A Universe from Nothing: Not that hard to understand.

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by paddoboy, Feb 3, 2017.

  1. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    The same thing can be said of Lawrence Krauss. In fact, I think that Krauss is even worse than Dawkins in that regard. Like Dawkins, he's another of the "new atheists" and seems to have produced his 'A Universe from Nothing' book in hopes of demolishing what he believes is the last redoubt of theism. That's why Dawkins was so effusive in his praise, comparing Krauss to Darwin. Darwin knocked theism's design argument back on its heels in Dawkins' estimation, and Dawkins believes/hopes Krauss just did the same to the first-cause argument. Unfortunately Krauss has never studied philosophy, believes that the entire subject is bullshit, and makes elementary logical and conceptual blunders as a result. Most notably, he's confusing physical vacuum and all the quantum-field-theory processes that are supposed to occur there with non-existence. That results in his whole argument being little more than petitio principii with lots of physics jargon attached to obscure his argument's fundamental circularity.

    Here's David Albert's rather scathing New York Times review of Krauss' A Universe from Nothing. Albert is a very prominent philosopher of science (with a PhD in theoretical physics) who teaches at Columbia University.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html


    Here's Krauss' response to Albert, in which Krauss makes a thorough fool of himself in my opinion, while revealing his anti-religious motivations.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/

    And here's some comments on the controversy by Cal Tech physics professor Sean Carroll who seems to mostly agree with Albert and with the points that I've been making in this thread.

    http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2012/04/28/a-universe-from-nothing/

    Apparently Krauss holds grudges and didn't take kindly to Albert's review. Both Albert and Krauss were scheduled to speak later on the something-from-nothing controversy at the Museum of Natural History's planetarium in NYC and Albert was suddenly disinvited and told not to come by the planetarium's director and event-organizer Neil Tyson. Albert believes that Krauss told Tyson that it was either 'him or me'. (Professors behaving badly, it's nothing new.)


     
    Last edited: Feb 6, 2017
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  3. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Well, well. So my suspicions about Dawkins in this context were spot-on. How predictable the man is!

    And that is a really good book review - by a (rather annoyed) prof of philosophy, of course.

    According to modern physics, particles of matter can be represented as excitations of fields. And so Krauss says you can have a universe with no particles, just the fields. But the fields are themselves complex physical entities, obeying set laws of behaviour such that particles can and do arise from them. So where has this got us? Nowhere really, just yet another Russian doll inside the previous one.
     
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  5. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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  7. dumbest man on earth Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Valued Senior Member

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    - Yazata
    - exchemist

    It is nice that there are educated members of Sciforums that are able to, and prefer to, engage in considered, intelligent and rational discussion!
    A tip of my hat to the both of you!

    It would seem that, whether Layman, Academic or Scientist - some cannot help but to, or possibly choose to, allow their beliefs, fears or imaginations to supplant any such truly considered, intelligent and rational discourse.
     
  8. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Yes I've read things by Pigliucci before and he always makes sense to me.

    What he reveals about Krauss, in the interview he reports, is pretty damning actually. In the course of it Krauss has to admit he has NOT solved the problem of origins and thus that the title of his book is just a highly misleading publicity stunt. In the process, this reveals that Dawkins's simple-minded endorsement of it shows he has either missed this entirely (to put it charitably) or else is engaged in a confidence trick on the public (to put it less so).

    That is Dawkins sitting next to Krauss in the picture, isn't it?
     
  9. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    The guy has no less than three doctorates. I never knew that, it's kind of extraordinary. One is in Genetics from the University of Ferarra in Italy and another is in Botany from the University of Connecticut. Pigliucci did work in evolutionary biology that won some recognition, before swerving into the Philosophy of Science, earning a Ph.D. in that subject from the University of Tennessee. So he obviously has knowledge and experience in science as well as philosophy. I've always felt that philosophers of science should have training in the sciences as well as philosophy.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Pigliucci

    It looks like Dawkins but I can't be sure.
     
    Last edited: Feb 6, 2017
  10. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Must be a "moron", though, if he's a philosopher. Apparently.

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  11. dumbest man on earth Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Valued Senior Member

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    ...of interest to some may be the Video/Movie/DVD : "The Unbelievers" - released in 2013.
    I thought that it was a kind of a "Cult of Personality", I/We should be adored/idolized/worshiped exercise, but...

    Honestly, I see nothing at all wrong with promoting Science. In addition, I firmly believe in and support the advancement of the Real Sciences - whether Experimental or Theoretical(although some here at Sciforums seem to believe, or at least state/claim/assert that "Theoretical science, and scientific theory are one and the same." ?!
    I find it entirely distasteful, however, to simply engage in attacking others beliefs(Religious or Moral), views and cultures to somehow attain...what...?...Fame?...Adulation?

    ...if interested - imdb Link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2636522/
     
  12. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Interesting discussions...Yet still no one can give any possible scientific alternative to a "universe from nothing"

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  13. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    More labels? How about the simple fact of scientific research, the application of the scientific method, and reasonable speculation?
    How about as per the Sagan video, simply couragious question/s that dare question thousands of years of mythical ID?
    Again, all I need is a viable scientific alternative to the universe from nothing.
    I have plenty of time.

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  14. dumbest man on earth Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Valued Senior Member

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    - Post #50 -
    - https://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html
    - http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/a-universe-from-nothing/
    - http://www.space.com/24781-big-bang-theory-alternatives-infographic.html
    - http://www.space.com/31465-is-our-universe-just-one-of-many-in-a-multiverse.html

    Odd, from your Posts in this Thread , it would seem that you revel in slathering people and ideas with "Labels"!!
    - "non scientific ID arguments"
    - "the extra baggage that one needs to accept if we go to the uniscientific ID aspect"
    - "omnipotent, all powerful, immortal being"
    - "paranormal, supernatural, and anti science nonsense"
    - "troll"
    - "omnipotent all powerful "personality" "
    - "uneccessary IDer or such"
    - "any Tom, Dick and Harry"
    - "others that in most cases are simply applying their "god of the gaps" and ID fanaticism."
    - "these turkeys"
    - "upstarts to come on a science forum, and driven by agendas [which a lot are] deride these reputable people."
    - "mythical ID"
    ...applying some of that time to some actual diligent research or possibly even a small amount of a proper academic scientific education might, if you would allow or accept it, possibly provide a plethora of "viable scientific alternative" 's...

    Would you possibly accept a little input from the Australian Astrophysicist, Luke Barnes ?
    : https://letterstonature.wordpress.c...know-before-you-hear-the-krauss-craig-debate/
     
    Last edited: Feb 6, 2017
  15. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    As Sagan said in his "Pale Blue Dot" narrative, cosmology is a humbling and character-building experience: Its far more than that. It has done more than any other scientific discipline to reveal the myths that humanity has needed to explain that which cosmology explains........
    The BB/Inflationary theory of the universe is the overwhelmingly accepted model we have of the evolution of spacetime. It fits in snugly with GR and our explantion of the macro objects we see today and how all that arose from the first formation of matter.
    With all that as a firm foundation, science has been able to speculate above and beyond, with reasonable certainty, and although while certain aspects remain speculative, it seems obvious that a universe from nothing, no matter what definition of nothing one chooses to prevail, the universe that we inhabit, essentially arose from that nothing. While various methodologies have been speculated such as multiverses etc, we always will arrive back at "nothing"
    This universe from nothing, by whatever methodology, is still the only legit scientific solution to what we see, despite the gnashing of teeth, wring of hands and any other emotional outbursts by those that like to again raise those long held, unscientific ancient mythical beliefs from a period when humanity was still ignorant of the science in everything around him.
     
  16. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    27,543
    I am often reminded of a lecture Professor Stephen Hawking once gave.....
    It was after of course that the BB was generally established and with regards to how Hawking and Penrose had applied the Singularity at t-0 or the "beginning"
    It was at a conference at the Vatican on cosmology, when that great astronomer/cosmologists the Pope, said emphatically that it was OK to study the universe after the BB, but that they should not delve into the beginning itself, because that was the moment of creation, and the work of God. [or words to that effect]

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    As I mentioned earlier, perhaps a future validated QGT may reveal more of the exact mechanism and methodology of how the Universe essentially arose from nothing.
     
  17. dumbest man on earth Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Valued Senior Member

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    So, paddoboy, you seem to be imagining, hallucinating or possibly fantasizing said : "...the gnashing of teeth, wring of hands and any other emotional outbursts by those that like to again raise those long held, unscientific ancient mythical beliefs from a period when humanity was still ignorant of the science in everything around him."

    Would you find no enjoyment, paddoboy, in actually participating in honest, earnest and intelligent discussions?
    Must all your Posts essentially boil down to simple ad hominem attacks (i.e. attacking the person, not the argument) ?

    At any rate, to again reiterate what Yazata stated, in his Post #55 of this Thread : "...unverifiable speculations mustn't be misrepresented as authoritative scientific answers."
     
  18. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    I suppose offending philosophy and Philosophers was always going to be a risky business!

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    How dare they!

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    In the meantime.......

    http://bigthink.com/think-tank/scie...lain-the-meaning-of-life-with-edward-o-wilson

    Biologist Edward O. Wilson, a two-time Pulitzer Prize recipient and the author of the new book The Meaning of Human Existence, knew that it was vital that he define "meaning" early on in his book, lest he be attacked by a hornet's nest of philosophers. Thus, he identifies the meaning of meaning as:

    What are we and why?

    Where do we come from?

    Where are we most likely to be headed?

    Wilson believes those questions cannot be explained with religion for two reasons. First, because every religious faith has a different creation story that, almost categorically, is in competition with every other creation story. Second, because every religious faith is a product of human culture. To assume that human culture can explain meaning is to put a whole lot of trust in introspection, yet Wilson says we can't discover meaning just by thinking about it. The facts lie elsewhere.

    This is also why Wilson believes philosophy is ill-equipped to tackle the meaning of existence. In fact, the storied biologist has few kind words for the field as a whole:

    "I like to say that most of philosophy, which is a declining and highly endangered academic species, incidentally, consists of failed models of how the brain works. So students going into philosophy have to learn what Descartes thought and then after a long while why that's wrong and what Schopenhauer might have thought and what Kant might of thought or did think. But they cannot go on from that position and historical examination of the nature of humanity to what it really is and how we might define it."
    more at link...........
    Oh the pain of it all!

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  19. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Here's some more........
    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221268641300037X

    Spontaneous creation of the Universe Ex Nihilo:

    Abstract
    Questions regarding the formation of the Universe and ‘what was there’ before it came to existence have been of great interest to mankind at all times. Several suggestions have been presented during the ages – mostly assuming a preliminary state prior to creation. Nevertheless, theories that require initial conditions are not considered complete, since they lack an explanation of what created such conditions. We therefore propose the ‘Creatio Ex Nihilo’ (CEN) theory, aimed at describing the origin of the Universe from ‘nothing’ in information terms. The suggested framework does not require amendments to the laws of physics: but rather provides a new scenario to the Universe initiation process, and from that point merges with state-of-the-art cosmological models. The paper is aimed at providing a first step towards a more complete model of the Universe creation – proving that creation Ex Nihilo is feasible. Further adjustments, elaborations, formalisms and experiments are required to formulate and support the theory.
    extract:
    "Currently, the most commonly accepted state-of-the-art theory for the Universe creation is the hot Big-Bang theory, stating that the Universe has expanded from a primordial hot and dense initial condition. The Big-Bang theory has been extremely successful in correlating the observable properties of the Universe with the known underlying physical laws [1]. Yet, this theory cannot describe what came before the Big-Bang event and also what happened during the first miniscule time-fraction after the initial Big-Bang (Planck time)."

    extract:
    In the beginning
    According to the newly suggested theory, CEN, in the beginning there was nothing – no material, no energy, no space and no time. This situation was fully symmetric with no entropy. Therefore, this initial state was allegedly static, with no motive for change.

    In terms of information, ‘nothing’ is equivalent to an infinite number of simultaneous Nullifying Information Elements (NIEs) – information elements that co-exist simultaneously and cancel each other. Each such element represents either a being – existence of something, or the cancellation of that existence, no-being. In information terms, such NIEs resemble the notion of “bits.” For convenience, we will use this term throughout the paper, while naming the information element that represents existence as bit+ and the one that represents no-existence as bit−. The number of bits of each type is infinite. Each bit+ element can co-exist simultaneously with each bit− element, or equivalently, can co-exist with all of the bit− elements with an equal probability, and vice versa. To illustrate the above notion, an infinite number of simultaneous, co-existing, bit+ elements and bit−

    Discussion and future work
    This paper presents a model for the Universe creation ‘Ex Nihilo.’ The proposed theory's main advantage is that it does not require any explanations of the physics prior to the Universe creation. This stream of research can also provide an explanation to several unexplained phenomena, such as the second law of thermodynamics, the existence of virtual particles in vacuum, the source of symmetry in the Universe, the evolution of matter and anti-matter, and non-local influences in quantum mechanics.

    The paper provides a first step towards a more complete model of the Universe creation – proving that creation Ex Nihilo is feasible. Further adjustments, elaborations, formalisms and experiments are required to formulate and support the theory. Two of such elaborations include: (1) formulating the mathematics of the dynamicity laws in the Universe platform; and (2) modeling specific mechanisms responsible for the evolvement of observed phenomena in the Universe, and in particular life itself. Such future research could demonstrate how complex and unpredictable phenomena can be generated from a small set of rules, and how it is possible to simulate dynamic life and other computational processes from a small amount of initial information. Possible directions for such future research may be based on the discovery of information structures that maintain ‘life’ properties such as ‘survival,’ ‘growth,’ and ‘duplication’ during changes in the Universe; or representing the evolvement of information in the Universe either as an extended case of a cellular automaton, or as an artificial neuron network.

    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221268641300037X
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  20. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    So again, in spite of the "unverifiable speculations mustn't be misrepresented as authoritative scientific answers" cop out notion, the fact is that they certainly are "authoritive and scientific" while at the same time speculative in methodology aspect, simply again because no other scientific answer exists to explain where or how the universe came into existence, other than ‘Creatio Ex Nihilo’ as aptly named in the previous paper.
     
  21. dumbest man on earth Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Valued Senior Member

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    3,523
    Yet, it seems that you continue to flood these fora with your philosophy.
    And, why does it seem that you introduce Religion into so many of these Threads...
    This is supposed to be a Science Forum, paddoboy!
     
  22. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    27,543
    http://inspirehep.net/record/12227?ln=en

    Creation of Universes from Nothing
    Alexander Vilenkin

    Abstract (Elsevier)
    A cosmological model is proposed in which the universe is created by quantum tunneling from literally nothing into a de Sitter space. After the tunneling, the model evolves along the lines of the inflationary scenario. This model does not have a big-bang singularity and does not require any initial or boundary conditions.
     
  23. dumbest man on earth Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Valued Senior Member

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    ...and again, I cite a "possible scientific alternative to a "universe from nothing" "...
    - see : https://richarddawkins.net/2016/03/no-big-bang-quantum-equation-predicts-universe-has-no-beginning/

    By Lisa Zyga - " The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.

    The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a “Big Bang” did the universe officially begin.

    Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.

    “The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there,” Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org.

    Ali and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, have shown in a paper published in Physics Letters B that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by their new model in which the universe has no beginning and no end." - https://richarddawkins.net/2016/03/no-big-bang-quantum-equation-predicts-universe-has-no-beginning/

    also : http://www.livescience.com/49958-theory-no-big-bang.html
    : https://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html

    - Full .pdf of "Cosmology from quantum potential" available for FREE : https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.3093v3.pdf

    by : Ahmed Farag Ali - Center for Theoretical Physics, Zewail City of Science and Technology, Giza, 12588, Egypt. - Dept. of Physics, Faculty of Sciences, Benha University, Benha, 13518, Egypt.
    and by : Saurya Das - Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Lethbridge, 4401 University Drive, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada T1K 3M4

    "It was shown recently that replacing classical geodesics with quantal (Bohmian) trajectories gives rise to a quantum corrected Raychaudhuri equation (QRE). In this article we derive the second order Friedmann equations from the QRE, and show that this also contains a couple of quantum correction terms, the first of which can be interpreted as cosmological constant (and gives a correct estimate of its observed value), while the second as a radiation term in the early universe, which gets rid of the big-bang singularity and predicts an infinite age of our universe."
    - full .pdf available at Link : https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.3093v3.pdf
     
    Last edited: Feb 6, 2017

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