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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)."
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
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)
He's making an analogy. A rigorous explanation is beyond the generalized audience he had there. Even those with proper background to understand it would probably have been bored -- they came there to see a scientist celebrity, and Hawkings did not disappoint.
For your enlightenment, the 'water' in question is a series of multidimensional branes, according to one cosmological theory. The universe may have been created when two branes collided, creating turbulence that manifested as a big bang in our dimensional space. These collisions go on all the time, but like the 'bubbles in boiling water' analogy not all the turbulence creates new universes.
Your next question is 'where did the branes come from'? Branes are mathematical concepts. If someone tells you 1+1=2, you can't really ask where '1' came from. If there is a multiverse it has to have some sort of brane structure, in much the same way as if humans exist they have to have skin.
So the universe was 'created by nothing' in a pretty accurate sense, as a mathematical concept is as close to 'nothing' as anyone is likely to conceive. But in the end, Hawkings' words were chosen for showmanship, not precision.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
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."
Lack of understanding? He was quoting St. Augustine.
It's a quote he uses a lot. Read a lot of Hawking's speeches and you'll see that he rehashes old material endlessly; it's a hell of a job for him to actually go through the labour of typing out anything new, what with his condition, so he copies and pastes wherever possible from previous works and speeches. Whole paragraphs tend to get copied from Brief History to this day.
The full quote from the book was:
"As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. [Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 8]"
Thus Augustine's idea of time is in full agreement with Hawking's: that time is a function of the universe, so 'before creation' is a meaningless phrase.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The last number I saw, which I don't have an authoritative reference for, said 20-25% of physicists believe in God, compared to ~90% of the general population. The percentage is higher when you consider all scientists, but still, science is not a very religious occupation.
The only even remotely rational way that an intelligent person can believe in any kind of "god" is to understand science, and see some of the freaky stuff that we can't understand (ie: "if all matter is made up of sub-atomic particles, and those particles appear to move randomly, then is there such a thing as free will?"). I could see how a particle physicist or astrophysicist with a good understanding of science could say, "Shit, I guess maybe there could be something else out there pushing around these particles or making these black holes, etc.").
That's extremely different than a mouth breather with an IQ of 90 saying, "God is real because my daddy says so" or even "regular" people saying "God is real because it says so in this book".
And, when I say scientist, I meant Scientist. When I say Scientist, I don't necessarily mean everybody who works in a lab. I'm referring to the kind of person that things rationally, and scientifically about all kinds of things, whether they happen to actually study science or not. There are plenty of people who may work in science, but still believe in gods and demons and devils and fairies etc, etc. But a truly Scientific person could never, and would never believe something is true based solely on heresay.
I don't respond to AC's.
Along similar lines to this, for anyone who thinks that the idea of some eternal life beyond this one sounds boring or silly, as it's generally used to relate to God and religion, Eternity does not mean infinite time, it's more like an existing outside of time. It's pretty hard to say for any of us to say what that experience might be like, but in the sense often used in religious discussions, it's not helpful to imagine eternity as a really really long time.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
"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
Now, maybe you left out 3 because you're assuming the Big Bang. If so, that's fair enough.
But the claim of every major theistic group I know is #4, not #2. You seem to be aping Dawkins' arguments, with a similar ignorance of the actual set of alternatives. No one claims that the order/complexity/whatever of God just popped into existence. People (Hawking, Dawkins, apparently you) do claim that the order of the physical universe & natural law just popped into existence. If you're going to compare your views to other people's, and if you care about honesty and intellectual integrity, please accurately represent them.
And if you think the distinction I'm making between 2 and 4 is irrelevant or meaningless, keep this in mind: The Big Bang was resisted because people wanted to have a universe that always existed. They could accept an eternal universe; they did not want to have to explain a universe that started to exist. (Of course, we can also suppose an eternal chain of Big Bangs, universes spawning other universes, etc., so the Big Bang doesn't actually settle this question of eternality.) So, those philosophical naturalists thought 3 was more reasonable than 1 for precisely the reason that theists claim 4 is more reasonable than 2.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
No, the religious nut-cases do that. They are the ones you always hear about in the media. You don't hear about the millions of reasonable, open-minded religious people who are capable of realizing that the Bible doesn't actually say how old the earth is and Genesis 1 was meant to be poetic rather than a scientific account of how God created the universe.
Celebrate the finer things in life
One is Joseph's line, and one is Mary's line.
FFS you could have worked that one out in 10 seconds.
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