Slashdot Mirror
Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created from Nothing
mr_3ntropy writes "Speaking to a sold out crowd at the Berkeley Physics Oppenheimer Lecture, Hawking said yesterday that he now believes the universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing. He said more work is needed to prove this but we have time because 'Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.' There is also a Webcast available (Realplayer or Real Alternative required)."
Sounds like his speech was Much Ado About Nothing
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Hawking is such a hack.
the interesting thing about theories is that they all attempt to explain something. why there are bumfights between bible thumpers and scientists three times a day over these things has always mystified me.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
title says it all....
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
That's not how it really happened... But when they were come into the Void, Ilúvatarr said to them: 'Behold your Music!' And he showed them a vision, giving to them sight where before was only hearing; and they saw a new World made visible before them, and it was globed amid the Void, and it was sustained therein, but was not of it.
It sounds to me like someone just discovered the Burger Joint at the Beginning of the Universe.
Many thanks to Douglas Adams.
All men can fly, but sadly, only in one direction--Down.
It would add some credibility when I tell my girlfriend that the porn in my browser history came ex nihilo.
Enormous turtle farts. Then nothing. Then the Universe. Before that, I would say turtles all the way down, but there was no down. It was turtles all the way flammix, especially in the direction of Zorch. Believe me. I was there. At least, I'm sure I was, in at least one of the parallel turtles.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
In this house we obey the law of thermodynamics.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
What is eternity? You're on the checkout line at a supermarket. There are seven people in front of you. They are all old. They all have two carts and coupons for every item. They are all paying by check. None of them have ID. It's the checkout girl's first day on the job. She doesn't speak any English. Take away fifteen minutes from that, and you begin to get an idea of what eternity is.
Thank you, Emo Philips.
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
The linked article at The Daily Californian barely touches on any of the stuff mentioned in the /. summary. Do we have to listen to the webcast to get any of the good stuff?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Perceived long times (endless) are all relative. 1 second is percieved to be endless compared to a hundred-billionth of a second. So whats the point? We're saying that Eternity seems like a long time, especially as it gets to be longer? WHOA BRILLIANT!
And uh, so we suddenly "Existed" as a universe? hrrrm... Yeah, Nothing to see here, move along, move al--oh hey, lookie something to see is here now.
Brought to you by the Captcha: Morsel
Nothing is the only thing that can flow from nothing. Because it is no-thing. It is what rocks dream about.
If there was nothing there in the beginning, there would be nothing now.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Stephen Hawking, despite his celebrity status (which has more to do with his wheelchair than anything else), wasn't taken very seriously by physicists.
In short, they think his information paradox and work on black holes (his lifes work), is a bunch of crap?
You probably saw the same Discovery special about it. So whats the scoop, should I care what he says? Is he more qualified to tell me the nature of the universe than Pat Robertson is?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
WTF? When "Stephen Hawking" says the Universe just magically popped into existence from nothing, he gets applause and articles written about it. ...wait, what's that K'ri!x? The blue Saturn waxes by the white dove? Yes? Then what? Oh, then the Universe popped into existence.
When *I* say the same thing, my friends have me put in front of the county medical board and committed to this here padded cell. Luckily they cannot hear The Voices...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The article points to his overall speech to be filled with satire. It's hard to say what he was trying to get at, and is he serious? "The universe was built from nothing, but we can't prove it because that would take too long".
Is he joking or is he serious? I have a bolder conclusion:
"The universe was built from SOMETHING. Since time is seemingly infinite in both directions, I'll never be able to prove it, but I know I'm right".
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
The answer to what existed before the universe is "I don't know, but I don't want to say I don't know, so, like, nothing."
universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing.
So how long till it pops out of existence?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
He used the analogy that they were like bubbles in the water. Ok, where did the water come from?
This sounds a lot like... *drumroll* blind faith to me.
This is the same sort of blind faith that most atheists pompously deride the religious for. In fact, based on this summary, it would be called something to the effect of a "load of religious bullshit" if it came from a preacher. Oooh, theoretical physicist says it, so we'll hear him out!
Please, you're acting like a bunch of laymen waiting for the latest ruling or revelation from the priest.
*Sigh* Go ahead, mod me down because I actually pointed out the obvious.
You don't have to be an astrophysicist to have beliefs about cosmology. And we shouldn't be looking to Hawking to determine our own beliefs on anything that doesn't have to do specifically with physics (which his message increasingly strays away from). We should all evaluate the evidence for ourselves as time permits rather than worshiping whatever opinion he holds. Somebody on these forums once told me that no scientist was ever completely right (well put) and this means that we shouldn't worship any of them the way we do him. When you become obsessive over a scientist, the person becomes more important than the ideas themselves, and this can only interfere with an objective analysis of his statements.
Clearly, Hawking is taking advantage of the stage he's been given to act as more of an entertainer than a physicist. That's his right, but people should not be under any illusion that he knows the answer more than anybody else right now. There is far too much anomalous data in astrophysics today for anybody to say that they have the answer. People like him will gloss over this fact and leave a sense that we understand more of the universe than we in fact do. But the problems remain and his message is not even very new. In fact, there's really no practical reason for him to be giving these talks other than to make money for himself. People already know his theory very well. It's the basis for every single NASA press release and every single astronomy class taught in every single school in the world. Maybe what we really need is for the astrophysicists to spend more time on the problems, collaborating with the various peoples' of the domains that they work within, and less time demonstrating that they've mastered the art of public relations.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
That's right up there with that Hispanic fella that rose from the grave.
If you chose #2, it's turtles all the way down...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Okay, so universes are bubbles inside a pot of boiling water? Wouldn't that imply that there is something outside of the universe?
...Or is he just testing how far he can go before people stop the "OMG! It's Hawking! Everything he says is right." crap?
I guess you have to watch the webcast because TFA doesn't say that. If anybody wants to summarize here that would be great.
IIRC from A Brief History of Time, Hawking theorized that time, a dimension, didn't exist 'before the universe' because it doesn't make sense to ask about time any more than the other three dimensions of spacetime before TFU existed. He had some maths explanation about how the time dimension approached 0 and curved back on itself (somebody more fresh elaborate...), and I think he got the Pope to concede time after time-0 to nature.
Maybe he's proposing a new theory here, reflected in the webcast?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Maybe we could ask Paris Hilton, too.
Among celebrity experts she is most definitely the biggest authority on the science of creating something from nothing.
And there was still nothing, but at least you could see it.
Have gnu, will travel.
Duh.
"Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end."
Sure, it may feel like an eternity, but that's what it takes to get a decent table at Milliways.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
It would seem you have backed yourself into a corner here.
We are all just people.
Real scientists don't bother to argue with religious people any more than they'd bother to argue with the guy on the corner talking to a leprechaun. You can't exactly reason or argue or even discuss with people who claim that they talk to invisible, omnipotent, omnipresent beings that live in the sky.
I don't respond to AC's.
To quote Asimov,
And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
And there was light --
Wonder if he ever thought about these string theorists who say there are infinite parallel universes. Does he think there are infinite parallel universes, all popping into existence from nothing?
If the universe could pop into existence from nothing, why isn't it also possible that nothings appears from everything?
n e.html
- 5.html
http://www.dichotomistic.com/matter_infinoverse_o
http://www.geocities.com/spatlavskiy/OTHER-PAPERS
After all, it's somewhat easier to imagine that stuff can emerge from some sort of mathematical soup of inifinities and negative infinities and everythings rather than from nothing.
So if the universe formed out of absolute nothing that makes it Christian-centric? I don't get it. Short of "a big guy got some dirt and molded it into a ball and made some magic incantation and life appeared on the ball", I don't see what religion has to do with it.
If you ask a cosmologist, he/she would say that universe was created from nothing. If you ask Physicist (Quantum mechanics), he/she would say, universe is "nothing" (it is just a perception created by our consciousness). The problem here is that science equations don't work in nothing (because there are no science equations in nothing). Our equations (as they exists today) have relevance only when there is a physical reality (even if that reality is simply a perception). Also, we can't have nothing, since we are inside a physical universe (and "nothing" is outside of it), so the theory cannot be verified.
Hope this clarifies few things, or does it confuse even more?
To be fair, this cuts both ways (liberal and conservative). I frequently see comments that people assume are antagonistic and feel that the antagonism is in the ears of the, um, belistener.
As someone with a fairly good training in physics, I read this statement to be a commentary on Hawking's annoyance with the question of what came before "time" began. Many religious people have attempted to reconcile the Big Bang with Judeo-Christian beliefs by having God be responsible for the Big Bang. I think that such an allusion should not be taken as necessarily antagonistic.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
At what point do we stop looking at Hawking as some demigod genius, and realize that he has gone absolutely crackers?
This is total nonsense. See Alexander Franlkin Mayer's web site at http://www.afmayer.net/
I can't remember the exact numbers, and it is less than the general population, but a rather significant percentage of scientists believe in God. I just thought I'd throw that out there.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Although TFA doesn't actually discuss the hypothesis that "universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing" (I suppose you'd have to go to the webcast for that), Hawking's use of the phase "that he now believes" implies that this is something new, and that he's in the process of developing it.
In fact, the idea is decades old, and has been popularized in several widely read books.
I recollect Gamov's book, "My World Line", wherein he recounts a time he and Einstein were crossing the street in traffic while discussing how an energetic universe could have arisen. Gamov pointed out that since gravitational energy was negative and the energy of matter was positive, they could balance and a universe could form without a net input of energy. The idea struck Einstein so forcefully that he froze in the middle of the street while he considered it.
I don't know much about physics in general, let alone quantum physics but I seem to recall hearing or reading that neutrons and protons "pop in and out of existence". Maybe I misunderstood what I heard.
However, if that's the case what makes it such an outlandish suggestion that the universe came about in the same manner (aside from the "nothing can come from nothing" argument)? Perhaps it's easier to imagine that the microscopic particles can pop in and out of existence because they seem so small to us. Is it naive of me to think that scale has such a role in our perception of possibility?
I just read this here:
Apart from the quarks that constitute the nucleons (i.e. neutrons and protons) (these are called "valence quarks") there also exists a "sea of quarks", which continually pop into and out of existence due to quantum fluctuations.
Can someone with a background in physics explain how this is possible?
I am probably stronger than Stephen Hawking, but neither of us is strong enough to lift my house. Stephen Hawking is probably smarter than me, but neither of us is smart enough to explain how the universe popped into existence. If Hawking thinks he can explain the origin of the universe, maybe he's not so smart. If he's just guessing, well, I can just guess too.
Some years ago there was a documentary series called "The Creation of the Universe," with Timothy Ferris. They talked about this theory that the universe could have sprung into existence from out of nowhere. He said of the idea, "It sounds incredibly unlikely, but then it only ever had to happen once."
In the beginning, there was nothing, which somehow exploded.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
I don't think we will ever answer these kinds of questions, no matter how long we study them - why does anything *exist at all* - space, time, matter, energy ? Surely it makes more sense for nothing to exist, ever.
On the other hand, if nothing exists at all, then there are no laws of physics, so maybe there is nothing to prevent something from coming into existence spontaneously.
But then, if something can come into existence spontaneously, what prevents it from spontaneously not-existing ?
And what do we even mean by existence ? How do we define it ?
Hawking has certainly benefitted -- in terms of his popular appearance -- from ALS. It is quite reasonable to wonder whether his work is truly valuable. In the long term, I think that we'll see that he hasn't made any monumental contributions to astrophysics or theoretical mathematics that are comparable with Guth's idea of inflation or with the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. However, he has contributed numerous less profound ideas: black hole radiation, some singularity theorems (with Penrose), and some ideas about black hole entropy and cosmology. In Kuhn's picture of scientific progress, Hawking's work is more "puzzle solving" than it is a paradigm shift.
At the same time, Hawking's ideas have been interesting and novel during the entire length of his career. He's a brilliant man on the forefront of a fascinating subject. Even if his ideas are epoch-defining or accurate, they are always worth thinking about.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think Hawking's been stealing from the internet: http://wiki.battlemaster.org/index.php/Light_of_Fo ntan#No_Space
This something from nothing crap has always bothered me. It almost as bad as the claim that 99% of the universe was created in the first day. The rate of expansion is increasing, right, so did the universe slow down at some point?
I thought one of the tent posts of the big bang theory was that you could never look beyond it.
Anywhile, I still think we will figure out that our universe is at least two universes coming together. Taking Steve's analogy, imagine what happens when two soap bubbles combine. The can be floating along very slowly and then wham, their attraction brings them together and they merge. Imagine if they were different colors, say red and yellow. Our universe is the emerging orange part. At least I hope we are in the orange area. A single point of orange that grows very rapidly and when looked at from the inside would look like a cone.
My prediction is that eventually, everything will be orange and the rate of expansion will slow.
He obviously doesnt know that eternity is....eternity...
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I needed a new sig.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I could not determine from reading the article that Hawkings suggested the universe came from nothing. Unless there is something more obvious in the webcast, I suspect this is just a bad interpretation of what he was trying to communicate
To the philosophical issue of "nothing", I will say this. There is no such thing as nothing! Much has been said about nothing, but insofar as nothing is intended to mean "no thing", then what the hell are we even talking about? Seriously, as soon as you have given a point of reference to something that is suppposedly "nothing", then it can no longer be an instance of "nothing". Evaluate the following statement: "nothing doesn't exist." You should realize that if nothing DID exist, it would no longer be "nothing", but instead be some existent THING.
The idea of nothing is just a psychological device that humans use to blanket their psyches from the anxiety produced by the unknown and the not understood. The term "nothing" is akin to cosmological terms like "black holes", "dark matter", and "dark energy". I suggest that the real reason these things are "black" and "dark" is because the light of human awareness has yet to illuminate what is actually going on there.
So terms like "nothing" really only mean... "We intuit that something is going on, but as of yet we cannot fathom what that might be." Instead of saying "we simply don't understand what is going on at this time" we give things an almost occult identity: "it must be dark matter!". This is why, ultimately, I classify science in the same category as religion. When we cannot understand something, we posit a "mysterious force" that we "believe" must be there in order to explain the world that is around us.
The reason why the "hard problems" of science continue to be "hard problems" is because you cannot solve a problem with the same limited mind that created it. We keep asking "where did the universe come from?" because we still believe that time and existence are linear. We believe that things have a "set beginning" and a "set end". We believe all things are effects of some previous cause. We believe these things so much in the same manner that people used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe. And just like then, when someone points out that maybe that is NOT the way things actually work, they get branded a lunatic.
and we are stuck it very long repeating time loop
Mainstream Christian creationism explains the universe as being created in it's current mature state by God. That's not ex nihilo, unless you classify God as nothing.
How exactly is what Hawking says related to creationism?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I'd like to know which end is longer, Dr. Hawking?!
Let's just say I have a wager on the answer...;-)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Keep in mind that the creature in #2 could be from a Universe that actually makes sense, and did not pop out of nothing. Imagine that an Intelligence in some artificial Universe (say WoW) begins trying to make sense of its surroundings- WoW has physics entirely different from our own, has creation ex nihilo on a regular basis, has no entropy, and the laws of the Universe re-write themselves with every patch. Furthermore, WoW has only been around a finite amount of time. What would such a creature think of the world? Would it see some Divine will behind the chaos of its existance? Or would it be unable to imagine a world other than its own?
Something that created our Universe wouldn't necessarily be bound by our laws of physics, but would presumably still have its own limitations.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
...the thought of accountability after death... wahhh!
Wasn't it Einstein who said the above? I'm more and more becoming a believer of that comment. The more we discover about the micro cosmos the more we learn how little we actually know. Were it first molocules, now we have atoms, quarks, and... Some are hanging onto the string theory, others have other believes.
But personally it has always fascinated me how in most models of atoms you'll see round particles. The moment you see a picture of several molecules, taken from an electron microscope, you most often see round shapes. Even though Einstein never lived to see all these new discoveries I think that Hawking may very well be absolutely right here and is basicly continueing in the same line as Einstein.
After all; isn't it a mere fact that you can create a new substance from several others within an instance? Take, for example, the "creation" of water when you add both hydrogen and oxigen. A small bang followed with "instant" water... While the whole theory may sound awfully simplistic one has to wonder; in a lot of cases things aren't as complex as most people care to realize.
Wow-- really cool find.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The rotten bastard!
I assume Christians think everything is an act of God, home insurers take note.
Bravo!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
One of the reasons that there is even anything being discussed here is that Genesis very strongly resembles current cosmological theory and mindset. If "religious writings", which in this case are inferred the Book of Genesis of the Judeo-Christian Bible, bore absolutely no resemblance to scientific evidence, then this post would not have been made. Or necessary.
But it does!
The problem is that an 3000+ year-old book which could be subtitled "A WAY WAY Briefer History of Time" still looks like Hawkings theories is what keeps this reparteé alive, feeds the faith of the "religious scientists" and irritates the crap out of the "non-religious scientists".
Because when it gets down to the highly theoretical stuff like this that no one will ever truly be able to prove, its not much different than religion.
You would be right, if and only if Hawking was talking about things that couldn't ever be proven one way or another. At that point, he wouldn't be doing any sort of physics anymore, he'd be somewhere off in that grey area where it borders philosophy and religion. (I call this area "Wankersville", but that's just me.)
However, there's a difference between something that cannot ever be proved, full stop, and something that can't be proved or disproved right now, due to the limitations of our understanding and our equipment.
There was a time, as recently as a hundred years ago, when debates about whether light was a particle or a wave would have seemed like wanking. However, they were not -- because we now have an (well, at least a partial) answer to that question, it's just that the theoreticians exceeded the reach of the experimentalists for a few centuries. Debates such as those, which get answered eventually by experimental evidence, are wholly different from debates which can never be settled (and, IMO, are a pointless waste of time that humanity should just move the hell along from).
It's pretty clear that Hawking realizes that what he's postulating can't be proven or disproven right now, but he's not putting it out there as an article of faith, either; he's saying that at some point in the future, between now and the heat death of the Universe, we'll probably be able to test it experimentally. That's a lot different than religion.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
in other words, Hawking was making a joke. it's a shame it was lost on you, though.
The title of the original post should be "Hawking abandons causality"
You know, you come from nothing - you're going back to nothing.
What have you lost? Nothing!
Always look on the right side of life...
Do you want to have atheism tainted by what atheist Communist regimes did to religious believers? How about the Christians who were massacred by Communist regimes because their views were called "counter-revolutionary?" And before we forget, how about that French Revolution where secularists did unto the Roman Catholic faithful as they believed had been done unto them, except it was done in fa, far worse numbers?
Get over yourself. You don't live in a theocracy or a country that is becoming theocratic. If you actually think that, then it shows you don't know a bloody thing about the Bible. The only "theocracy" in Judao-Christian history was pre-kings Israel, the only time where religion directly ruled the population. Ever since then, there were spheres of authority that caused the religious bodies and state to interact, often reinforcing one another. That, however, is not "rule by God," but rather rule by religion and a state.
If you want to argue that America is becoming a religion-inspired Fascist state, we could toss back a beer in agreement. An actual theocracy, well, I leave it to you to read the Mosaic Law and tell me that our legal system and government looks anywhere near what is spelled out in the Torah.
I thought the numbers I saw were higher, but that might be the difference between US and world scientists. Anyways, assuming your number is right, 20-25% is still a significant percentage. That's all I'm saying. You can be a "real" scientist and religious.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now that the brightest of the brightest agree that everything was created from NOTHING (the first one from a scientific community), its time for everyone one of us to claim which God created the first. Let the war begin.......
Well, if you believe in an omnipotent God, then it follows that God could have created EVERYTHING just 15 minutes ago; including your memories, the internet, this website, ad infinitum. No human can prove otherwise. Sure, Descarte could prove his existence, but could he prove that he had existed at breakfast that morning? Not likely.
But, you do have to make some axioms before you can make any theorems. At some level, we all have things we believe in. Whether or not those faiths are "blind" is a matter of argument. Feel free to disagree, but I most likely won't respond as I've got a shockingly large number of replies to respond to for what I thought was a fairly benign statement. Additionally, I've had this argument enough to have a pretty good idea where it's going... ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Are we sure it's not just a hideously complex genetic programming simulation? Maybe he's just looking back to before the start of the run...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
...at least not on the surface. I didn't see the webcast either, but it only makes sense that the beginning of time and the beginning of the universe coincide, especially if there is no time prior to the beginning of the universe.
To top off the cupcake with a speculative cherry, the stuff in spacetime is probably what causes the spacetime phenomenon, rather than just using the phenomenon as a void in which to exist.
couldnt they just give you the text and let windows text to speech engine say it? It would almost be like if you were there!
MISSING - Sig file. 2 years old black and white and very funny. If found please email me.
True to Type, I've not heard the fine lecture, but would assume that Hawking is saying that mathematics and logic may be used to show coherently that there need not have been a First Cause. I doubt he's talking about any kind of religious creation.
Sounds pretty monumental to me:
"Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created"
Something I suggest to Christians to try to fathom their beliefs is that perhaps God exists outside of time and space and that God could have created the universe with an infinitely deep past; ie there is no reason for a Christian to believe that the universe is any specific age or that 'creation' happened at a specific time.
Some Christians readily soak this up while others just stare blankly before quoting some irrelevent bible verse. Its a useful calibration.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I fear the coming of the Great White Handkerchief !!!!
"Causality is an aspect of the universe" therefore: "The universe itself (or whatever caused it, ad infiniwhatever) requires no cause"
;)
gee, that was tough. And only figured out several thousand years ago...
Interestingly: even if causality exists within our universe, it does not exist in any universe which does not exist. Draw your own conclusion, so long as it's the same as mine.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
That was one of my early experiences in physics. I later diverged from that viewpoint, but I don't think it was a stupid viewpoint to hold.
Which doesn't disagree with my original statement. I'm referring to the kinds of thoughts you mention in the first paragraph. I've struggled with my faith a lot. I did not arrive at my current agnosticism lightly. (To stifle further argument on a semantic issue: when I say "agnosticism" it means not believing in God. Call it atheism if you like. I really don't care. Much.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
We can observe "something". That "something" being the universe around us.
So the three options about the known "something" is that it either came from "something", or came from "nothing", or that the "something" was both "always" and "never".
Hawking postulate simply rules out that "something" came from "something else", because ultimately if "something" came from "something else", then you never answered the original question, because you are now trapped in a loop asking what the original "something else" came from. Which whittles the issue down to two options: "Something" came from "nothing" or "something" was "always".
It's easier to rule out that something was always given that E=MC^2 and C^2 is actually just another way of representing the other two dimensions, time and space (C is the minimum plank space and minimum plank time reference frame). If those measurements are observed and other physics tells us that time, and energy has constraints, as well as time being finite on the "something" end, then I would agree with the logic that it is unlikely that "something" was "always".
Which leaves the last option of that "something" came from "nothing".
Although you can belong to "organized" religion and be religious, I feel it is the exception rather than the rule. When I say "religious", I'm referring primarily to your type of religion.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
It seems to me that accepting anything on blind faith is pretty much a defining character of humanity.
A person may be a scientist, but they are a human first. And the human need for theological security (after life, intangible reward/punishment system, moral guidance, etc...) means that some things will be explained in a matter of religion until such a time that science can prove it.
On a side note, I have never held that Science and Religion directly rule each other out. Just because you believe in a God(s) doesn't mean that your deity of choice did not create the laws of physics that us mere humans strive to unravel. Me personally, I'm an agnostic. I look for logic explanations of the behavior of things I experience in life. Science did not create those experiences, it just describes them.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Your support for his argument uses faith in human progress to say that we will be able to prove it.
the universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing
This made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad idea.--Douglas Adams
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
There's nothing new about this. People have been saying for thousands of years that the universe was created ex nihilo. Hawking is just a little late jumping on the bandwagon ;-)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
So in theory then, at any given moment, an entire universe can erupt into existence? Is the void between the electron orbits of the oxygen atoms in front of me capable of producing this Big Bang? damn, as if global warming warmongering wasn't enough stress...
Speakers should try to use their speech carefully to get across the point they're trying to get across. If what they say can be taken the wrong way, then they should change what they're saying in order to convey their message correctly. That's not censorship or "political correctness", it's just good speaking and/or good manners.
Listeners should try to give speakers the benefit of the doubt and not try to force their prejudices onto the speaker. Try to find the nugget of value in what is being said. That's what I would call good listening skills.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
His idea [no not a theory] came from nothing and is full of nothing!
-x3lite
Ve are nihilists, Lebowski!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Is Hawking a deist?
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Now that you mention it, that does ring a bell. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it was a Roman Catholic Priest Georges Lemaître. I do not believe he was a Creationist, however. Unless you're using that term very loosely.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I believe Asimov made this same prediction (? do we call a guess at what happened in the past a "prediction"?) in his book Atom. Or perhaps in another book; anyway, I'm sure Asimov said this a long time ago. He said he though it had to do with random fluctuations in ratio of matter to antimatter in a particular space (or something like that. I'm not much of a physicist).
Houston, we have a problem. When science produces something out of absolutely nothing it ceases to be a science and becomes a religion.
JAM
P.S. I've read somwhere that Einstein equations define time and space in relationship to matter and time cannot exist without it. Isn't then the eternity becomes just a 15 billion years or so ?
but "why does the universe exist" isn't really a question that can be answered with scientific i.e. empirical methods.
All of our information about the big bang indicates that all of the matter and energy in the universe is moving away from a central point, and thus we can infer that in the past all of that matter was compacted at that point.
These simple observations don't do anything to answer how that matter got there in the first place. That Hawking statement that the universe came from nothing, is just to say that the simplest explanation about something we have no information on whatsoever, (like the universe before the big bang) is to say that it doesn't exist. There's no actual information whatsoever to back up Hawking's claim, but there's no *emperical evidence* to contradict it, and it's very simple, so some are apt to take it seriously.
However, there *do* seem to be some *logical* contraditions in the idea that the universe came from nothing, or at the very least there are some very difficult questions that must be answered before you can just say "the universe came from nothing." If the universe just happened, it implies that something causally weird is going on i.e. that the universe is self caused or somehow uncaused. Self causation, or necessitation is the sort of thing that was historically attributed to god by Descartes and others, although some philosophers, like Spinoza, who thought that the universe *was* god necessarily attributed it to the universe as well.
However, the statement "came from nothing" seems to imply uncaused, which is a more difficult thing to grasp, because a self caused thing exists necessarily from it's own essense, but a thing with no cause has a very uncertain existence. Frankly, I'm a little iffy on what "uncaused" even means. It seems to indicate something that isn't causally, or logically necessary, but is somehow possible and manages to obtain. If that's the case, it seems to suggest there *is* no determining factor that made that possible event obtain, which is a hard thing to understand and accept.
To me it almost makes sense to suggest if that all possible universe might necessarily exist (in a loose sense of the word exist) somehow. The only reason that I can think of for this, is if the Spinozan notion that limitations such as nonexistence imply the existence of something else to constrain them, and that existence of all things is sort of the "default." However, even that seems like an unnecessary sort of thing to be true about the universe.
Something I suggest to Christians to try to fathom their beliefs is that perhaps God exists outside of time and space and that God could have created the universe with an infinitely deep past; ie there is no reason for a Christian to believe that the universe is any specific age or that 'creation' happened at a specific time.
Some Christians readily soak this up while others just stare blankly before quoting some irrelevent bible verse. Its a useful calibration.
The difference is that there are Christians who are not textual Biblicists; the folks who get all wound up about dinosaur fossils and the Big Bang, and about science in general, are only those who draw their entire belief system from the words written in (usually a particular translation of) the Bible. Since the Bible is not even internally consistent, this leads to a lot of problems in their philosophy, as well as certain ridiculous assertions about the age of the world, etc.
Christians who take a less literal approach, which includes most of the modern major Christian sects, don't run into as many problems with science impinging on their faith, because they're not tied quite so tightly to one single tome. Catholics have literally tons of philosophy, written by various saints, popes, &c., to fall back on when the Bible seems to contradict either itself, or reality as determined empirically: they don't have to muddle it out themselves.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
0 = 1 + -1
0 = 2 + -2
0 = x + -x
etc...
Within nothing lies the possibility for everything.
I came up with that on an acid trip 20 years ago. Surely someone has applied a real scientific approach to this? Brownie points to anyone who can point me to it...
If the universe popped into existence, could it pop out of existence too?
Could you give me the algorithm by which I can determine whether the thing is possibly solvable?
Someone else responded with the exact opposite observation. I.e., the "hard" sciences tend to be less religious than biology. Not exactly relevant to the current discussion, but IIRC, he/she is right. (Never heard any numbers for metalurgy, however.)
No doubt true in some cases. Maybe many or even most. Speculation, of course. However, there are those who have thought hard about it and genuinely believe in God in some form or another. You can be a "real" scientist and religious.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
'Do you know what eternity is? Do you know what eternity is? I mean, do you know what eternity is? There's this mountain, see, a mile high at the edge of the universe and there's this little bird-'
'What little bird?' said Aziraphale suspiciously.
'This little bird I'm talking about! Anyway, every thousand years this bird-'
'The same bird every thousand years?'
'Yeah.'
'Bloody ancient bird then.'
'Anyway, every thousand years this bird flies-'
'-limps-'
'Flies to the mountain and-'
'Hold on, it can't fly to the end of the universe. Between here and there's loads of' the angel waved a hand expansively if a little unsteadily 'loads of buggerall, dear boy.'
'But it gets there anyway.'
'How?'
'It doesn't matter how.'
'It could use a space ship.'
'If you like.'
'But if it is the end of the universe we're talking about it would have to be one of those trips where your descendants are the ones who get out at the other end. You've got to tell them, you've got to say, when you get to the mountain you've got to...what have they got to do?'
'Sharpen its beak. And then it flies back-'
'-in the space ship-'
'and in a thousand years goes and does it all over again.'
'Seems a lot of trouble just to sharpen a beak.'
'But when the bird has worn the mountain down to nothing then,' Aziraphale opened his mouth. Crowley just knew he was going to make some comment on the relative hardness of birds beaks and granite mountains. 'then you still won't have finished watching The Sound of Music!'
Aziraphale froze.
'And you'll enjoy it. You really will.'
'Hold on-'
'You won't have a choice.'
'Wait-'
'Heaven has no taste.'
'My dear boy-'
'And not a single sushi restaurant.'
-from Good Omens
Your assumption that since it is out of science's scope it doesn't exist is no doubt based on your materialistic world view.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
Remember when we thought there was only one continent, one planet (and a flat one), one sun, one galaxy? Now we have the concept of multiple (even infinite) universes! I wonder who will discover the first external universe.
We should adopt a naming convention for new universes.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Or is it just speculation?
Is there an experiment we could perform that would prove or disprove this hypothesis? Is there a mathematical model that makes this plausible?
Hawking has a lot of profound ideas, but I'm not convinced by any of it.
Next they'll be telling us that we humans evolved from monkeys!
for sale
I'm a self-modifying sig virus
yeah.. i got karma to burn.. but this was also the very first thing that came to mind when i read the article and synopsis.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
A more succinct defense than I would probably have been able to come up with myself. Thank you.
I think what's causing confusion is that there are some questions which are absolutely not empirically testable, by definition, regardless of what scientific equipment you might ever be able to point at the task. The question of whether there is a God is one of these. There's just no way to do it; there's no test you can perform which would invalidate God, because you can always back God up slightly and find a place for Him.
There are other questions, the great majority of questions, which may be or even probably are empirically testable, somehow, we just can't perform (or even conceive of) the test methodology right now. "What happened before the big bang" is one of these. I've no idea how you would actually test it, but there's no particular reason why you couldn't in the same way that the God-question is by definition untestable. It's just really, really hard, and would probably require some sort of fundamental redefinition of how we conceive the universe(s). But not absolutely impossible from the get-go.
To separate questions into these categories doesn't require any faith in human capabilities at all. I'm not arguing that we will ever perform any of these tests -- we could all be wiped out by an asteroid, superflu, or nuclear war, and that would be the end of us (in fact, I suspect that it's probably more likely that we'll be extinct as a species before we have the capability of answering such fundamental questions) -- but that wouldn't invalidate the fact that there are some questions which cannot be tested, ever, by anyone.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There is a very notable exception which also makes me wonder if the entire assertion is based on a false premise. Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project, is a professing Christian and involved in a field that most would not expect a Christian to be involved in yet alone leading. I highly recommend reading the linked article if you want to see how a Christian views the scientific world. I wonder, sometimes, if the reason why we don't "see" a lot of Christian scientists these days is due to the prejudice of the current scientific establishment.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
I was thinking of the 40% number, although I do also remember that the number in the NAS was significantly lower. Still 7% is 7%, and 3.3% is 3.3%. They do exist, even in the highest echelons. Again, that's all I'm saying.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Nothing contains everything. It is a complete lack of definition and boundaries. That is a definition, and therefore does not apply to nothing. Therefore, lacking all definitions and boundaries, it must also contains all possible definitions and boundaries.
You aren't familiar with nothing, you are familiar with the lack of something, which is very, very different. Nothing doesn't lack anything, nor does it have anything.
As soon as you say anything about nothing, that is false, because you have defined it and by extension its opposite, and now it is something, not nothing.
You are stuck in dualistic, subject/object thinking. You can never understand the true void while you still think that you are you, separate from the Universe around you. You are not a little man inside your head, listening through your ears and seeing through your eyes. The sense of self is another sense, like smell or thought. Like the sound track printed on a film strip, your sense of self is just another track in the recording.
You aren't what you think you are, and this certainly isn't what you think it is.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You don't seem to have understood my post, so I'll try to explain what I mean a little more carefully.
You claim hypocrisy on the part of atheists for not accepting religious beliefs but accepting Hawking's unsupported word. But Hawking coming up with some wild-sounding speculation is not the same as a religious figure preaching centuries-old articles of faith.
First, consider a hypothetical Church of Science (or whatever) where Hawking is a priest. How could Hawking come up with his far-out models of universal origins without deviating from the accepted doctrine of his church? I claim that he couldn't, and that he would become a heretic. Hawking is taking a position against the establishment, whereas the normal role of priests is to be in support of the establishment. When atheists criticize the church, they often refer to its authoritarian nature which, in the extreme, is manifested by theocracy. It just wouldn't make sense to weigh the same criticism against Hawking, who would be the first victim of such a system.
Second, compare Hawking's message to those that are most despised by atheists. He's just telling a crowd of people (his fans) about some of his latest thoughts. He's not trying to "preach" in any sense of the word. He has no political or social agenda. He's not even asking that anyone accept his words on faith alone. It's not as if people are going to insist that textbooks be rewritten as a result of this. There's really nothing to get upset about. Contrast that with the agenda-driven religious right.
I hope I've clarified my position. I didn't claim that the US is a theocracy. In fact, I intended to claim the opposite. I also didn't claim that religion has a monopoly on oppression and cruelty, just as (I presume) you're not claiming that Hawking supports religious intolerance.
"So again, it seems to me that claiming to be a scientist when you believe something unprovable is, if not hypocritical, at least inconsistent."
Then they'd be robots, correct?
No emotion, no love, no hate. Therefore no one is a scientist.
Scientist: "My wife loves me and I love her."
You: "Really, prove it empirically. You're no scientist."
Here's another example: Prove you exist, that your reality is more than just a mental delusion on your part.
I've seen you post this crap before. Take a hint from your moniker and go have another drink. Maybe it'll kill that one last useful brain cell of yours and help us all out.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
How about all his half-assed black hole theorems?
He should pop into nothingness and give us all a break already.
quote: "If one believed that the universe had a beginning, the obvious question was, what happened before the beginning," Hawking said. "What was God doing before He made the world? Was He preparing hell for people who asked such questions?"
...
my god, what the hell ist wrong with this statement? jeeeeesus, those believers
Insha'Allah, my friend. and Mazal Tov, for good measure.
That is the theory of relativity in action.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
GEORGE: Come on, how hard is that? Look at all the junk science these days. You want an idea? Here's an idea. A higher being, of incomprehensible power created it.
Hawking: Scientists don't like the idea of higher beings.
GEORGE: But it is a being of incomprehensible power.
HAWKING: That is not for everybody.
GEORGE: I know, but it's incomprehensible
HAWKING: That would make me look like such a schmuck.
GEORGE: All right, forget that idea, it's not for you....Okay, okay, I got it. How about the Universe is created from nothing? Every scientist tries to make it about something, how about making this about nothing?
HAWKING: Yeah and...?
GEORGE: And people say hey it's about nothing, they look at their meaningless lives, and sort of just agree.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Quantum theory already predicts instant creation of matter for a very small amount of time from nothing. Universe simply got create as a quantum fluctuation where time before "universe" didn't exists, so the normally very small amount of time that matter can be created could then be infinite since time means nothing before universe. And then, quantum theory stills apply inside the newly created universe.
God (if...) didn't create universe : he create rules.
Remember The Star Diaries? In the polish editions (might be in the London-published "second part", Memoirs of a Space Traveller (which is basically the rest of the stories from the original, polish Diaries), too), in the Eighteenth Journey of Ijon Tichy, the author clearly suggests what Hawking stated - that the whole universe is an "unnatural phenomena", which jumped right out of the laws of physics. In the story, this was discovered by a scientist named Solon Razglaz (a Latin-Polish bastardisation of Einstein's surname), a famous mathematician who recently changed his field of interest into astrophysics (!). After that, Ijon Tichy works with him to solve this problem, and they come up with a concept of some "special" electrons (sorry, physics-fans, I'm not that good at translating physical names into english ;) ) travelling backwards through time (which isn't an entirely fictional concept, although there is no proof). Then they make a "cannon" (which is really just a particle accelerator, just a very big one) and fire a single electron backwards to the beginning of time, where it collapses and creates our universe. And that story was written over twenty years earlier. Talk about coincidence, huh?
Just because he is so smart doesn't mean he should get away with shit like this. Its like seeing a press release on candidate X or reading about company X's response to their recent product failure. He now has the position that will let him answer something with nothing and people will actually swallow it.
You've just been spending too much time at Digg, that's all.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Further worrying is Hawking's statement that "forever is a long time". We do not have "forever"; time is but a property, linked to gravity and space, and the universe moves towards entropy. The end of gravity, the end of mass, the end of space, and thus, the end of time, perhaps all reducing itself to a singularity from where it all began, starting the cycle again. Or not. Who knows. The universe is not infinite though, and thus, neither is time.
At some point we just can't know, and this will always be an issue of theory and metaphysics. Still, the idea that the universe arose without a cause is just mind-bogglingly illogical. I can't tell you what that cause was, but if the article is accurate, I have to disagree with Hawking here.
One possibility is that the universe has always existed in some form, and the "big bang" is just the expansion outward after entropy eventually leads to the cessation of all matter, leaving all the energy contained at a single point in space. Another is that it was born from a black hole or some sort of wormhole from another universe (leaving the question of how that one was formed unresolved). Of course, there's the God theory too, with some interpretations seeing God as a humanoid creator, and others, as the totality of existence and then something more, making the very nature of reality itself part of God. (Sufism, Hinduism, Kabbalism, among others). This creates the odd logic trap of making God beyond causality. Which really isn't any more illogical than Hawking's position when you think about it.
We went home. Now I wish we had bought some while it was on sale.
About the universe waking up from nothingness, and creating itself. This means we could have skipped 2,000 years of religious wars, standardized on Hinduism, made it Open Source and still had the New Age movement with its interesting drugs.
technical writing / development
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
For any of your arguments to work:
a) knowledge itself must be finite.
b) everything can be totally explained.
c) the scientific method can advance to achieve a) and b)
d) you must prove a), b) and c) in and of themselves. Proving a) and b) and c) requires methods outside of the set which it contains. (i.e. you have to prove these meta statements on knowledge).
What empirical evidence do you have to show for any of this, or is it just a _belief_ of yours?
- Meher Baba, Discourses (first published in the late 1930's)
http://www.meherbaba.com/
And if the history of the universe was compressed into 24 hours, that would have been only a couple of milliseconds ago! Now that's recent!
To test whether something can come from nothing, we must have _nothing_ (not just vacuum), thus negating ourselves, thus negating the experiment. It is equally impossible to disprove the "something from nothing" postulate.
We're starting to veer off into areas that are going to quickly resemble a bad Michael Crichton novel, but the question wasn't "can something come from nothing," but "where did the universe [by which we mean, this one, that we're in now] come from," which aren't the same.
The reason the latter isn't prima facie impossible is that (perhaps) you could at some point find multiple universes, and observe or otherwise gain intelligence about the birth of our universe from another one. That may well be impossible under any conception of the universe or multiverse as we currently understand it, but the photo-electric effect would probably have seemed pretty impossible to Isaac Newton, too. Having to turn everything we know about how everything works completely upside-down is a tractable requirement and problem; empirically determining whether God exists is not.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Divide by zero
-FL
You're right, it's a bit of a tautology, isn't it.
:)
Although when I first read Andromeda Strain, I thought it was good. But I was young, and foolish.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
May he be touched by His noodly appendage. Ramen.
Actually, it reads like TFSummary was much ado about something wrong. I went to a lot of trouble and such and RTFA'ed, but I don't see anything from the summary in the article.
I see a mention of "inflation," and a poke at the God Team, but I don't see any mention of "nothing." (If somebody has a transcript, I might be bothered to look for the promised proclamation, but I certainly couldn't find it in the article.) Mr. Hawking has apparently just pretended to have an understanding of the un-understandable problem that sits at the beginning of anyone's understanding of everything: something exists, where nothing used to.
Sure, the idea of an abrupt Creation, or "Design," of the universe lets us joke about what God was doing before he got around to Creation, but the metaphor of water (or, let's suppose, some kind of cosmic stew) boiling into steam/universes leaves us with the same problem that we had in the first place: where in the [space larger than a universe] did the water/stew come from?
As I read it, the exact same problem has been reached again - and Religion and Science both require a leap of perfect faith over the gap that is The Beginning of It All.
The universe is, pretty much by definition, 'that which exists'. If it wasn't created from nothing, but from something, that something would comprise part of the universe at an earlier time. Meaning that there was no creation in this instance, just a change of state.
So what else could the universe be created from, but nothing?
I strongly agree with your statement. Many of my classmates don't like to speak with me, or even "look down" on me for my un-Christian views. In addition, I've had multiple girls refuse to date me simply because I'm not Christian. Although one could argue that the girls are using that as an excuse to just not date me, I'm talking about the cases when I've become very close to the girl, and the next logical step would be to date.
Whatever the case may be, I certainly have heard people at least claim that they don't want to spend time/go out/talk with me because I'm not Christian. People think it's wrong to discriminate based on race, but when discrimination occurs based on religion (on a small scale, I'm not talking about the holocaust), it's suddenly justified because that's part of the religious doctrine?
I used to be Christian, and at my church, we were told as kids to only have close friends with people within the church. Having friends with anyone else would supposedly cause us to turn away from the "truth" and fall into temptation.
A few people beat him to it
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
that made sense. Is the basketball court I'm in infinite? I throw a dart, and the dart hits the wall. There is "something" there, and therefore that's not the edge of the court, ergo my court is infinite. If there was a big wall at some point that nothing could get around, that would seem to be the end of the universe, at the very least in any way that is at all relevant to us (By definition). So I think those greeks need to go back to the drawing board.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
What created the Nothing that created the universe?
And since you just defined Nothing as the starting point of the universe, you just defined nothing!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
If that's not the case, then atheists and Christian's both believe God is nothing. That's quite a bit more common ground then either side seems to be aware of.
But if God is nothing...
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
In case you want some practice thinking about this, here are some games that might help. ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Or, you might just mean that men are capable of science, too. What if I had said "Many 'real' scientists are women"? Would you infer that I was implying that women are better suited to science than men?
Why?
Not even close. Read what else I've written if you want to infer what I was implying. My statement is no different than the statement that "Many 'real' scientists are women". I.e., being a woman or being religious does not preclude you from being a scientist. There's a difference between arguing from correlation and arguing from existence. If you say there are no three-legged dogs, then all I have to do is show you one three-legged dog to prove you wrong. I am in no way implying that most dogs have three legs, or that three-legged dogs are superior. Got it?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I thought you were going to make me have to go all Google or something!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
At a small enough scale, it seems that they do. Virtual particles that are constantly arising without cause and disappearing are fundamental to quantum mechanics. So if universes can start small and "inflate," it could be happening all the time. Unless they interact with this universe, we wouldn't see them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Many are assuming that Hawking is proposing that the universe came into existance from complete nothingness. This isn't what he was saying at all:
From the article:All this is is a simple analogy to represent the way in which the universe came into existance, it says nothing about what caused it to do so. In fact, even in his analogy, the bubbles are caused by extreme heat through a medium in a transitional state. This most definitely is "something".
In a discussion with one of the more thoughtful news anchors at my work, I was caught making the following statement, "everything must have an origin", but in actuality, we have no proof of that. Traditionally, when we talk of creation, we are really refering to a transformation of something into something else. We've never actually seen creation, in the purist sense of the word, so we have no way of proving that anything ever was created.
I have come to believe that there never has been nothing. Some form of SOMETHING (be it matter, energy, time, or what-have-you, since we're talking multi-dimensional proporties outside of our existing concept of reality) has always existed. Time could very well simply be a property unique to our universe, so "eternity" may have no real meaning whatsoever. But in any case, something has always existed in some form or another. It is impossible to come to any conclusion otherwise. Even if you take into account that physics, reality, space, and time, as we know it, may very-well only exist inside our universe, there must be some form of physical properties, be they very different, outside our universe, and changes in those properties were the cause of our universe.
Simply because one is busy concentrating on the creation of a bubble in boiling water doesn't mean that you can completely disregard the existance of the boiling water, or the energy coming off the stove, as part of what went into creating the bubble.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Hey, RPGs are useful frameworks to describe all sorts of behavior, since they are simplified frameworks for a world. MMORPGs are particularly interesting because you can study all sorts of emergent behavior, especially forms of economic and social interaction.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
is that the universe continually goes between existence and non-existence.
;)
its stuck in a crash/reboot-loop. its just that it takes so LONG to reboot, we don't notice it during our lifetimes.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I do not think they are at all synonymous. I can see why you inferred that, but it was not at all implied. That was a non-sequitor on my part.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
From TFA: "It expanded in a million trillion trillionths of a second."
As in, a million seconds?
you'll find that out soon enough.
If you look at the context, it is clear that this was a "popular talk" NOT intended for fellow Physicsists/cosmologists but for the "General Public". In any such talk you are always going to get more than your fair share of super-simplified statements. If people with a higher than average understanding of the issues start to dissect such statements then they are always going to find something to bicker about. It is not important for the statement to be completely accurate or even mostly accurate. It is intended to convey "a sense" of the theory (or hypothesis depending on your taste). That much it does very well.
Good, that's why I shouldn't have to pay any taxes!
Table-ized A.I.
This guy just needs to give it up. I deserve to be modded down for saying that but I just find him harder and harder to take serious lately.
... or roller, as the case may be.
+0 Meh
I for one welcome nothing from nowhere.
Table-ized A.I.
The Bible contains statements that we know to be false because they contradict each other. For instance, compare the first chapter of Matthew with the second chapter of Luke, both of which have the genealogy of Jesus. How come there are missing generations mentioned in one of them but not on the other? A man can have several sons, but not several fathers. Therefore, at least one of the gospels, either Matthew or Luke, or both, is proved by the Bible itself to contain false statements.
I certainly think it is possible that we can create something from nothing. Much like black holes take matter and warp it to the extent that it disappears, ie something into nothing. Or dark matter that we can't explain, which we are now coming to understand within our own universe. Surely then it's conceivable that matter can appear from nothing? And from there, slowly over time through the universe expanding and collapsing, it has reformed over time to how we see it now?
I am an agnostic and by no means a religous person. However I believe that statement to be wrong.
The Bible contains all sorts of statements that we currently believe to be false.
There is a huge difference. Religion, modern science, whatever are all believe systems. They have axioms which we must believe, then build up structures on those. Every now and thenscience encounters something that does not fit (eg relativity) and we need to adjust our axioms and belief systems and update science.
There are also scientific heretics. They don't, typically, get physically burnt any more. They just get ridiculed by others, don't get published or get fired from their academic positions.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Nothing is actually something, because in order to think about nothing, it has to be something, and the thought of nothing contains the energy of it.
So I don't think it makes sense, for a scientist as smart as Hawking, to come up with a foolish theory that you can get something from nothing, if thats the case he should also be able to give us unlimited energy from nothing. The everything from nothing also means anything from nothing, everything is energy, so energy from nothing is what he'd have to prove to make his case.
I don't think he can prove that energy can pop in, so his theory to me in bullshit until he can pop in unlimited energy proving it.
I do not understand what you are saying. Maybe it is because english is not my native language, or for some other reason(s). (Right in their own right)
But probably it doesn't matter much to me.
First there was nothing. But nothing was pregnant. But nothing didn't know it because it was nothing. Later on that day, nothing gave birth to a chicken. But nothing died in childbirth, leaving only the chicken.
But the chicken had some deep seated knowledge that it had come from somewhere. Later on, the chicken laid an egg. The egg, with some careful tending, hatched into a little chicken. Looking at the egg and the little chicken, the first chicken thought "I must have come from an egg, just like this little chicken". But going back to where she was was born, the first chicken could find no sign of an egg. In fact, she found nothing.
So the first chicken was puzzled. If there was no egg, where did she come from? Well, being a practical chicken mom, she thought, "Well, before I had my egg, there was nothing. So I must have come from nothing, too." The universe explained, the practical chicken mom went on to have many more eggs and many more chickens. Her days went happily by, filled with the pleasant clucking of her large family. And thus she came to realize -- with her beautiful mind at peace, in an orderly universe, life was good.
The universe exists when it became self aware, before that it did not exist, and if it loses self awareness it dies.
So far, there is no such thing as "random", or "nothing", so these terms make no scientific sense and should never be used in a scientific debate about creation, or anything else really. Either everything in the universe came from something else, or the universe came into existence from observation, There is absolutely no evidence that anything can pop in or out of existence, I've never seen that into a lab, and unless he's talking about some quantum particle doing the time travel or being in two places at once, I'm not exactly sure what experiments he has done to prove it.
So his theory so far, even if he tries to back it up with math, would never really be able to prove that randomness can exist. What it can prove is the universe started out as perhaps less ordered, but order comes from observation, the more observers, the greater the order, and this is even shown on the quantum level.So yeah, I welcome Mr. Hawkings diversity of thought on this issue, because many people who don't want to believe a God created the universe, and who want to maintain an essential strict materialist view, may appreciate his ideas.
However, if you believe in God, or you don't believe anything is ever random, then there must always be an observer and a controller to bring order.
I read his article, it's heavy on theory and speculation, it's mostly philosophy and theory. If you want an alternative you can look for what the beep do we know on Google Video and you'll get more opinions on what the universe is. Some believe the universe exists only due to observers observing matter into existence, and some think the universe exists because of strings, and some thing the universe exist only because of matter.
I think there was a time where there was no matter, but this does not prove there were no observers, because the observers could have come from another dimension, or another universe, or even from the quantum, which is not exactly solid, but which does exist.
Without the proofs presented in the discussion then maybe I can get away with writing this:
There probably wasn't nothing to begin with since "nothing" implies that you can put "something" into it by our everyday experience. That's a lot of functionality to begin with for free. Instead assume it starts from a void which can't hold any information.
Rules (i.e. X interacts with Y by doing A when C occurs) for a computer are data that tells the system which actions it should take. It is no coincidence that data (information) is required since every explicitly chosen action requires an informational constraint to pick it over every other possible action. Without this constraint any one of the possible rules may be selected according to whatever probable bias exists in that context. So information is saved (not required) if the system doesn't have to choose a specific rule.
The structure of the system determines what rules it can enact at this higher level (as opposed to actions at a particle level...). Structural form is also a particular selection over all possible structural forms and thus requires an informational constraint to specify. If structural form is unspecified then the amount of information required to represent the various configurations is saved.
Existence of a represented object is specification and simulation of its state and behaviors, where choosing to represent it or not takes information in terms of selecting the rules and state to represent it or not. If this is left unspecified then this particular information is saved.
If the universe is indefinite about existence of things, about specifying any of the parameters discussed and others then no informational constraints are required, which is no more or less than what is allowed or disallowed by a void. Remember in quantum physics the unspecifiability of particle behaviors except after measurement? About the infinite futures and/or pasts, and schrodenger's cat and infinite universes and so on? There is unspecified things even in our perceptions but this is not the undecideability of the void but rather the rules that allows us to exist in the domain it supports. In our case it is our perceptions as entities based on rules and state in only one of the possible forms that allow us to observe the stateful events to happen in this subset to the whole of all possible things.
We're living in one of the infinite possible universes under one of the infinite conditions that our particular consciousnesses could manifest in or at least interact with from somewhere else. That is the basis of how things "exist" from our perspectives and that we're able to interact with them and share the space with others and so on.
The void by its simple nature is unchangeable, it's timeless, it can't be found, seen or interacted with and it supports everything by being indecisive about everything. Ok! The above is really half assed, but it seems reasonable except several glaring omissions and I'm not sure how one would go about proving it unless one can assume the void and find out one of a set of possible ways that "we" got "here".
My slant on the universe and God thing is: The unviverse has always been here. God has always been here. It is like God's lungs breathing. Breath in breath out. Expand. Contract. Forever. Endlessly The point of no breath or the point where the breath is changing from breathing in to breathing out is the reference point at this time. God is breathing in at this time and we are in His breath.
HTH
...and then she turns out to be a lesbian.
:)
That is Murphy's Law in action.
I've come up with a little experiment which would empirically prove the existence of God, if he deicdes to show up and take part. A negative result would simply prove that God either does not exist or does not wish to take part in my experiment.
To start with, we pray for God's intervention in our experiment. Next Experimenter 1 flips a coin 1024 times and writes down a 0 for HEADS and a 1 for TAILS.
Experimenter 2 then generates 1024 bits with a quantum random number generator. These bits are non-deterministic, so its supposed to be impossible to know what they will be beforehand.
Now we compare the bits. There's a 1 in 2^1024 probability that every bit compares.
We can also do the experiments in opposite order to control for say, evil spirits. Or we could do them in sync. And yes, I'm entirely serious.
To prove or disprove the Genesis story, one could set up a large telescope 6000 light years away and watch history unfold. We'd just have to figure out how to get it there quickly.
This is total flamebait. Verses taken out of context to try to suggest that the Bible teaches that God created man for bestiality.
For reference, here's the rest of the account in Genisis 2 (KJV):
20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
After all, as has already been discussed many times in this thread, a Catholic Priest was behind the original formalism of the Big Bang! No, I do not dispute your statements whatsoever. My point was merely that one's scientific views do not have to dictate one's religious views. However, yes, they will often influence them. Unfortunately, the reverse is also sometimes true.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Partly at least.
I have believed as long as I could think that the universe is nothing. All of it's contents percievable and impercievable (important) sum to absolutely nothing. Nothing is everything and vice versa, because with nothing ELSE to relate "everything" to, "everything" doesn't exist.
It's only within certain contexts, limited portions of the whole, that anything's definable.
I also believe that the impercievable portion of space time is infinite, and consists of everything that could ever be.
The idea isn't disprovable, is useless, but it gives me piece of mind somehow --like I've realized something important.
Stephen Hawking is a gimp who can't even go to the bathroom without help so what does he know? Actually now that I think about a lot of our supposed science revolutionaries seem rather dubious. - Einstein was a poor paten clerk who couldn't even progress beyond a junior position. - Newton came up with his ideas after being smashed in the head with an apple. - Franklin electrocuted himself plenty of times - Tesla died poor and penniless - Faraday was a bookbinder without any education at all. I think at this rate I'm on the road to becoming the next great scientist you should all give me the money and Nobel prize now to save yourself the trouble later. (I think it goes without saying that I'm joking.)
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
If God came down to stephen hawkings and promised to miraculously cure his ALS disability, i wonder if he'd have the balls to say this to God's face...
think of this from a philosophical viewpoint, rather than physics...
If a "nothing" can create something, then its not nothing.
I suggest what he is proposing is a new type of something.
IANAL, o wait, wrong discussion... IANAPhysicisist or IANAMathmatician, and maybe I am missing something, if so forgive my ignorance.
... 30 .... n billion year... so am i sposed to be impressed when time is either irrelevent of forever.
/. speel check kicked in). its the don't know that we don't know that makes anything we can't imagine so irrelevent and puny becuase its not the universe's fault we can't imagine it. I don't know how we can think in something so small. If we talk about the big bang and the time from then till now, how small an event in the realm of forever is that.
Nothing is something and nothing exists.
We talk about the universe as tho its the only one, the seen universe and the universe in other dimensions in relation to this "seen" universe. but nothing is everything and from this nothing comes everything.... maybe becuase we always think about the "seen" universe as tho its something special. wow, been here 10,20
The universe by defintion however is everything, seen, unseen and unimagined yet we define it as the "seen" universe otherwise our head explode (sorry asplode, my
Get your head around this: The nothing is forever, has always been forever, will always be forever and will produce an infinite number of "seen" universes forever. It really is as simple as that.
It just how it all works.
"Stephen Hawking Says Universe CREATED from Nothing" ... ;)
Really?
No, just a Slashdot gaffe perhaps
Well, unless he changes his views sometime soon, he's going to be pretty much discredited. Not unlike a biochemist who merely states that DNA would be near impossible to form via Darwinian evolution, so everyone gets pissed and starts shouting 'Evil theist who doesn't believe in a biological theory that was formed before while everyone thought that cells were simple solid blobs! Attack!' Anything scientific that merely hints at theism having creditability is thrown out, partly because science is business, partly because no one wants to hear that maybe, just maybe, there is a supreme being(s) that exists outside of the realm of known/currently perceivable scientific knowledge. I, for one, find it to be hilarious that theophobia is the only thing keeping Darwinian evolution from being seriously challenged, as Darwin, being a man of science who had the balls to stand up to religion, would have wanted, and would probably do today (after shitting himself once he realized that his theories were being so abused by idiots who take his theory as a law). Now, we'll probably see the same thing happening to the Big Bang theory.
I wonder where else Hawking can get a job?
Since empirical and philosophical are mutually exclusive, one would think that if an philosophical empiricist existed, we would enter some kind of twilight zone where military intelligence would make sense...
Philosophical and empirical are NOT mutually exclusive. Half of the "modern period" of philosophers (roughly those from Descarte through Kant; post-Kant is not considered "modern", oddly enough, but "contemporary") were labeled "empiricists", and emphasized how the only way we can come to knowledge of anything is through experience and observation. Those sorts of philosophers (such a Locke, Hume, and Berkeley) laid the foundation of the philosophical world view which underlies all of today's science. Don't forget, what we now call scientists were once known as Natural Philosophers, i.e. people who conduced a reasoned study of the natural world.
So philosophy is not exclusive of empiricism. Empiricism is itself a philosophical position, and (rightly so, in my estimation) the dominant one of today's academic world. But it took a lot of arguing about how it's possible to know anything before that consensus was settled upon, and were it not for philosophy we would not have the rigorously empiricist science that we have today.
Also, if you want a hardcore empiricist who took "I think therefore I am" seriously, look into Berkeley. He believed that the only things which existed were minds (as he could self-evidently tell that his own mind existed), and the things perceived by minds. He argued vehemently against the existence of a mind-independent material world (that is, something apart from the mere appearances of things) on the grounds that you couldn't observationally tell whether it was there or not, i.e. that it's a non-empirical idea! All you can know are your ideas, your sensory perceptions; so he concluded that talk of a material world was literally nonsense. So just being an empiricist doesn't prevent you from wandering off and cooking up "crazy" philosophical ideas, either.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Hawking thinks he can predict all that exists about "our universe", not before it was made, not after. His talk is about getting close to being able to mathematically describe how it expanded from "nothing" and how the basic irregularities of that "inflation" now give us all we know. He's working backwards from galaxies and irregularities in the microwave background to show that there is a theory that can explain how this irregularity can exist and was started. Whether there was something before is inconsequential, like trying to go "south" of the "south pole". It simply does not exist. It is nothing. Is that so hard to fathom :-)
The original had three piles, provable, might be provable and unprovable, but it is an error to put God's existance in pile three. This is because God's existance is provable by God though not by man. So, for this particular question you want pile 4. Now there is scripture, read recently in church, that talks about not testing God, but you don't even have to look that far. When we are doing physics, we are working with the reproducible. We are, as Einstein put, trying to read the mind of God. We are not trying to change God's mind. To physics, an action of God's that turns up in an experiment is an anomaly. It does not repeat and you have to disregard the data.
While it is not OK to test God, it is OK to bargin with God as Abraham did, and this is especially so when you are trying to help out other people, at least this seems to be when God comes into the stories in a give and take kind of way. But, once you are at the bargining table (trying to change God's mind) your questions about God's existance are pretty much answered. Moses found the expereince so overwhelming that he started wearing a veil.
People have every reason not to beleive in God and every reason to believe in God. The trouble is not God but reason. It is not equiped for the miraculous so it is just not terribly useful when dealing with Someone who only acts through miracles.
So, as you experiment, you can find out things like wow, random really can be random, how odd, didn't think God would throw dice. But, your set up has to throw out any evidence of God's intervention in the experiment.
You're saying that it's wrong when it has light coming first? It's wrong when it gives a rather correct order in which animals developed if you allow for them grouping them differently (and oddly enough, you can blame monks pondering Noah's ark for developing scientific taxonomy; it's no coincidence we use Latin names, Latin being the language of the Church)?
Or perhaps the biggest thing you find wrong with it is that people (incorrectly, if you ask the Pope) think it rules out evolution, incorrectly think it implies the world is 7,000ish years old, and worst of all, says that God had something to do with creation?
Next up, Stephen Hawkings announces his new perpetual motion machine. Afterall, we don't need these stupid Laws of Thermodynamics, do we? ;-)
Religion can never nullify science, but science will eventually nullify religion.
Luke's list (Luke 3:23-38) from David to Jesus has 43 names: David, Nathan, Mattathah, Menan, Melea, Eliakim, Jonan, Joseph, Judah, Simeon, Levi, Matthat, Jorim, Eliezer, Jose, Er, Elmodam, Cosam , Addi, Melchi, Neri, Shealtiel, Zerubbabel, Rhesa, Joannas, Judah, Joseph, Semei, Mattathiah, Maath, Naggai, Esli, Nahum, Amos, Mattathiah, Joseph, Janna, Melchi, Levi, Matthat, Heli, Joseph and Jesus.
r d-of-god-part-2.html
Matthew's list (Matthew 1:2-16) from David to Jesus has only 28 names: David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijah, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Joram, Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, Manasseh, Amon, Josiah, Jeconiah , Shealtiel, Zerubbabel, Abiud, Eliakim, Azor, Zadok, Achim, Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan, Jacob, Joseph and Jesus.
Moreover, only 6 ancestors appear in both of these lists: David, Shealtiel, Zerubbabel, Eliakim, Joseph, Jesus.
Luke's list has 43 generations from David to Joseph (or Mary, as Christians claim), but Matthew's list has only 28 generations from David to Joseph. That would mean that if Luke's list is indeed Mary's genealogy, then Mary would be 15 generations younger than Joseph. 15 generations is a lot of time even if the average age at which all of Mary's ancestors gave birth to the next generation was just 10 years, in which case Mary would be 150 years younger than Joseph! That is clearly not the case.
Let us assume that Matthew's list got shorter because of loss in translation, and other errors. If that is true, let not the evangelists admit that Bible is true (i.e. inerrant) in the literal sense. Hence it has to interpreted, in which case, they should not hold it as evidence against scientific evidence.
The most holy book, has 15 errors in such a short passage. Many of those errors could be claimed to be because of human intervention. Then what does that say about the amount of strain we should have when living exactly by its preaching?
Does it make sense that The Holy Word of God given by God so that ordinary men may live by its above-human-logic morality, is infused with silly logical errors so that we may be confused by it? This is not strictly a valid argument in Christianity because God the Potter can choose to make the pot anyway he wishes.
Using common sense to figure out what is literal and figurative in the bible as many evangelists do today, requires arbitrary line drawing. Don't you see how this works? The universe is earth-centric... wait, science disproved that, so that must have been a metaphor. The earth (and universe) are only 6000 years old... wait science disproved that, I guess that must have been a metaphor too. I've got an idea... why not look at this like you would any other source of information: fairly. If the claims made in the bible show themselves to be wrong, then stop making excuses for it and treat it like it is: an unreliable source of information.
The only reason people started believing that the bible should be interpreted symbolically is because all of its claims turned out to be ludicrous... not because the bible states or implies that it should be interpreted this way.This is a dishonest and bias way to analyze data. If I came up with an explanation for something which was later disproved, you wouldn't automatically assume that my data was just figurative would you? So why do people do this with the bible? If you look at anything in a figurative sense, you can make any crazy statement a truth.
God is just the line in the sand which separates the known from the unknown. As science continues to answer these unknowns, the line keeps getting drawn further and further back until God becomes obsolete. The only important question left will be, "are you willing to let go?"
http://edwinjose.blogspot.com/2007/03/is-bible-wo
Mod parent up. Interesting point.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
Yes, but then we'll eventually have a stack overflow and crash.
(Billy Preston and Bruce Fisher)
Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin'
If you wanna be with me
Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin'
If you wanna be with me
I'm not tryin' to be your hero
'Cause that zero is too cold for me, Brrr
I'm not tryin' to be your highness
'Cause that minus is too low to see, yeah
Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
And I'm not stuffin'
Believe you me
Don't you remember I told ya
I'm a soldier in the war on poverty, yeah
Yes, I am
[Instrumental Interlude]
Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin'
If you wanna be with me
Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin'
If you wanna be with me
You gotta have somethin'
If you wanna be with me
You gotta bring me somethin' girl
If you wanna be with me
The Bible has two creation stories - and they contradict each other.
... the Lord God formed man")
The more well known story - I will call it Creation A - is described in Genesis 1 to 2:3. The other story - I will call it Creation B - is described in the rest of Genesis 2. Consider some of the differences:
Creation A
- Man created the sixth day
- Man created after the plants
- Mankind created in God's image
- Many humans created, of both sexes ("male and female He created them"), but not woman from man
Creation B
- Man created the first day ("in the day the Lord God made the Earth and the Heavens
- Man created "when no plant of the field was yet in the Earth"
- Man created from dust (no mention of "God's image")
- One man created first (Adam), then one woman from the man's rib (Eve)
How can there be anything? In order for there to be something there must be nothing. Nothing is the absence of anything. In order for there to be nothing there must be something; why? Nothing is a distinction. In order for there to be nothing, something, specifically the distinction "distinction", must exist in order for the distinction nothing, and nothing itself, to exist, at which point the distinction nothing implies something. Nothing simply can't exist without something. The longer there is nothing the more likely something will be; nothing simply doesn't want to be nothing all by itself; it needs something. It's a mobius loop with one side being something and the other being nothing. Nothing and something are intertwinded and inseparable.
- Mobius Nothing Creation Myth of the Universe, PWL-20070314a
Is he confirming he is in the Inflationary Universe theory as described by Alan H. Guth? I believe he might be leaning towards that theory or some variant of it.
- Dragonlord Warlock (aka Dion) "So many computers.... so little time...."
Nothing does not have energy,or dimensions stashed in his pocket.
Its just absence of anything.Universe started from the same causes which created time/3-d space bubble,but these causes are something,and likely been a natural process(bursting from unknown dimensions).
I thought it was Seinfeld!
However, here you get into a small problem. If you have no need of a creation event, there is nowhere to have this "nothing" from which the Universe supposedly spawned. Even a nothing has to be somewhere, even if that somewhere is nowhere. It is meaningless to talk about what happened prior to time, because without time there can be no "prior". Likewise, if there is no creation event, you START with the Big Bang and can dispense with the need of this nothingness.
Personally, I would tend to go for the idea that time (but not space) is a closed loop. (Yes, it is possible for only time to be closed, provided there is a stable solution to the wormhole equations.) If you allow matter and/or energy to be slingshot back to the start, and thus have a Universe with a variable mass, many of the problems in cosmology (an apparently variable speed of light, and an apparently variable Hubble Constant for example) stop being problems. These would be the normal and expected consequences of such a system. By having time strictly bounded, we can eliminate a lot of the problems that occur in other cyclic models. (We can also eliminate the need for an inflationary model, which causes no end of headaches, because the start of the loop can be placed AFTER the point in time that inflation would be expected to finish. This allows us to avoid all kinds of strange things, like superluminal velocities, twelve dimensions of space, a wholly even Universe forming structures, etc.
The problem with cosmology is that many theories add more paradoxes and conundrums than they resolve. This is generally not considered a good sign, and has led many to question the validity of much of cosmology. I think it reasonable to trust cosmologists to have a pretty good idea of what observations are supporting, so the only solution I can come up with is to conclude they are holding some single assumption to be true that is, in fact, completely wrong. Everything else is correct, but that one assumption. Then it becomes inevitable that everything would have to be almost - but not quite - right, which is what we see.
My guess is that the entire theory of everything between the Big Bang and the end of the Inflationary Era is the assumption that is invalid. No, not the model, the theory that such a period of time even existed. If we eliminate that entire period of time, we eliminate virtually all of the problems. Eliminating problems is generally a Good Thing and usually a sign of being on the right track. However, we would now have to explain how you can suddenly get this fairly complex, non-uniform structure, without introducing ANY problems to replace the ones that are now unnecessary. Looping time is one possible solution, there may be others. All that seems obvious at the moment is that if an assumption needs any kind of unsolvable problem, it's probably wrong.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The first 18,5 minutes of the Webcast are more or less a - at times funny - commercial for Berkeley (and for Hawking). The speech itself is similar to the one he gave at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A transcript can be found here:t ml
http://hayadan.org.il/english/hawking_in_israel.h
Recent research into the origins of the universe by highly regarded scientists show that Stephen Hawkings' hypothesis about the universe popping up from nothing is completely and perfectly wrong. The proof for this will be provided by several lengthy studies to be funded by left over funds not used after finding that there is no life on Mars, so those programs will no longer be necessary.
More funding and time will be necessary, as to prove this, it will take several million years, but that's okay, eternity is a really long time, expecially the part that lasts forever, so given enough monkeys, and typewriters, the proof should present itself quite readily.
From the way most guys here contribute to issues, I can't help but think that it is not a very positive society. Take an idea from the bible which you may not believe, but it declares that all things are possible to those who believe. The fact that you do not see a way through it does not mean that there ins't. The greatest sickness of mankind has been limiting himself to the current ideas, tools and methods. New tools, ideas and methods will come which wil allow us to do the things you are proudly declaring impossible. Or are you suggesting like Uncle bill that will not need anything beyond 640k? I am a systems Scientist. I can easily describe the disease that most slashdotters suffer from; each one is limited in understanding to their own little ecosystem. They want to define what is possible and ins't based on the particular circumstances governing their ecosystem. This is not a place to bring your Ideas of a new invertion. It will be definately shot down.But all the great inverters of the last few centuries were ridiculed by people who think like most slashdotters. Final advice, If you can't bring new ideas, leave those who can alone. No wonder Isaac newton realised that some of the folks in the so called academic society were only serving to impede his work, coincidentally in a forum like slashdot. Long live great thinkers, those who don't think will just never see your point no matter how much you try to explain. And sorry, you never pointed out the particular verse in the bible which contradicts science.
In the beginning when God created the Up Quark, the Down Quark, the Top Quark, the Bottom Quark; then the Charm Quark, the Strange Quark; also he made the Tau Neutrino, the Muon Neutrino, the Electron Neutrino. Then he saw that the mattercules where good. Then he made the number one, and separated it from 0. Then he made Latin so that he could coax the rest of the crap made from nothing...
Something witty goes here.
The universe was called into being by the laws of nature. Since these laws are everywhere and always, obviously an infinite number of universes have been called into existence, all of them obeying the same laws of nature in every respect. Thus they all are exactly the same, right down to your lack of shoelaces.
You are so correct.
To a good scientist, it shouldn't matter what they believe in. You could believe in the FSM. Doesn't matter. Science is about what works, not "truth". I observe something. Is it repeatable? Can I construct a model that predicts other things? Is it the simplest model that predicts the things I want to use?
So, how does any of that relate to the evolution of humans story?
* Did you observe it?
* Can you repeat it?
* If you constantly adjust your theory for "found" evidence rather than making *experimental* predictions and then refining, is that science, or being an O.J. Simpson defense attorney?
* It it really the simplest model to postulate unimaginably long timeframes in order to make extremely unlikely and unobservable things seem possible?
Time is curved. There's the whole "spacetime curvature" that general relativity is all about :) And for instance you get things like cosmic strings, which open up the possibility of "closed timelike curves" (CTCs) which would allow you to travel into the past - if such things are allowed to exist.
Also look at other solutions to GR other than the standard FRW model - Godel's metric specifically allows for CTCs and indeed the whole universe is exactly as you describe in terms of ending up eventually where and when you started.
Religion is not in conflict with Science, because Religion talks about unprovable things, whereas Science talks about provable/disprovable things. Apples and oranges, in other words.
In the thought experiment, Alice and Bob can be separated by thousands of light years. If Alice's measurement has a (measurable) effect on Bob's measurement, then it has to be in such a way that no information can be transferred - otherwise superluminal information transfer would be possible and that would lead to violations in the causality ordering principle. (The COP can be simply stated as: if event A causes event B, then in every frame of reference event A precedes event B.)
So, Bob's measurement affects Bob's outcome, and Alice's measurement affects Alice's outcome, but the assumption is that Bob's measurement cannot affect Alice's outcome, the way the experiment is carried out. Does that help?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Ok, here it goes:
I can go on, but please take 10 seconds to reply to these questions/problems with your religion and then we can talk.
But the concept of time should also exist for God, otherwise God could not have been able to tell the before and after of his creations. The concept of creation itself requires a space/time continuum.
The concept of existence requires time, as well. To put it differently, in order to be able to tell apart different states and thus validate the concept of existence, time is required.
To explain it even further: you can not tell if something exists, unless it has more than one state, and a way to go from one state to another. So the concept of existence requires more than one state, and therefore the concept of time (since one state must come before the other state).
There are 3 probable approaches to the problem:
1) the laws of God's universe were created by another God. This is not possible because it leads to infinite God recursion.
2) the laws of God's universe were created by God himself. This is not possible as well, because God would not have needed to create restrictions on himself.
3) the God's universe has no laws. But if such was the case, then God's universe would not have been able to function. Again, not possible.
So, you see, the concept of God is problematic from all sides.
The roots of science are in ancient Greece, and ancient Greeks were not religious types. They may had the 12 gods of Olympus, but their religion was more for festivities, celebrations and story telling than worshiping.
Then, for 1500 years, Christians hold science and logical thinking down, because science could be used to prove their lies.
thesis - antithesis - synthesis: the porn in the browser history and his girl friend are in fact the same thing.
NOTHING came first
In the end of the speech in the QA period, he said: "If I'm right then the universe is a self contained entity governed by science."
In that summary right there he implicitly states there was something before the inflation of our universe, there was a framework of natural law. Ergo, not nothing.
On a simple side not, if you substitute the word science for the word God then you see he's making the same thesis statement as a creationist. He's just making science his "God", rather than some other theory. Generally the atheists I have had this discussion with reason that we as humans have created these supernatural deities to give our lives governance and order. Hawking does the same thing, only with a different governor.
No idea where Hawkins got his ideas from but this is not only old hat: The hat was eaten by a large gerbil some time ago and we're all wearing the t-shirts.
Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dspart for a full discussion on the topic, a peer-reviewed proof and discussion of the consequences.
Love,
0. The large gerbil
2^0.=0.
i prefer Stephen's work in hip hop"
"E" stands for energy, yo that's me,
I'm a brilliant scientist and a dope MC.
Before you step to me I'd think twice G,
I'm the Lord of Chaos, King of Entropy.
You down with it? I motherfvckin' hope so,
'cause if you're not, I got a motherfvckin' rope yo!
I'll string you up, from a big-ass tree,
with a sign round your neck that says, "Wack MC".
There ain't another motherfucker hard like me,
I'm a universal constant, I'm a singularity.
Got Doomsday at my back with fat-ass tracks,
he pumps funk in the cracks and cuts wax with an axe.
So listen up bitch, 'cause there may be a test,
my style is smooth, but it's hard to digest.
My science is tight, rhymes faster than light,
like a ton of TNT I'm about to ignite.
Chorus:
E=mc,
E=mc Hawking!
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Yeah, that happens when you don't get enough sleep. You start hallucinating.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
(sic)
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
...which is already defined: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dspart
Mssr. Hawking is way behind - even my t-shirt is more up-to-date, lol.
0.
I believe that bit about eternity is a Woody Allen quote. Did he credit it? Pretty annoying if not...
ThosEM
I stepped in some just this morning.
I was there in the balcony listening to his speech. Needless to say it was an awesome experience. And the guy has a great sense of humor. I mean he used a Woody Allen quote!
I can think of one possibility that was left out, God exists without cause, created the universe and chooses to interact within its laws most of the time but occassionally does things the way He wants anyway, disregarding the rules He established, thus miracles.
The problem you describe isn't a problem with God exactly, it is a problem with causality. People believe that there must be a cause for every action. Turtles all the way down and so forth.
The attraction of a belief in a primary creator is that it steps outside of the cause/effect relationship. If there is a God who is not an effect, but exists simply as a permanant entity, then that makes it possible for there to be a primary cause. If not, then there needs to be a cause for God or a cause for the existance of the universe. The universe seems bent on this cause/effect pattern in those things we can observe so we tend to believe that either the universe exists outside of a primary cause or God exists outside of a primary cause. Since we observe cause and effect with all things related to the universe, we tend to believe that there must be a cause for it. Since we don't have an observable God to test, it is easier to believe that there is something that we cannot understand about God than something we can observe, the universe.
Of course if we can accept that either the universe or God exists without a primary cause then all these issues go away and we get to replace them with a whole new set. If we have to accept something is a primary cause and doesn't have a cause itself then we are right back to the faith question, God or the universe without a primary cause. The universe needs a cause because it is inflexible in how it can exist, but God has the advantage because we ascribe the ability to exist without a cause to God.
Don't care for that? Well then, we have to decide that physics is insufficient to describe itself which also means that the arguments against God (from scientific points of view) don't apply by the same logic.
Turtles all the way down. Personally I find that a belief and interaction with God do me more good personally than a belief that the universe exists without primary cause. I guess its a practicality thing.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
You know, it's a universe, about nothing! Nothing? That's right, Nothing! For example, what did you do today? Created a black hole. See, that's an episode...