is broken up between "off" and "on". The off can be finite, the on can be finite, but the fluctuation between the two can be infinite. In any case a super cognition would not be required as a gap answer in either case.
