“Poof There It Is” is an absurd cosmology found in the Uncyclopedia… BUT, I can’t argue better for any other theory. PTII has 3 simple tenets which agree with our best science AND creationism: 1) There was nothing 2) then Poof 3) There it is (our universe).
When you go beyond those three, aren’t you really choosing between flying spaghetti monsters: Big Bang, Branes, Creationism, Strings, etc. There is no agreement on what happened, so really, can we reasonably say we know anything beyond Poof There It Is?
Yeah I remmeber watching a show where Stephan Hawkings and…some other guy were discussing whether they thought God created the universe, they didn’t believe so.
And I was basically waiting for the “and heres why”.
And then… nothing, there basically like, Poof just happened no God.
I was thinking OK, that seems just as unfathomable as the ad infititum turtles holding up the world.
We don’t even know that. It still may be the case, within physics thinking, that ‘something’ has always been around and in some subregion of that ‘something’ Poof, there it is’ occurred and then us.
I recently read… amazon.co.uk/Universe-Nothin … 145162445X
which makes the case that nothing is fertile, basically, and has to be. Me, I consider fertility something. I mean, I can reify with the best of the ‘really everything is logical and rule bound’ crowd.
The state of nothingness is a logical impossibility and provable to logicians. It doesn’t require Science to figure that out, but they seem to be slowly getting the idea. You have to give them time to make sure the right people are getting credit and blame and hide mistakes of their past.
The issue is not either Big Bang or not. It is quite reasonable that the BB was merely a couple of rather huge black holes colliding (assuming that there was any kind of bang at all - still dubious). The Eternal Universe - An Ocean of Motion.
It violates EVERY “law of physics”. All of the laws of physics are based on cause-effect.
There is no such thing as “zero energy”, but even if there were, there is no such thing as “negative energy” to compensate for the “positive energy”. There is either energy or not, there is no positive or negative to it.
“Second [proposed] Law of Thermodynamics” - entropy.
Well I pulled it out of my ass the same way you pulled out that it can be proven to logicians that it is logically impossible for there to be a state of nothing
That’s an excellent post, statiktech! Victor Stenger is a highly respected physicist, whose book that we have, “The Unconscious Quantum” debunks some of the sillier ideas that have popped up around and about quantum mechanics, such notions as inspired Schroedinger to put his cat in the box . I’m not a theoretical mathematician, much less a good one, so I rely on lay presentations of information to understand such things. Stenger is a very well grounded physicist who doesn’t accept anything that isn’t well tested and substantiated, although he will discuss reasonable theories…as theories. No offence to myself and you other fine philosophers here, but in any debate on issues of physics I got to favor Stenger’s word over anything with which we might counter. This is not to say that he is incapable of error. He’s a man, and all men are infested with the disease of fallibility. Only, I think his health in that regard is on the whole better than most of us.
James, your objections to Stenger have hardly been convincing philosophical diatribes. Sorry. You don’t have the mathematics to well understand, and hence to reasonably refute what Stenger is conveying, ideas not of his own conjecture but of the field of physics and quantum mechanics in general. I too find this rather thorny; that the ideas of science are based on some holy script called mathematics to which you and I, common men but not stupid, have no access. It really is disadvantageous to us. But we have our advantages over science too. We can stick our handsome noses into cubby holes where science has nor light nor measure; we can even gaze upon the face of God and debate whether his crown is white gold or platinum.
Science is a work of man, and so it is exposed to error. But I think we as reasonable men and women must accept tentatively those notions of science that are generally accepted by its members, notions like the standard model of physics which thus far have withstood all tests of their validity and truth.
Right back at ya - good post. Thanks for the book recommendation too, I’ll have to check that out.
I am the same way. I don’t claim to be a mathematician or physicist, so I look for explanations I can understand. I think Stenger does a great job at making his material accessible. And it’s obvious that he knows his stuff. He seems quite brilliant to me.
James responded in typical fashion. Whatever I provide, he’ll just turn his nose up and dismiss as “merely wrong”. Unfortunately, this is nothing new.
Samm, I wasn’t trying to be convincing.
As you stated, the people on this forum can only choose truth based on their faith in the Science prophets and preachers.
The alternative is logical deducing and clear thinking.
I merely state provable truths so that anyone might see that there is actually that truth out there.
Convincing them or anyone else is up to how much they really want to know the truth.
. I’m not a theoretical mathematician, much less a good one, so I rely on lay presentations of information to understand such things. Stenger is a very well grounded physicist who doesn’t accept anything that isn’t well tested and substantiated, although he will discuss reasonable theories…as theories. No offence to myself and you other fine philosophers here, but in any debate on issues of physics I got to favor Stenger’s word over anything with which we might counter. This is not to say that he is incapable of error. He’s a man, and all men are infested with the disease of fallibility. Only, I think his health in that regard is on the whole better than most of us.