Slashdot Mirror
Higgs Data Could Spell Trouble For Leading Big Bang Theory
ananyo writes "Paul Steinhardt, an astrophysicist at Princeton University in New Jersey, and colleagues have posted a controversial paper on ArXiv arguing, based on the latest Higgs data and the cosmic microwave background map from the Planck mission, that the leading theory explaining the first moments of the Big Bang ('inflation') is fatally flawed. In short, Steinhardt says that the models that best fit the Planck data — known as 'plateau models' because their potential-energy profiles level off at relatively low energies — are far less likely to occur naturally than the models that Planck ruled out. Secondly, he says, the news for these plateau models gets dramatically worse when the results are analyzed in conjunction with the latest results about the Higgs field coming from CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Particle physicists working at the LHC have calculated that the Higgs field is likely to have started out in a high-energy, 'metastable' state rather than in a stable, low-energy configuration. Steinhardt likens the odds of the Higgs field initially being perched in the precarious metastable state as to those of dropping out of the sky over the Matterhorn and conveniently landing in a 'dimple near the top,' rather than crashing down to the mountain's base."
That sounds like a cosmic catastrophe in the making. Or has it already happened?
Ezekiel 23:20
....we just don't know.
It wasn't a Big Bang, but a Medium Bang!
gotta get out my papers, nobel prize for fizziks here I come!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
OK, so I'll confess my ignorance on this one, and maybe someone can clarify it.
Does this have anything to do with if the universe will go through a big crunch? Or is this more about the models about the mechanics of the big bang?
I have no idea what this summary is saying since it's outside of my field, so I have no idea if this is good news, bad news, or a different in understanding something which is pretty abstract anyway. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A: Other variations of the big bang theory are safe, just the 'main' version is in trouble
or....
B: The big bang theory itself is in trouble, including any of its variations. 'Leading' here would mean big bang theory over say, a steady state universe.
From what I can tell, the Slashdot title means B due to this quote in the story:
But if you take the data we’ve been given and just follow your nose, then inflation and the whole Big Bang paradigm seem to be in big trouble,” Steinhardt says.
Emphasis on "whole".
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
..but I have always been skeptical of "inflation"
It seemed like a mathematical "band-aid", applied in desperation to a flawed theory
The old ways are best:
This finding is relevant because it suggests the existence of a limited number of ephemeral particles per unit volume in a vacuum.
In other words, there is no nothingness; everything is something. Thus we're looking at vacuums being a variation of type of substrate of matter, not an absence of matter. Mind-blowing. Be sure to drop acid before reading this.
Please. Pretty Please...
Years ago, this was a significant debate, but in recent years the debate was "settled" - the universe's expansion is actually increasing in rate.
I have always felt that it was wrong to call this settled. The increased rate of expansion of the universe is explained by "Dark Energy", a completely unknown entity with unknown properties. There is no reason why the effects of Dark Energy might change (or even reverse) over time. So, is the universe expanding at an increasing rate? Apparently. Will it continue to do so? I don't think that is even close to answered.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
A wizard did it.
Why do you religious people keep saying that atheism is a religion?
Because some atheists act in a religious manner.
We (I am an atheist) cannot prove the non-existance of God. We can use our observations of the world around us and logic to come to a refusal to believe the fairy tales we're taught as children, and this is all in the realm of reason. But those of us who claim to know without doubt that there is no deity have crossed into the realm of faith.
... the most idiotic paper I have read all year. It's a silly collection of straw-man arguments, with no actual science in it at all.
What they claim is "universally accepted" (actually, they claim it is almost "universally accepted", quotes theirs), isn't. Which is why they have to use the silly quotation marks.
Plateau-like models are not the only ones consistent with Planck. See: the Planck paper on inflationary constraints
Inflation has always had a problem with initial conditions. Guess what? It's still there.
"A challenge for the inflationary paradigm in light of the Planck2013 data is to explain why no significant multiverse effects have been observed" Wuh? Maybe, um, because there might not be a multiverse at all?
It's not a cosmic catastrophe so much as a physics one, although I'd prefer to call it a physics "opportunity"! Having found the Higgs we already know that there is now an incredible precarious balance even within the Standard Model. The Higgs is a fundamental scalar particle which is a radically different beast from any other fundamental particle we know of. One of the strange properties of the Higgs is that there are corrections to its mass which scale with energy squared.
This might not sound like a big deal but quantum mechanics means that even at low energies these high energy corrections to the Higgs mass are important. The question then becomes "what energy is our current knowledge of physics good to". Well if we look at the Standard Model of particle physics it is missing gravity so, at the scale where gravity becomes important (about a million billion times higher in energy than the LHC) we know the SM breaks down.
The problem is that this means the Higgs mass is corrected by a series of terms each of which is ~32+ orders of magnitude larger than the mass itself. This means that you need a cancellation to better than one part in ~10^32 by chance. This is about the same chance as winning the UK national lottery every week for 4-5 weeks in a row or tossing a coin and having it come up heads over 100 times in a row. If either of these events actually happened nobody would believe they happened by chance - there would be investigations into how someone managed to cheat the lottery or you would want to inspect the coin to make sure it did not have two heads.
There are solutions to this conundrum: Supersymmetry makes all the corrections to the Higgs mass cancel precisely (above some energy scale) and Large Extra Dimensions lowers the scale where gravity becomes important considerably. What would be interesting to know is whether these solutions to the fine tuning problem we have in the Standard Model also solve the fine tuning which this paper suggests that cosmology also has.
Such anger.
The assertion AC made (along with other "religious" types) is based on the the acceptance that the singularity was "just there", and that abiogenesis "just happened". Many call this acceptance faith.
I don't think I would actually call it faith, but something more along the lines of, "We don't know. We're fine with that right now. Some day, we hope to discover the answers for the origin of the singularity and the facility of abiogenesis. But, whatever the case, we're sure it's not God."
sig: sauer
Well said... But Carl Sagan said it best: An atheist has to know a lot more than I do. Sagan certainly didn't believe in a god, but he just treated nonexistence as the default, and was willing to listen if someone actually came up with real non-faith-based evidence that nonexistence was wrong.
Why is this called Steinhardt's paper? Anna Ijjas is first author and she's a post-doc at Harvard.
Sheldon will be not happy...
There was no "kablooey" in the sense of something exploding into space. There was no space. The universe didn't come from nothing, it came from everything. Then it changed state.
I don't disagree with any of this, but I think the language excellently demonstrates the tremendous challenge scientists have explaining the origin of the universe to non-scientists - Particularly religious-inclined non-scientists. I think most people would just write it off as incomprehensible gibberish, and really, there's no 'easy' way to write it.
Well, yes and no. You can't resimulate the universe, but you can make inferences from observations. Everything's moving apart, what does that mean? Possibly everything expanded from the same point. What would conditions be like if that were the case? The Big Bang is a model that attempts to explain observed phenomena - and we can do experiments to test how some of our theories about nature hold up to conditions suggested by that model.
If cosmological observations don't match quantum theory, then either QT or the observations are flawed. The solution to this dilemma isn't "don't try to come up with theories and test them." There may be cosmologists who take fundamentalist approach to their pet theories, but the science as a whole is not bogus.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Every human has a belief system. My belief system is grounded in science, but it still takes an incredible amount of faith on my part. I have no direct personal proof that the sun is a giant ball of nuclear fire, i have to take it on faith that the scientific consensus is 'right'. It is easier to accept this consensus when they show me how they came to their conclusions and how i can repeat their experiments and see it for myself. Even easier when they invite to prove them wrong using the similar methods.
Good-bye
But wouldn't something like the quantum immortality effect come into play here? In other words, to steal the Matterhorn analogy, we are guaranteed to have fallen into the dimple at the top instead of falling down the sides because we live in this universe and all the other possible universes never formed because they did fall down the sides.
Granted, occams razor and all that, but it is at least interesting to think about.
That's pushing it. I KNOW there is no flying spaghetti monster. No proof against it. There COULD be a flying spaghetti monster. But I KNOW there isn't one. That is not faith. That's just not being silly. Not the same.
Any theory of the origin of everything has to start with nothing. Absolutely nothing. Otherwise, you're not talking about an origin, you're talking about something that already existed, and that means that you now have to figure out the origin of that thing before you can find the origin of everything.
Existing human metaphysical systems do not yet (and might not ever) sufficiently understand what terms like "existed," "origin," or "nothing" actually mean to make blanket statements like yours. We live in a universe controlled by causality (which makes physics possible), and thus often assume that the concept of "prior cause" is "universally" applicable: by this logic, "everything exists as a result of a prior causes; something that exists without a prior causes is not part of everything, therefor is nothing" (without deeply defining most of the terms in that phrase). However, it could be that our observable causally-ordered universe expanded from a boundary with a different "type of space" where time and causal ordering do not exist; where there is no meaning to the questions "what came before" or "what caused this state" because there is no time direction for "before" or "caused." The assumption that "origins are necessary" may simply be a quirk of our particular location in the cosmos, rather than a "universal" truth.
Chicken that laid a very large egg.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
We (I am an atheist) cannot prove the non-existance of God.
This is a dead horse that's been beaten to death so many times we've hardly got a carcass. Yes, actually, you can.
Let's take the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He's made of spaghetti and two meatballs. We know that these two components neither have sentience or the ability to fly. If you change their molecular configuration such that the material involved should become sentient and capable of flight, you no longer have spaghetti and meatballs. Put another way, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is, in fact, the equivalent of a square circle. He's a logical contradiction that can't possibly be real. We can apply the same reasoning to Invisible Pink Unicorns. Something that's invisible can't also be pink, and visa versa.
The gods dreamed up by all our fanciful imaginations are equally contradictory. Take the Christian god. It's omniscient, omnipotent, yet has human form. It's described as one god, but is made up of three entities. Preordains everything, but simultaneously possesses free will. Perfect good, but created evil.
In other words, Christians worship a square circle.
I know you want to be kind to your intellectually inferior friends, but there are no contradictions in the universe. Sure, there are infinite possibilities, but gods aren't possibilities. They're pure fantasies, as the moment you eliminate properties that eliminate the contradictions, they cease to be gods.
No, his comment (mostly) makes sense. His complaint is that current non-cyclical Big Bang theory can't explain ultimate origin, because there is not and can't be a scientific explanation for how something can come from nothing. Quantum fluctuations and energy fields are not nothing. He further points out that cyclical crunch/bang theories are not ultimate origin theories, but continuations of existence. They just kick the Question of the Origin of Everything down the cosmological road.
The traditional Christian view of God is that of a being with no origin. There's no attempt to explain one because the belief is that there isn't one. He's eternal. I don't know what he means by BBT and God following the same origin story, unless he means unknowable or incomprehensible through reason alone.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Good. This means scientists had a theory, and they've been testing the hell out of it. As they find data that contradicts the theory, they will rework the theory to match what is observed. This is exactly what we want. We should be celebrating because the scientific process works.
You forgot option C: Neilsen ratings for the CBS comedy are going down the tubes.
Do you know that Santa Claus doesn't exist? If your answer to that is "yes", then there you go, you can know that gods don't exist too. If your answer to that is "no", then your definition of "know" is useless and has no relevance to reality. Either way, you can know that gods don't exist in the same way that you can know that Santa Claus doesn't exist. That of course doesn't imply that gods don't exist, but making a big stink about the philosophy of not being able to know it when the same arguments would apply to Santa Claus is plainly ridiculous.
The universe starting out in an unlikely high-energy state? isn't that just what the Big Bang theory says anyway?
Just like they "invented" the force of gravity to explain why the planets didn't just go flying off?
If by "they" you mean "Isaac Newton", then yes. There were certainly ideas better than "celestial spheres" before the Enlightenment, but not a useful theory that gave quantitatively correct results.
It's easy to propose the idea that "hey, what if the universe expanded really fast early on", but to invent a specific mechanism for that that describes why that happened, and why it stopped, and gives quantitatively correct results for the CMBR data is a lot of work. There have been many such hypotheses - some survived the recent, accurate CMBR data, but those make specific predictions about the Higgs field and will be further culled by the data coming from the LHC.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Nope, that's an atheist. "agnostic" just means "I don't know". One can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist.
The difference is that nobody makes not believing in Santa Claus their primary character trait.
The thing that bugs me about a Big Bang Theory is where did this singularity come from?
I am not a physicist. My limited understanding is that under M-Theory the universe may be a higher-dimensional membrane, a "brane". Furthermore, the universe is not unique, there are numerous branes, a multiverse. Its been suggested that when two branes collide a new one is formed ... a new brane, a new universe, a big bang.
Um, that's exactly what an atheist is. They don't accept the god hypothesis without proof.
Every atheist thread seems to degenerates into semantic hair-splitting over the terms atheist and agnostic and what varying degree of confidence/belief/doubt they are suppose to represent. In my experience, this does not yield productive/interesting discussions.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
And this guy proved it. Real existence would be unbearable.
What you describe is a belief, an assumption, but not a religion. Even when some atheist DO make the statement they are 100% sure there is no gods, they still have no credo, no ceremony, no priest or priesthood, no leitmotiv, no church, no chants, no holy books, nothing BUT that belief in 100% surety non existence of gods. That does not make it a religon. Otherwise 9/11 truther , Alien landing believer, and other believer in woo stuff would be religion. They are not. It needs much much more than that to have a religion. Thus the assertion atheist are religious even pertaining to the 100% sure atheist , is false.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
If the evolution of a stable universe requires the Higgs field to start out at a metastable point, and if variations in those initial conditions lead to universes which collapse rather than inflating, then "the amplitude" (i.e. the probability that they are the outcome that we turn up in) for those other states is zero. Why? Because those universes all collapse long before we could show up.
On the other hand, if Steinhardt is correct, then his result shows there is a path to here-and-now through the metastable point, and if that's what it takes to get here, then that's enough: that's what it takes. The amplitude of the entire wave function for the Steinhardt path is non-zero, unlike the functions for the ones that collapsed.
Yes, some Christians believe that Jesus isn't God (with a capital G). The followers of Arius, who thought themselves Christians and believed that only they had Christianity right, believed that while Jesus was a superhuman entity, he was not identical with the Creator. The classic Unitarianism which arose in the Austro-Hungarian Empire several centuries ago (which self-identifies as a school of Christianity and is not to be confused with the much less dogmatic Unitarian Universalism that arose later) believes that Jesus was simply a great man chosen for a special purpose by God.
Citing Scripture isn't helpful here because the majority of Christians worldwide do not believe in the principle of sola Scriptura. They look to a Tradition which draws upon the Bible, but only in combination with an extrabiblical rule of interpretation.
Ditto.
This is the most complex argument I've heard that the universe is only 6000 years old.
Why do you religious people keep saying that atheism is a religion?
Because atheists have formed a conclusion, they have a belief, they merely have come to the opposite conclusion, the opposite belief.
One definition of religion is a group of people with a shared belief, in particular a belief that can not be proven. Given that a deity can be neither proven nor disproven, people who believe or disbelieve in a deity are both operating in a religious manner.
An agnostic is a person who has formed no conclusion, who does not know whether or not a deity exists because there is no evidence either way.
It would seem that the agnostic is the person operating on a non-religious manner.
Every human has a belief system. My belief system is grounded in science, but it still takes an incredible amount of faith on my part.
Yes, everyone has beliefs, biases, and a worldview. But the term religion is a little bit more precise, and atheism in the general sense does not seem to have the dogma, strictures, rites, and communal/identity implications that we normally associate with religion. Perhaps more militant atheists groups would qualify for the label, but your general, everyday I-don't-believe-in-god type would not.
Incidentally, I would argue that your burning-ball-of-nuclear-fire hypothesis regarding the sun is not "faith" in the religious sense. Yes, you extend faith/credit to certain authorities and institutions in choosing to believe that claim, but if the question were ever to come into doubt, you could opt to mentally reexamine the issue without feeling that your identity was being ripped out. In my mind, religious faith implies having a certain feeling that you ought to believe something and resist challenging it, even when your natural mind wants to doubt it.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
I'm not going to sleep well tonight knowing my understanding of the Universe has changed from one form of utter nonsense to another.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Surely you jest. The Bible is disproven repeatedly. It is massively internally self-contradictory (and hence literally cannot possibly be true in its entirety). The book of Genesis is disproven -- not just not proven to be true, but proven to be false, proven to contradict a great deal of empirically founded, macroscopically and microscopically consistent knowledge, things that we accept as almost certainly true, beyond any sane question, every day.
It is difficult to even know where to begin in listing the problems in Genesis, as it isn't even approximately or metaphorically correct in its description of creation -- it has things in the wrong order, an absurd order temporally, it has nothing whatsoever that describes the actual processes any rational person would infer looking at the actual data. It gets the age enormously wrong. It gets the size wrong. It gets the structure wrong. It posits the story of a truly absurd flood (6 inches of rain a minute for 40 days straight to barely cover Mount Everest) and a Wal-Mart sized wooden boat ventilated through a carefully described one-square-cubit window in which every species on Earth that would be killed by such a flood -- which would be damn near every species on Earth -- was preserved. It describes a creation process for humans that never happened and is directly contradicted by the fossil record, introduced as an equally absurd explanation of theodicy -- the contradiction between believing in a compassionate and loving God and the existence of evil. It asserts that the Earth is the center of all things, floats on the ocean, and is surmounted by a solid bowl of sky hung with lights and pierced with holes through which God pours rain. It asserts that the stars can be shaken down by things like Earthquakes.
The "history" of the Bible is equally absurd and is contradicted repeatedly by archeology. Again it is difficult to know where to begin, but Tubal Cain as an "artificer of iron" is an excellent example, given that any Biblical timeline would put Tubal Cain several thousand years before the iron age. Iron, in other words, literally hadn't been invented yet. There isn't a shred of evidence outside of the assertions of the Bible itself that Moses ever existed (any more than there is evidence for Adam and Eve, or Noah, or any of the other figures from Genesis or Exodus). Jesus clearly was not omniscient or clued in on this, as he asserted on more than one occasion that Noah and the flood was a real person and real event (generally when predicting a similar apocalyptic event that never happened).
Besides, even if the Bible (old testament) were a nearly perfect history, instead of an obvious collection of fables, myths, legends, a mish-mosh of earlier Sumerian legends that dates no earlier than the first thousand years or so BCE that would not constitute any sort of evidence for the truth of its creation myths, any more than the creation myths of the Hindu religion are "proven" when somebody discovers that e.g. Mathura from the Mahabharata actually existed at some point in the past. I can write entire fantasies about (say) the Civil War with all sorts of characters that never existed and events that never happened and yet salt the story with references to things that did happen and people that did exist. I can even insert space aliens, or (in the case of the Iliad) with Gods. Does the Greek pantheon of Gods actually exist because they are characters in the Iliad and we've now discovered the site of ancient Troy? Does this prove Greco-Roman paganism, creation myth and all?
Look. I mean that quite literally. Forget the big bang and just look. You can, if you look for it, find and follow the entire historical argument and evidence for estimates of the size and age of the Universe. It isn't hidden, and isn't mysterious. Nor is it the product of "scientists with an agenda" unless that agenda is doing their best to figure out what really happened by letting the world speak for itself rather than taking an antique mythology written
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
While Christians believe that this text is authoritative, like any text (whether Christian, Muslim, Jew or not even religious in nature at all) it means absolutely nothing in itself. It means something only when combined with a rule of interpretation which is external to the text. This has been pretty well understood outside religious circles since De Saussure's discovery of l'arbitraire du signe over a century ago. With Christianity, the fact that this religion existed for several decades before the compilation of any texts makes it pretty clear that calling the Bible -- and not the tradition that predates it -- the ultimate source of Christian belief is inaccurate.
It is fair to note that we have never observed an act of creation, in the literal sense. Indeed, the correct statement of the relevant, empirically supported physics is:
Mass-energy is neither created nor destroyed, but simply changes form.
More sophisticated field-theoretic statements conserve "information" as fundamentally as mass-energy, but the point is that these are conservation laws, things we have never observed to fail in an enormous range of observations and experiments and spacetime scales ranging from cosmology to the smallest scales we can currently measure.
The really, really interesting question is why anyone would have a "creation" theory for anything, given that we have yet to make a single concrete observation of a creation event of any sort, anywhere, at any time, or even find a way of inferring that such an event once upon a time might of occurred. All we have ever observed is things that already existed changing form. The Universe we can observe is a dance of existing stuff back as far as we can see in time, away as far as we can see in space, at all scales from the largest to the smallest that we can measure.
There is an interesting information theoretic argument that essentially proves that for an omniscient God to not be inconsistent, it has to be the Universe. In order to be omniscient and self-knowledgeable, the irreducible information content of God has to precisely match the irreducible information content of the Universe, defining the Universe as everything that exists (which must include God, if God exists). All of our observations of "sentience" or a sense of passing time involve entropy, and our understanding of reasoning and sentience as a dynamical state that changes over time further suggests that it is almost certainly meaningless to assign a property such as "sentience" to a Universe per se, no matter how complex, and the assertion of entropy as a measure of state change over time contradicts zero-entropy perfect knowledge. So there isn't any really great reason to conclude that the Universe is any sort of sentient God, but that's pretty much the only model (besides God as the really big and powerful but entirely mortal and time-bound space alien with technology that looks like magic) that isn't egregiously inconsistent.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I think at that point it is more about Linguistics, Philosophy, Neuroscience than actual physics.
Other than in Math which can get very conceptual, human thought likes to deal with discrete things. Stuff like Infinite, Everything, Nothing, or anything that is an absolute is very difficult to process. We like to label things, we like to describe things. In describing something you are by nature encapsulating it into a known value. In many cases we describe things in absolute terms, even those things rarely are. Anytime you do this you are describing a barrier, and when we think of barriers, one of the defining elements is that there are two sides, one is separated from the other. You can't have a barrier with something on one side, and nothing on the other, there is always something on the other side. Hence if everything is contained within the big bang, where does the big bang reside, ad nauseam. My favorite example is that of a simple apple. We define an apple by its apparent observable boundary, of its skin. When in in reality, it is comprised of particles that are constantly in a state of flux vibrating and moving. At best we might be able to describe it in an equation that describes the movements of the particles in relation to each other within the apple, and visually we simply apply a threshold of what we can observe to define it more easily. However if you delve smaller and smaller, you have more to describe, much as I expect as with the Higgs. Who is to say what is beyond that to further describe to have a better understanding of the physics involved. We are limited by what we can observe. When it comes down to it, everything is everything, but that is hardly really useful information.
On top of all that there is the question of why we are limited in this way to labeling and describing things, that do not translate very well to these kinds of debates. Why can we not think in such a matter to understand these principles better. There is the debate which is a bit of a chicken or the egg argument, does how we think define our language, or does our manner of communication and language define how we think. One might argue that our ability to reason (or even basic communication of anything) is an evolutionary trait designed to pass information from one to another for the purposes of survival (and by extension procreation). This seems to be mostly the facilitation of the brain processing abstract ideas to discrete descriptions and vice versa. However as mentioned earlier there is some difficulty with that likely mostly dependent on what we can physically observe. Perhaps an apt example (maybe) might be the translation between digital and analog. It is not always exact, and is done using accepted thresholds of meaning.
Anyway one of the larger problems as I see it, is that we have disciplines like physics that generally speaking use observation and highly conceptual mathematics to try and describe the universe around us. However the further we get away from what we can physically observe, we are left with trying to use reason to explain what we cannot observe, and when trying to do so translating conceptual ideas of infinite, etc... generated by mathematics into rational arguments it is impossible to do so.
So until we are able to breach this linguistic/Neuroscience barrier of how we communicate/think, I think we will have a very hard time describing the universe past a certain point both at a macro and a micro level using physics (other than to say that math is telling us stuff we don't understand and we build physical constructs to try to explain it away).
At this point I probably need some weed or a lobotomy or something.
We have no way of assigning probability to initial conditions of the universe because we don't anything about the space of possible universes. We can't even say that probability was involved. We already know that the universe began in a low entropy state, so a naive estimate of the probability of our universe is vanishingly small. So there must be some reason for the universe to start in a low entropy state, and until we understand that reason, we can't make any sense of initial probabilities.
The difference is that the current big bang theory requires the existence of the laws of physics and a quantum fluctuation with about the energy equivalent of 13 lbs of matter.
Most god theories require a sentient, frequently omniscient and omnipotent, entity capable of creating the entire universe. Judeo-Christian-related faiths also require that this omniscient, omnipotent entity likes to meddle in his creations' lives but suddenly decided to be a lot more discreet around 2000 years ago.
I think you need to add one more key component to your scientific philosophy to distinguish it from similar religious claims:
4) laws discovered by observation are easily communicable to other people
Many religions will claim that through "religious observation" (participation in the rites, prayers, behaviors, etc. of the religious community), the "laws of God governing the universe" are "discovered". Many individual religious adherents will claim that, through their "spiritual development" and "mystical experience" from "religious observance," they personally see with ever greater clarity proofs of the divine power ordering the cosmos. However, such "proofs" remain intensely personal, and the only way for another person to "be enlightened" is to embark on their own life-long "spiritual journey" ("I know the truth... but I can't just explain it; you have to experience it for yourself").
The "communication component" of "scientific philosophy" is a key distinction from the "personal discovery of objective Truth" in religious practice. Perhaps I personally have to become as "pure and spiritual" as a great religious guru to "discover" the truths evident to him; however, I don't have to be as smart as Einstein to see how Einstein's relativistic theories describe observable features of the universe. Over time, scientific concepts that once could only be understood by the few most enlightened scientific minds become communicable and accessible to an ever greater range of people --- a high school student today can learn Newton's orbital mechanics.
Likely primarily his Catholicism. The prevailing "scientific" model of the time, the Steady State theory, would have been much less "harmonious" with the "creation event" notion presented by Christianity. This would naturally motivate him to investigate to reconcile his belief with the scientific facts.
And so, we now have the correct science, harmonious with the religious framework, as accepted, and the erroneous model forwarded previously by "scientific consensus" refuted. Seems like a straightforward progression to me, and probably more work than its worth in this case for you to try the standard attempt to twist the two into opposition.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I sincerely doubt you are an atheist because you capitalize god [...]
That's very silly. It's a convention to write "God" when you're talking about the the supreme being (like the Christian God, as opposed to other gods like Zeus, where "god" is usually not capitalized), even if you don't believe in it.
See for instance Wikipedia: in "God"
In theism, God is the creator and sustainer of the universe. In deism, God is the creator (but not the sustainer) of the universe.
But in "Zeus"
He is the god of sky and thunder in Greek mythology.
Judeo-Christian-related faiths also require that this omniscient, omnipotent entity likes to meddle in his creations' lives but suddenly decided to be a lot more discreet around 2000 years ago.
"The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist". A trick that was also used by Keyser Söze and apparently now God.
lucm, indeed.
The followers of Arius, who thought themselves Christians and believed that only they had Christianity right, believed that while Jesus was a superhuman entity, he was not identical with the Creator.
Just to clarify here, it is not mainline Trinitarian doctrine that they are "identical", either. Going back to Athanasius, proper rendering of the concept of the Trinity requires "Neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance". Considering them as "identical" would violate the first criteria.
Since misrepresenting the history and concept of this seems to be an shared avenue of attack of, oddly, both atheists and Mormons, I think it worth noting--even though I take from your post the implications of the word choice were probably inadvertent. "Three entities, one essence" seems a good way to verbalize what has always been the Trinitarian doctrine into modern parlance.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
How many elephants in the room can fit through the eye of the needle?
I'm going to say it isn't helpful to make the assumption that Christians are exactly what you think they are. You're not a Christian, so you don't have the right to throw around definitions. Different Christians have different beliefs about the Bible. Some think it literal truth, some think it the writings of people who were doing their best to write down some incredibly important truths. I've known both. Moreover, the Bible isn't particularly consistent in many ways, and picking out individual verses is a really bad way to try to win an argument with some Christians. A devout friend of mine relishes confusing those who pick out their favorite verses and build their beliefs on them.
I suspect you get annoyed by some of the stupid things some Christians say about atheists. You're mirroring that, by saying things about Christians that many (perhaps most) Christians would see as stupid and wrong about them.
Depending on the definitions you've selected, you can have a square circle. Heck, the closest thing to a square I can draw on the surface of the Earth includes circles. Moreover, this looks to me very like the concept that something cannot be a wave and a particle both, because the usual definitions of those are contradictory. When definitions disagree with reality, definitions are useless. Nor can definitions be used to find necessary truths that pertain to the Universe, since we never know how the definitions can be subtly wrong.
Sure about that? It seems to me that physics was pretty well agreed on in the late 1800s. There were known problems, like black-body radiation, the photoelectric effect, and the unusual results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, but people were fairly well agreed on what they did know. That didn't last, and our great success in coming up with extremely useful theories and experimenting with them has led to more diverging opinions than before.
Sure about that? How much have you studied it? My experience is that it becomes more precise with more study, and that you find certain basic similarities among religions that are fairly specific. Obviously there's a whole lot of disagreement (you can show with a little knowledge of religion and a World Almanac that over half the people on Earth are necessarily wrong on some very important points of religion), but that's not the same thing as vagueness.
Look, it's fine that you're an atheist. It's fine that you don't have the desire to learn much about Christianity and Christians (and other religions and their adherents). However, if you ever wish to convince anybody by argument, you're going to have to learn more about what you're talking about.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If we postulate the goldfish in a fishbowl have free will, you can still make a large number of definitive statements about their outcome. Free choices and ultimate ends are two entirely different things.
But we are not just talking about outcomes, we're talking about omniscience, literally knowing *everything*, including the actual choice before it was made.
Omniscience is incompatible with free will.
Knowing the outcome of every choice before it was made means that everything is preordained.
A simple example:
There's a 1/4 cup of cold tea in front of me. I can either finish it or throw the tea remainder away (I have done both in similar situations in the past).
If an omniscient entity already knows, as I am typing this sentence, whether I will drink it or not, then there is no choice, as I cannot not possibly choose the opposite action. And if I could, then the entity is not omniscient.
You cannot hypothesize that scientific discovery is driven by faith, when there have been a plurality of faiths, including none at all, involved in making discoveries major and minor over the years.
"I think Thy thoughts after Thee, O God!" -- Johannes Kepler
I'm not really interested in chasing your particular equivocation of "faith", as based on your rationale here, I have the sense that would be quite a semantic chase.
That there have been a plurality of faiths has nothing to do with whether a particular scientific discovery is facilitated or informed by faith. Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto--insofar as the individual's motivation or overall metaphysical axioms (one of which being the quite-unprovable notion science is quite thoroughly dependent on, that of identity, that things consistently are what they are and continue to behave as they are) structure or guide an individual's process of discovery in any sense, the science is to that degree "driven" by that.
One may, indeed, propose that -all hypotheses-, and by extension, -all scientific progress-, is driven by faith, in that -by definition- a hypothesis is unproven, indeed, untested at the point of proposal. I'm not sure what notion of "faith" you are using, and I suspect we'd quite disagree on it, but if it means "provisional acceptance based on limited information", as actual theists would use it, rather that it being used as no theists actually do to semantically fit a pre-built argument (cf. Dawkins) it is essential to all scientific progress.
You will find many other referenced first-hand positions on how faith had facilitated the science of scientists, by the scientists themselves, here.
Perhaps you can indeed project into their brains a more-accurate recounting of their thoughts than they know themselves, and then inform us of it, but I quite doubt it. I suggest starting with your better-known-by-you-then-they-themselves rendering of the cognitive processes of Planck, Heisenberg, and Maxwell, as listed.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
You are getting confused by your own abstractions.
No, I am not.
Your stipulation is that the entity is "omniscient". We'll go with the meaning of "knows all facts about all things that are" as the meaning for the purposes of discussion, as you appear to be using it.
This is your definition, not mine. Please do not put words in my mouth, thank you.
I referred to what is sometimes called "total" omniscience, that is knowledge of everything, period.
You referred to what is sometimes called "inherent" omniscience, that is knowledge of everything that can be known, with the added stipulation that the future cannot be.
Now, if you exclude the future from the realm of knowledge then there is indeed no conflict with the existence of free will. However, all the religious people that I discussed the subject with, claimed that the scriptures support the notion that god does know the future, i.e., his omniscience is total.
Now, you may disagree with that claim, and that would be fine, but don't start calling other people "confused" just because you failed to ascertain which of the (legitimate!) definitions they used.
So, here is the core of it. If there is free will, there is no "the future". "The future" contains no "things" as part of that "everything", to know about.
You are begging the question.
If there is no free will, then there is a "future" to know.
But that's a theological question for another day
This started as a theological question.
my point here is simply that your argument does not follow
My argument was, and and still is, that the ability to know (not just model) the future implies predetermination which in turn is incompatible with the existence of free will. Either may be possible, but not both.
How exactly does it differ from your argument?
A theory can be invalidated by fact and field observation? This is the end of science as we believe it.... Wait, wait, wait... But this IS real SCIENCE...