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

The only credibility gap is your own posts claiming nonsensical hypothesis as faitre complei certainties.
Now once again, if you have anything invalidating present accepted cosmology, or anything supporting any new model you propose, you need to do three things...
[1] Follow the scientific method:
[2] Get it properly peer reviewed:
[3] Take it to the Alternative hypothesis section, at least until it has passed review:

Now if you are instead going to do what all our alternative hypothesis pushers on this site have done, and invoke some conspiracy nonsense with regards to mainstream science and the establishment, don't bother.
We have heard all that before, from others here claiming to have ToE's and the knowledge to rewrite 20th/21st century cosmology.

 

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Nothing wrong in speculative hypothesis, in arenas where science at this time does not have any evidenced based answers. The difficult part for some on this forum, is to accept that it is speculative, and should be discussed as speculation.

But it appears we have a few with one or more maladies, that twists there minds into believing and accepting that what they speculate, automatically over rides long thought out, evidenced based incumbent models of cosmology, formulated and tested and observed over many many years.

What you speculate is a White Hole, and as yet we have no evidence such things can exist.
In essence though, all it is doing is pushing the cause back further.
Others speculate that we could be the "ultimate free lunch"and not need a cause.
see....
https://blogs.stsci.edu/livio/2012/11/13/is-our-universe-the-ultimate-free-lunch/
So it seems, something [the Universe] arising from nothing, [no space, no time, no nothing] is within the boundaries of the laws of physics and GR.

Myself? Your WH speculative hypothesis is one I have had for many years now, but now I find the "Ultimate free lunch" scenario as more logical. Why? Because the WH concept you propose, and that I have often thought about, is simply a case of turtles all the way down.

 

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I have not seen a speculation that the "causality" (assuming Cause/Effect) may not be physical in itself but consists of certain potentials (which in themselves are not physical) but which imply a possible reality. David Bohm calls it the Implicate order, which becomes manifest in Explicate Reality.

example: By definition a vacuum has no physical properties, other tham emptiness. However a vacuum may also be called a form of (negative) potential, where all wave forms have been removed. A hole in the fabric of space, which "demands" to be filled.

It seems to me that the absence of spacetime (pure vacuum) creates a non-physical causality, which results in a physical effect, perhaps a BB?

 

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I had to say something to stick up or myself after it was implied that I was lacking in schooling in Physics.

Does everything have a cause is both a scientific question and a philosophical one. Science needs motivation and guidance from philosophy. A thing that I understand, though, is that scientific investigation lessens uncertainty. If we could ever come to know everything on every level, including the very minutest and most macro levels, uncertainty about anything would be gone.

That is why we should redouble efforts in science research. Indeed, I call for the pursuit of scientific knowledge on how the universe works. It's hard tedious work to make progress, but the effort must be put forth, in my opinion. Consider the extent of the work on just the Large Hadron Collider. Much more work has been done on much, much less worthy causes than that.

Just recently, people were complaining about the Indian government spending $70 million on a Mars orbiter. What good is human existence if basic existence is all it is?

 

The work of Ephraim Fischbach on solar cycle effects & earth orbit position effects is what I am familiar with re variable nuclear decay rates hence my care in using the calculations 15-17 billion years. Nevertheless, the issue of stars older than the apparent age of the universe still stands, as even rpenner admits, since 15 billion years is still too old 'for the Big Bang universe'.

I do not disagree with your agnosticism here as I said, but I also haven't laid out the other evidence indicating that not just stars but whole galaxies must be older than the postulated BB.

I agree of course that meteor dates of 4.5 billion years for the earth & solar system may be well off the true date for some reason - but eventually we will work these things out, especially if we can find meteors produced by stellar explosions outside our local aggregation of stars. Earthy decay rates still constitute a healthy starting point nevertheless.

FOLZONI

 

I had written: "The underlying issue though - as I indicate in the philosophy section under 'Non-Monist Materialism' is that space and time cannot be reduced to matter in the manner of Einstein & Minkowski. By such reductionism, everything is reduced to abstract absurdity."

All the claims you make above are merely philosophical ones in support of Einstein's relativity. By claiming that matter/energy is reduced to spacetime (rather than matter) you are merely varying the condemnatory words I wrote, as I condemn the reduction of the universe to ONE fundamental 'stuff' - whether spacetime (your preference), or what Minkowski called it (space-time-matter) or the use a different terminology it is still monism. Monism denies difference, and it is this monism (& determinism in the form of Parmenides' Block Universe) which is at the bottom of Einstein's relativity, which includes SR, GR and any concocted Unified Field (= Grand Unified) Theory.

Experiments do not & cannot disprove the existence of space - space or spacetime is an apriori philosophical presumption. Space and time are OUTSIDE scientific investigation since scientific investigation can only take place IN space and time. The subjugation of space and time by Einstein (forcing them into spacetime) is a philosophical procedure. We know this to be the case since spacetime creates logical paradoxes when SR is applied i.e. via time dilation & length contraction (TD&LC), the very heart of Special Relativity (SR). What Einstein has done instead is to REDEFINE science on supposedly 'new' principles - despite the fact that all other branches of science accept that space and time are OUTSIDE scientific investigation because they are the area in which matter/energy moves & transforms.

The nature of space and time is a question of philosophy not of physics.

Your last highlighted phrase is mere positivism, trying to pretend that science is fully knowable (in theory, not of course in practice) and that history will prove to be deterministic in the Newtonian-Laplacian manner (with Einsteinian modifications but as Paul Davies explains, invoking Parmenides' Block Universe). Philosophy however also concerns science, particularly in identifying troubles that plague science - notably here Einstein's wretched logical paradoxes that arise from TD&LC.

Returning to the thread topic: when you apply theories that create logical paradoxes by reducing space and time to spacetime you render the question of 'cause' more than problematic - e.g. with Minkowski diagrams hiding the parallel & daughter universe implications of a consistent application of SR for example. But I have to stop here since this forum is NOT the place to set out the alternative to SR, but merely to show that Einstein's relativity reduces the question of causation to mere determinism (whether finite determinism e.g. straight Big Bang, or an 'infinite' type e.g. multiple Big Bangs, inflation, Big Crunches etc.)!

FOLZONI

 

You have demonstrated nothing but ignorance of cosmology, physics and science in general since you got here. Your absurd statements go from "Galaxies seem to be 'exploding' away from an original point" to supporting evidence of relativity "are due to the misinterpretation of data to fit a preconceived notion" to the sublimely bizarre "Darwinian evolution however is the diametric opposite of Einstein's relativity".

I had assumed you were just trolling but maybe you really that confused by science.

edit to add: This is really starting to sound like a reality check sockpuppet.

 

Dear OnlyMe,

There are claims of bigger (brighter) stars than Classical Cepheids, in paddoboy's case the hypothetical Population III stars of extremely low metallicity but very great size & brightness. Candidates for these are still uncertain.

As galaxies evolve, stars as large or larger than the Sun (i.e. capable of the CNO cycle) begin to process He as their interiors become hot enough, forming the heavier elements, an abundance of which indicates Population I stars, these stars being predominant primarily the arms of spiral galaxies. Present evidence on elliptical galaxies indicates that they contain primarily Population II i.e. low metallicity stars. There is thus reason to think that elliptical galaxies process H into He without many of the stars becoming large enough to synthesize the heavier elements - this accounting for the lack of spectral absorption lines in the blue-violet spectral regions. Individual elliptical galaxy stars are essentially impossible to visualize (apart from globular clusters which are closer to us and also comprise Population II stars). Globular clusters however reveal that the stars are very close to one another so that the plasma vortices assembling the stellar material in the first place seem to have formed from a very different mechanism to that of the spiral galaxy arms.

My point is that spiral arms (comprising population I stars) evolve more quickly, producing metals, whereas elliptical galaxy stars evolve more slowly since the stars seem to be smaller & burn fuel much more slowly. How we wish we could see White Dwarfs in elliptical galaxies - then I suspect we could readily demonstrate that some stars in elliptical galaxies will prove much older than those brighter stars in spiral galaxies - since it would seem that the White Dwarfs there must arise from smaller - and thus longer-lived - stars so have not 'nova-spewed' the heavier elements throughout the elliptical galaxies.

The problem is made doubly difficult of course in that any bright star has reused pre-existing material - unless it is big enough to demonstrate that it is actually synthesizing heavier-than-Fe elements from the start e.g. certain C & S stars - so that the existence of 13-14 billion year old stars in spiral galaxies as it stands is sound proof AGAINST a BB "origin of the universe" (since the galactic recession rate - the so-called 'expansion of space' - implies a 'point origin' about 13.7 billion years ago). BB is merely a (mistaken) reification of this observation - but I am getting off topic so will have to present the alternative in the alternatives forum.

So don't believe me - so I approve your agnosticism as I said!

FOLZONI

 

Well said in all respects....
I would just add for the umpteenth time, that if he had more then pseudo quackery ideas of cosmology as he is trying to get us all to believe, he would employ the tried and tested scientific method and peer review.
Points he continually ignores.
I would also suggest that as long as he continues in the same vane as chinglu did....That is discussing, and proposing an alternative hypothesis under some transparent disguise, this thread may well end up in the fringe sections.....
Another point he has so obviously refused to comment on.

 

Ignoring the continued pseudo quackery and as detailed in a couple of links I have given, the manufactured problem of stellar age to invalidate the BB does not exist.
These ages have been refined in recent times, and the fact that out of billions/trillions of stars out there, some manufactured anomaly with just two of them, plus the recognised error margins and precisions of such measurements, sees this as a non event, one that our agenda laden Creationists friends would be apt to raise in there never ending battle against science/cosmology and the fact that it has confined the necessity of any magic deity almost to the dust bin.
No wonder they just keep on keeping on.

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Despite this dragged up "non event" re the ages of two stars [ out of many billions] being older then the suggested age of the Universe, and the explanations given re the error margins in such measurments, another news article just released adds even more explanation to such ridiculous claims, and the agenda behind those pushing such claims......

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http://chandra.harvard.edu/blog/node/517
Thu, 2014-09-18 15:38
How a Planet Can Mess Up a Star's Looks:


Recently, beautiful photos of auroras have been in the news. These colorful light shows were generated by solar storms, and provide a vivid demonstration of activity on the Sun affecting the Earth. The pummeling experienced by our home planet is an example of our one-way relationship with the Sun: it can have a noticeable effect on the Earth, but the Earth has a negligible effect on the Sun. Further afield in the galaxy, this isn't always the case. In a few other systems planets can have a big effect on their star, changing their looks in surprising ways.


As explained in the latest press release from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, an exoplanet called WASP-18b appears to be causing the star it orbits to act much older than it actually is. WASP-18b is an example of a hot Jupiter, with a mass about ten times that of Jupiter and an orbit that is less than 24 hours long. The host star, WASP-18, is estimated to have an age that lies between about 500 million and 2 billion years, relatively young by astronomical standards.

Younger stars tend to be more active stars, with stronger magnetic fields, larger flares, and more intense X-ray emission than their older counterparts. Magnetic activity, flaring, and X-ray emission are linked to the stellar rotation, which generally declines with age. However, when astronomers took a long look with Chandra at WASP-18, they didn’t detect any X-rays. Using established relations between the magnetic activity and X-ray emission of stars and their age indicates that WASP-18 is about 100 times less active than it should be at its age.

The researchers argue that tidal forces from the gravitational pull of the massive planet – similar to those the Moon has on Earth’s tides but on a much larger scale – may have disrupted the magnetic field of the star. The strength of the magnetic field depends on the amount of convection in the star. Convection is the process where hot gas stirs the interior of the star.

The planet’s gravity may cause motions of gas in the interior of the star that weaken the convection, causing the magnetic field to weaken and activity to decline. This causes the appearance of premature aging in the star. WASP-18 is thought to have a shallow convection zone, making it unusually susceptible to tidal effects.


What about other hot Jupiters that are relatively massive and close to their star? In some cases - where they orbit a different type of star to WASP-18 - the effect of hot Jupiters can be flipped and they can make a star appear younger than it really is. In the cases of HD 189733 and CoRoT-2a the presence of the planet appears to have increased the amount of activity in the star. In these cases the stars have much deeper convection zones than WASP-18 and tidal effects have little influence on convection and hence on the star's dynamo. Instead, the planets may be speeding up their star's rotation, leading to a more powerful dynamo and more activity than expected for the star's age. In these cases having a companion makes the star act younger than it really is. That makes sense for people and, in a few cases, for stars.


I've discussed the effects that extreme hot Jupiters can have on their host star. In such systems, what effect does the star have on its planet? In the cases of HD 189733 and CoRoT-2a, strong X-rays and ultraviolet radiation from the active star are evaporating the atmospheres of the planet. For HD 189733, astronomers estimate the planet is losing 100 to 600 million kilograms per second, and for CoRoT-2a astronomers estimate the planet is losing about 5 billion kilograms per second. For WASP-18, with much weaker X-ray emission and ultraviolet radiation, there is much less evaporation of the nearby planet's upper atmosphere than there would be if the star was more active. In effect, the planet is protecting itself. Its gravity causes the nearby star to be less active, and that causes the planet to be struck with less damaging radiation. HD 189733b and CoRoT-2b, on the other hand, are behaving in a self-destructive manner.

Talk of planet destruction isn’t necessary for our present-day solar system, where the planets are much further away from the Sun than hot Jupiters are. However, that won’t always be the case. A few billion years in the future, the Sun will dramatically expand in size when it becomes a red giant. Our oceans will boil away, never to return and what’s left of the Earth may end up spiraling in towards the Sun. We don't know the exact fate of our home planet, but it is clear that our aurora-viewing days are numbered.
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Dear FOLZONI, which I am begging to think should read, Dear THE GREAT FOLZONI, as your posts begin to read as the misdirection one would expect from a magician....,

What part of, I was making no comment about the BB did you miss? Setting aside the first and last lines of your post, none of its content had anything to do with my agnostic point of view, focused specifically on the radioactive decay rate applied to the age of stars!

Your above quoted post is no more than an attempt at slight of hand. So focused on your concerns about the reality of the Big Bang (and again I make no comment on that subject), that you seem unable to contain yourself, or restrain yourself to a response to the substance of my objection to the use of radioactive decay rates to the age of star formation. Even when there are very legitimate arguments that could be made...

On second thought, perhaps, THE GREAT FOLZONI is perhaps not an appropriate title, since your attempts at slight of hand seem transparent. As I said.., nothing of your response, was a response to anything I introduced, concerning the applicability of radioactive decay rates to the age of stars.

 

Wow! Paddoboy has accused me of...

...pseudo quackery, in that quoted post and the one above that (##69-70).

Rarely do I get honoured in such a way! However you have stated your words in such a way as to make it seem that you much prefer genuine quackery instead. Sorry I cannot provide the latter - e.g. I just cannot compete with the productivity of quackery by the BB's serried ranks of rattleheads.

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FOLZONI

 

Oh dear, OnlyMe...

... I now appear to have to perform a high-wire act under my clownish overblown title (your 'magician' was kind indeed) - but I'll have to do that on the alternatives thread. So perhaps for this site I should have taken an overly modest name?

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THE GREAT F

 

Well, it seems I got your attention..., but it seems you failed to see the underlying intent... Which is that I find any argument about the age of stars based on radioactive decay rates suspect. And I am still saying nothing about the Big Bang!

 

Double Post!

 

I just wanted to pop in and note something about the claim that claim about space, time, or spacetime are philosophical and not physical.

While we may make philosophical claims about these things, like I will do here, it seems hard to deny that making physical claims requires adhering to assumptions about the nature of space and time. Newton explicitly addresses and elucidates his assumptions about space and time, which encouraged many physicists and philosophers to do the same. (That is a little simplistic, but the spirit is correct, I believe.)

In his classical mechanics text, Maxwell is clear that his conceptions of space and time are assumptions that he requires in order to do physics, but the physics he does with them admits of great accuracy and practicality. He would be willing to adopt new assumptions if they could produce a physics that was more accurate and more practical.

And that is what special relativity did. And then general relativity did it again.

Within physics, we have a way to evaluate assumptions about space and time. To that extent, we can answer questions about space and time, however philosophical with physics.

When Newton wrote that he did not frame hypotheses, he meant that when there is a physical way of deciding between portions, we shouldn't deny that solution just because we have a Philip physical objection. Our philosophical objection can spur us to find problems in the physics or too find physics that is more accurate, but on its own, it is not reasonable grounds for overthrowing physical claims.

 

Elte: From your Post # 58

If you include those from primitive cultures & those who have never taken a course or studied physics, you might be in the upper 50% of the world’s population with regard to knowledge of physics.

That above is not saying much about your pertinent knowledge.

Your non-belief in randomness is a 19th century POV based on a belief in determinism. In the early 20th century, that POV was abandoned due to Heisenberg. Bohr, & others.

Either you do not know about the Uncertainty Principle or you do not realize its implications. You do not understand why the half life is used to indicate the decay rate.

Radioactive decay is one of many random processes. Why do you think they refer to half life for such elements?

BTW: Are you aware that many half lives are required for all of a set of radioactive atoms to decay?

You do not seem to be aware of the following. If you It you start with several samples of a radioactive element each consisting of 4096 atoms, you would expect the following results.

In one half life about 2048 atoms would have decayed. For some samples, more than 2048 atoms would have decayed; For others less then 2048 atoms would have decayed.

In the second half life the decay would occur for approximately 1024 atoms.​

The average decay rate over all the samples could be approximated by a simulation using coin flips, with one flip assigned to each atom.

Many half lives would be required if you waited until all the atoms had decayed.

The decay statistics obey probability laws not deterministic laws.

 

Dear PhysBang (I think we have met somewhere else), I cannot reply to your post because I cannot understand what the colored portion of your text means.

I.e. What is a "Philip physical objection"?

FOLZONI

 

Of course we have no stars let alone galaxies older then 13.8 billion years.
And the obvious ridiculous data only ever concerned two stars from memory, and it was not that much of a problem after other aspects were considered........

To reinforce my sometimes hazy memory, I E-Mailed a noted astronomer/cosmologist.
The following is his reply....again.

" Hi Barry

As far as I am aware there is no strong evidence for a star older than 14 billion years. Obviously one has to consider error bars (and whether they are realistic).

The observations of large scale clustering is quite consistent with the standard model of hierarchical galaxy clustering (indeed provides a strong leg of evidence for the model). So the observations are quite consistent with a 14 billion year old universe.

No superclusters are NOT gravitationally bound. There are knots that are bound like our Local Group and the clusters. Our maps are in co-moving coordinates (the expansion of the universe is subtracted out). The deviant velocities that we record are only perturbations on the expansion. The accelerated expansion is overwhelmingly winning over gravity.

Cordially,
Brent Tully"


For those concerned about the reputable nature or otherwise of Brent Tully.....

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Brent_Tully
R. Brent Tully (born c. 1940s) is an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Tully's specialty is astrophysics of galaxies. He, along with J. Richard Fisher, proposed the now-famousTully-Fisher relation in a paper, A New Method of Determining Distances to Galaxies, published inAstronomy and Astrophysics, Vol. 54, No. 3, in February, 1977. He also published the book The Nearby Galaxies Catalog in 1988 with 3D locations for the closest 68,000 galaxies to Earth. This data form acube of galaxies within an area of 700 million light years centered on Earth. A visual navigable representation of this index can be found in the planetarium computer software Starry Night Pro, where the data is called the Tully Database. Within this database is what R. Brent Tully calls the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex. [1][2]
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