The following is not a question: Can something come from nothing?

[Whateverist]

Mind if I try your last two points substituting "how" for "why"?

"We don't fully understand how the universe formed"
-a truthful (if somewhat obvious) statement of our current state of knowledge.

"We don't fully understand how the universe formed, yet."
-unscientific horseshit, which rebrands the scientific process as big-s Science, the institution full of wise elders who we must believe can solve our problems. Sounds a lot like church to me.

One of my pet peeves is using "why" where "how" will do.

I like the part I underlined very much by the way. There is something naive in the often assumed expectation that science will one day lay bear everything.

[Little lunch]

I'd like to ask some questions to those of you who know a lot about the Big Bang theory.
If time didn't exist before the Big Bang, does it exist beyond the boundaries of where the universe has expanded so far?
Beyond those boundaries, can another Big Bang occur?
If it could, would it have different rules and what would happen if two universes ever met?
I realise that these questions may show just how dumb I am about the subject, but I been wondering about it for a while. :-)

[bennyboy]

One of my pet peeves is using "why" where "how" will do.

You're right, and I guess you caught on that my use of "why" was deliberate, not coincidental. My reason for the word change is this: I think "how" questions imply a brute-force end that is equivalent to "shut up and stop asking."

How do I exist? Well, son, there are birds and bees, DNA, proteins, evolution, primordial soup. . . and there you go. How did the primordial soup exist? Well, son, there was a Big Bang and stars, and star deaths, and clouds of gas. . . and there you go. How did the Big Bang happen? Well, son, there's no how, because the Big Bang arose out of a condition in which even time did not exist. . .

Why do I exist? Well, son, there are birds and bees, DNA, proteins, evolution, primordial soup, dead stars, the Big Bang, and in the end, we still have no idea why any of it exists. No matter what we learn, son, there will always be another why to ask, even if we might not be able to answer it.

[Whateverist]

One of my pet peeves is using "why" where "how" will do.

You're right, and I guess you caught on that my use of "why" was deliberate, not coincidental. My reason for the word change is this: I think "how" questions imply a brute-force end that is equivalent to "shut up and stop asking."

How do I exist? Well, son, there are birds and bees, DNA, proteins, evolution, primordial soup. . . and there you go. How did the primordial soup exist? Well, son, there was a Big Bang and stars, and star deaths, and clouds of gas. . . and there you go. How did the Big Bang happen? Well, son, there's no how, because the Big Bang arose out of a condition in which even time did not exist. . .

Why do I exist? Well, son, there are birds and bees, DNA, proteins, evolution, primordial soup, dead stars, the Big Bang, and in the end, we still have no idea why any of it exists. No matter what we learn, son, there will always be another why to ask, even if we might not be able to answer it.

No, I'm missing it. If you admit you don't know whether the reason we exist at all is adequately accounted for by a how-answer, why choose to ask the why-question? It seems to me that the how question allows for the possibility that it was the intent of a cosmic genie, etc. But the why-question seems, to me at least, to carry the assumption of intent. Does this reflect your intent, or do we just have a semantic difference concerning the baggage entailed by the how-why decision?

[bennyboy]

Does this reflect your intent, or do we just have a semantic difference concerning the baggage entailed by the how-why decision?

Hmmmm.

To my mind, "why" is purely a causal question, while "how" implies determinism. So "why" allows for idealism, divine creation, etc. as well as a physical cause, but "how" seems to insist that cosmogony fit into a particular world view.

But that could indeed just be semantics-- certainly, both words can be interpreted in various ways.

[Coffee Jesus]

holy prick... I voted "Yes" as if the thread title was the question, but the question asked in the poll is different...

There should be a way to amend footnotes onto the poll, like "Poll Wrong. Most voters misunderstood."

[MindForgedManacle]

A singularity is a very strange mathematical and philosophical beast. A true Big Bang-type singularity is essentially a non-conscious deity: existent but having no beginning, not created but having all existent things arise from it etc.

How so? Deities are by definition conscious beings. They act and have values. Further, by this logic I could say reality itself is a deity.

Further, the singularity is a large part of why we know the current Big Bang model is incomplete in some way, namely that General Relativity goes out the window resulting in infinities.

If there is something intrinsic to all matter that allows for some kind of consciousness, then I'd say a singularity is dangerously close to a Deity. I don't know how you'd ever determine at what level mind is matter, or supervenes on forms of matter, or kinds of matter, or only on specific kinds of information flow, etc. This is because we only know of one form, one kind of matter, and one kind of information flow that gives consciousness-- our own.

[bennyboy]

How so? Deities are by definition conscious beings. They act and have values. Further, by this logic I could say reality itself is a deity.

The idea of God/gods serves many functions in the human psychology. One of these functions is to add meaning to things: why good people get sick and die, for example. This function requires a mind.

But the philosophy of cosmogeny is a little different-- in this case, the God is the "X factor," the magical quantity that by its very nature takes apparent paradoxes or things hard to understand, and resolves them. In short, it places an idea as a brute fact, so that the myriad details we don't understand don't have to be thought of as brute facts.

The former function requires mind-- a purposeful creator with a plan. But the latter purpose only requires a wrapping-together of infinite regression and the conciliation of finity, infinity and zero in one framework. I think the idea of a singularity serves this function at least as well as the idea of a God.
[/quote]

[LostLocke]

I'm unconvinced that's the case. You're speaking of the existential beginning of a singularity that he appears to be saying never existed at all.

I think he's saying that the singularity existed, but that the physics concept of time did not coexist with it, hence time references to it are meaningless.

LL: Who's right?

For better or worse, you are right in what I'm describing.

[ManMachine]

---

Since this crops up every week in arguments, I thought I'd make a thread.

The notion of things coming from other things is not applicable to the universe as a whole.

Before and after

When we use the words "coming from", "causing" etc., we allude to principles we have learned from experiences which we have made within our universe. With the help of physics, we can have a pretty decent understanding what lies behind these intuitions, what it means for something to cause something, for something to come from something.

It boils down to statistics: imagine you walk through the forest along a small creek, the trees are swaying gently in the wind. Imagine you have your camera with you and you film this scenery while you walk past the creek.



When you come home, you just for fun let the film roll backwards, and you notice that you can barely make out the difference: the trees are still swaying, and the water runs its shallow course. Since the slope of the river is not noticeable, there is no striking paradox. Until you reach a small waterfall.



Suddenly, it becomes all too clear that something is very wrong with this picture - the cascade runs backwards, waves from the shore coalescing on the creek to form droplets which emerge from the surface to travel upwards, losing their momentum until they integrate with a newly formed, almost unperturbed stream.

Why did the cascade so obviously violate your sense of time, while the other parts of the creek did not? The reason is entropy: the cascade is, from the physics point of view, a very irreversible process which produces lots of entropy. The creek running its course quietly produces entropy as well because of the friction the water experiences, but much less so than the cascade.

The surprising thing is this: nothing in the backwards-running movie violates the laws of physics. The only thing that is striking is how utterly unlikely the events are which we witness in it. In the same way, the laws of physics do not really dictate our everyday arrow of time, which events we interpret as future, which as past. It is merely a matter of probabilities, because increase in Entropy is exactly this: the transition from a less likely state to a more likely one.

No Time

The moral of this story is this: causation is a statistical phenomenon in a world of increasing entropy. Do not think that your intuition about what past and future mean, what causation means, can be applied to realms which are radically different.

Some want to go even further and discuss the origin of the universe, or let us say, of being itself, from nothingness.

Note what has happened: we use the words which have meanings in our everyday lives as well as in science, and try to apply them in a scenario so different that none of them retain any meaning. Two things spoil the question: if there is no universe full of particles doing their statistical dance, there is no notion of an arrow of time, even if we assume that time as a continuous parameter exists. However, if we let even go of this, if we feel compelled to talk about the creation of time itself, all meaning is lost, and the questions we utter merely resemble questions, but in reality only mimic them.

---

Ho, hum.

The question for me is how to unpick all the conflated ideas in this post. That's not a criticism, it's an observation.

The topic has wondered here and there, in and out of the Standard Model, which we know is not complete. There are varying schools of thought on this and it's fair to point out, or at least fair for Lee Smolin to point out in his frustrated rant against the individuals - who he claims prop up their pet theories by ensuring the establishments they hold authority over rally against competing theories - in his book 'The Trouble With Physics'. Well that's Theoretical Physics for ya, and it ensures the inertia of academia holds the impetuous whippersnappers of youth in their place and allows the consensual mind science to move at the speed of fog. But this is not new and it serves a purpose.

Next, how do you define 'nothing'? Are we talking a Quantum Vacuum, the popping candy-soup of fleeting quanta, or the absence of anything at all? The latter is effectively the broth of our popping candy-soup anyway.

How about time and space. We can't mention time without meaning space as well, they are one and the same thing, at least that's what Einstein tells us, and who are we to question. It is very possible (and some might even argue probable) that spacetime is an emergent property of quantum systems. There are now many theories that the spacetime geometry emerges from quantum systems, there are certainly those who claim the higher the energy of a quantum system the fewer special dimensions it has (which is why we experience light speed as a sort of Universal speed limit even though some observed phenomena defy this, spooky action at a distance springs to mind).

These theories certainly prop up some of the newer QLG Theory.

Because the complexity of the issues philosophers have left them pretty much alone. Most older philosophy use space and time as fundamental structures, it underlies many of our logical structures.

Without a doubt there is a philosophical debate to be had here, it's a fantastic idea to being to the forum, sadly it seems people have run to the structures they know best and not embraced the question.

For me the questions are, what are the implications for philosophy if;

1. The Universe and everything in it came from nothing (and will ultimately return to nothing)
2. Space and Time (and all attendant concepts such as causality) are not Universal constants but emergent properties

For me these are the questions that are imperative for philosophy, for centuries classical philosophy ran ahead of scientific philosophy, in this century scientific philosophy is leading classical philosophy by the nose. I personally think Deleuze is a great starting point for a decent philosophical debate on the matter (pun intended).

Anyone?

MM