Does everything need a cause or do some things not have a cause?

And what would be the cause of the cause of the Big Bang. We assume that everything must have a cause, but that cycle needs to be broken one time. There is always a bigger "why". In order for us to exist, there was once an event in the past with no cause

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

The cause is the formation and allowability of/and for the effect. It is a contradiction in terms to suggest an existent as being, without being an effect from cause. There must always be an allowability. Were someone to tell you otherwise would be to enter the realm of mythical mysticism.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

There is a philosophical problem with various random processes.

It seems strange to say that the output from a random process has a cause. Yet a process like radioactive decay produces energy/particles & the actual process is well understood.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Yes action needs has a cause. But, for the initial action, the initial cause didn't occur until after.

 

Let's say for the sake of argument that your question:

"Does everything have a cause?"

Can be translated into the more formal idea that we live in a universe of events. If you could somehow produce a list of all events in the universe, only some of them will be observable at a given time and location, while others will not.

There will, in general, be a great many more events that you cannot observe from a particular time and location ( Minkowski light cone) than events that you can observe.

If a first event "causes" a second event to occur in some manner, many cases are possible. You may be able to observe the first but not the second, the second but not the first, or you may not be able to observe either event. The events may also be decoupled. If a first event is unrelated to a second event (also possible) it may be difficult to impossible to make that determination as well.

Our experience tells us that everything over which we have some direct influence or control has a cause, even if we cannot observe all of the causes that contribute to a certain effect.

Gravity evidently has no known cause (yet), other than proximity to a gravitating body. This is a rather big unknown cause of certain behaviors, as we generally expect things to fall toward the center of the Earth when dropped from a distance above its surface, for unknown reason or cause, or else to remain on its surface unless they are separated from it by mechanical or other force.

 

The answers on this thread so far are saturated with agnosticism - i.e. "we do not know whether or what the Big Bang has (as) a cause". If instead we accept that the universe is infinite in space and time - i.e. setting the Big Bang aside as a mere one-sided interpretation of data - the question of causality is readily answered in the affirmative for all physical interactions.

FOLZONI

 

An infinite Universe does not invalidate the BB.

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/infpoint.html

 

What utter nonsense.

 

I'll try and answer the above invalid inference another way.
The BB does not say anything about the how, why, or the first Planck/quantum instant or from the moment spacetime [ as we know it] came into existence and started to evolve.
Infinity may well have existed at the quantum/Planck scale if the Universe is infinite.

 

Randomness in a process appears to be so because it is way beyond our ability to analyze it in the depth and manner needed to understand what all is happening. If we could account for and understand everything involved in a die roll, we could say what the result would be each time.

 

"Does everything need a cause or do some things not have a cause?"

Why do you ask?

You didn't have to.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Elte: From your Post #30

The above is a common, but erroneous Point of View.

It has been well established that there are random processes. Radioactive decay is one known to most people with a bit a education in physics. Various quantum level processes produce random data & are therefore considered to be random.

The Uncertainty Principle surely supports the notion of random processes.

Determinism is a 19th century notion long discarded by modern physicists.

If you believe that there are no random processes, you are forced to accept the notion that the history of the last hundred years would repeat with no change in any detail if it were possible to start over again as of 100 years ago.

BTW: Few if any knowledgeable people believe that dice throws are predictable in practice, but many believe they are theoretically predictable.

Those who believe that dice throws are theoretically predictable view dice & other objects to be solid in some classical physics sense of the notion. Actually, they are mostly empty space & the interactions are electromagnetic in nature. Surface electrons interact & electromagnetic forces produce the illusion of solidity.

I suppose that if the necessary data could be collected & if the pertinent calculations could be performed in real time, the results of dice throws could be predicted with some degree of accuracy. I doubt that even in principle 100% predictability could be achieved. For 100% predictability, it would be necessary to take into account quantum level interactions.

BTW: Felt gaming tables would be expected to significantly cut down the predictability & even smooth solid walls & floors would require consideration of quantum level interactions.

 

Yes... if determinism was true ther woud be no such thang as free will.!!!

 

What you say is true if we accept that infinity...

...is merely the repetition of an existing situation like a toy train circling endlessly on a circular track - the spacetime geodesics of the Big Bang.

However the reference you provide is startlingly different! To paraphrase the reference: If the observable universe was once a physically limited 'point', the unobservable universe was yet not so! Wow!

FOLZONI

 

Usually the Big Bang is said to be the beginning of spacetime as well as matter...

...but your words imply the opposite for an infinite universe. See my short posting in philosophy on non-monist materialism. That is the underlying philosophical issue you are trying to debate here; it is not a question physics or astronomy can address directly & completely.

The Big Bang is a mistaken inference from the data. We already know this because, based on certain isotope decay rates, some stars are estimated to be 17 billion years old (see the work of Jayant Narlikar), older than the Big Bang. Rather, we only appear to be at the center of an explosion of galaxies that are literally forming before our eyes, plasma condensing into galaxies which then mutually repel to create the phenomena we see.

For everything to have a cause we have to accept the existence of time & space as separate ontological entities, hence their separation cannot be denied by postulating hypothetical origins such as Big Bang.

FOLZONI

 

Greetings, dinosaur.

A very appropriate reply which gets to heart of the issue of determinism - good to see that your kind has not died out, though there are many (not me for sure!) who wish you would!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

FOLZONI

 

No they do not. The BB indeed was an evolution of space and time [henceforth called spacetime] "AS WE KNOW THEM"
There state or otherwise from the t=0 to t+10-43 seconds is unknown and outside the parameters of the BB.

That paragraph is pure codswallop. The BB/Inflationary model, matches observations so well, it is in the top echalon of certainty with regards to scientific theories.
If you have anything invalidating what we see, or any new model with evidence to support it, then get it properly peer reviewed. I dare say you have nothing though.
And of course we have no evidence for any star being older then the Universe, after measurments have been checked and error bars allowed for.
But don't take my word for it.
I did E-mail a cosmologist on that very issue after a similar erroneous inference by someone else....
here was his reply....

More pseudoquackery.
We have evidence of the highest order of certainty for the BB.
If you have any evidence or any hypothesis with supporting data to invalidate it, then get it peer reviewed.

It is logically possible, although still rather speculative, that the Universe/space/time was the ultimate free lunch.....

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A Universe from Nothing

by Alexei V. Filippenko and Jay M. Pasachoff

Insights from modern physics suggest that our wondrous universe may be the ultimate free lunch.

Adapted from The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium, 1st edition, by Jay M. Pasachoff and Alex Filippenko, © 2001. Reprinted with permission of Brooks/Cole, an imprint of the Wadsworth Group, a division of Thomson Learning.


In the inflationary theory, matter, antimatter, and photons were produced by the energy of the false vacuum, which was released following the phase transition. All of these particles consist of positive energy. This energy, however, is exactly balanced by the negative gravitational energy of everything pulling on everything else. In other words, the total energy of the universe is zero! It is remarkable that the universe consists of essentially nothing, but (fortunately for us) in positive and negative parts. You can easily see that gravity is associated with negative energy: If you drop a ball from rest (defined to be a state of zero energy), it gains energy of motion (kinetic energy) as it falls. But this gain is exactly balanced by a larger negative gravitational energy as it comes closer to Earth’s center, so the sum of the two energies remains zero.

The idea of a zero-energy universe, together with inflation, suggests that all one needs is just a tiny bit of energy to get the whole thing started (that is, a tiny volume of energy in which inflation can begin). The universe then experiences inflationary expansion, but without creating net energy.

What produced the energy before inflation? This is perhaps the ultimate question. As crazy as it might seem, the energy may have come out of nothing! The meaning of “nothing” is somewhat ambiguous here. It might be the vacuum in some pre-existing space and time, or it could be nothing at all – that is, all concepts of space and time were created with the universe itself.

Quantum theory, and specifically Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, provide a natural explanation for how that energy may have come out of nothing. Throughout the universe, particles and antiparticles spontaneously form and quickly annihilate each other without violating the law of energy conservation. These spontaneous births and deaths of so-called “virtual particle” pairs are known as “quantum fluctuations.” Indeed, laboratory experiments have proven that quantum fluctuations occur everywhere, all the time. Virtual particle pairs (such as electrons and positrons) directly affect the energy levels of atoms, and the predicted energy levels disagree with the experimentally measured levels unless quantum fluctuations are taken into account.

Perhaps many quantum fluctuations occurred before the birth of our universe. Most of them quickly disappeared. But one lived sufficiently long and had the right conditions for inflation to have been initiated. Thereafter, the original tiny volume inflated by an enormous factor, and our macroscopic universe was born. The original particle-antiparticle pair (or pairs) may have subsequently annihilated each other – but even if they didn’t, the violation of energy conservation would be minuscule, not large enough to be measurable.

If this admittedly speculative hypothesis is correct, then the answer to the ultimate question is that the universe is the ultimate free lunch! It came from nothing, and its total energy is zero, but it nevertheless has incredible structure and complexity. There could even be many other such universes, spatially distinct from ours.
http://www.astrosociety.org/publications/a-universe-from-nothing/
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


And yes, it is speculation, but a speculative scenario well within the current laws of physics and GR, and initiated by someone with necessary learning in the field to the highest degree.

Your own speculative nonsense falls rather short in that regard.

 

Gonna need a reference for that!

Even if you knew the mass of the star in question, since radioactive decay rates are both time and weak force sensitive, you would have to know exactly where in the star's gravity well the decay was taking place. The clock rate slows as the gravitational potential increases, which should result in a slowing of the decay rate from our perspective.., but the weak force which drives the decay rate, would at the same time increase with mass density, which would speed up the decay rate....

Too many unknowns for any reference I can imagine to be more than theoretical speculation! Not a good start for arriving at an estimate like that, at least for your apparent purpose. Though I am sure someone has made estimates along those lines, they likely included a great deal more qualifications than suggested in your comment.

 

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

I do remember a couple of incidents [no more then two] around 10 to 15 years ago, re that same supposed problem.
And I also remember that it was resolved within probable error bars and other precision limitations with stellar measurements.
The proverbial storm in a teacup, just as our cosmologist friend Brent Tully [whom I E-Mailed] inferred.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Some of our more anti anti anti BB friends and there agendas are grasping at straws to raise that long dead already solved issue.

 

And yet you raise an issue with age calculations, of one or two stars [among many billions of stars] and all the relevant data that would be needed to calculate within reasonable tolerances, to invalidate the BB/Inflationary model that is overwhelmingly supported by data from state of the art equipment like COBE, WMAP and other obvious data...WOW!!!!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!