RE: The Principle of Contingent Causation: The Impossibility of Infinite Regress.
July 10, 2023 at 11:50 pm
(July 7, 2023 at 9:37 pm)Nishant Xavier Wrote: Physicists reason like this, as the above excerpt also shows: (1) the universe is constantly expanding, (2) extrapolating backward, said expansion could not have been indefinitely continued in the past (3) Therefore, the universe had a beginning. Planck time, etc, is irrelevant to this conclusion.
No, physicists don't because step 1 isn't shown and step 2 doesn't work.
(1) The observable universe is currently expanding and that expansion is accelerating. There is nothing constant about it. What the overwhelming majority of the universe that we can't observe is doing is something you'd need to discuss with a serious cosmologist.
(2) If you extrapolate quantum mechanics and general relativity backward in time you get absurd results. Worse, the two models produce different absurd results. That's unsurprising, because we know that these models break down at the extremes. And the beginning of the universe is about as extreme as it gets. So no, you can't just run it all in reverse and get to a beginning.
What we know is that roughly 13.8 billion years ago the universe was in an extremely high energy, high density state commonly referred to as the "Big Bang". Prior to that... Well, that might be like talking about what's North of the North Pole. If not then I guarantee you it's going to be more interesting than anything concocted by a bunch of priests with a nasty penchant for burning anybody who tried to tell them that the Earth wasn't at the center of it.
