Loaded question that implies there's a state other than existence. There's no science behind that proposition, and there's no such thing as 'nothing.' It's a figment of our collective imagination,...
Loaded question that implies there's a state other than existence. There's no science behind that proposition, and there's no such thing as 'nothing.' It's a figment of our collective imagination, dreamed up by a primitive brain that barely learned how to count, likely while it was trying to conceptualize 'zero'.
Always been here, always will be. Some people like to put god in there, but since they can't explain where god comes from I find god is just an unnecessary step in the process.
Has it, though? Current scientific understanding is that there was a starting point to our universe, about 14.5 billion years ago. The universe did not exist before then (whatever "before" means...
Always been here,
Has it, though? Current scientific understanding is that there was a starting point to our universe, about 14.5 billion years ago. The universe did not exist before then (whatever "before" means without time).
There might be some meta-verse that has always existed, within which our universe resides, but the universe itself seems to have a starting point.
Actually, that's still up for debate. We know there was a big bang event that shaped our entire cosmos including spacetime itself - out to as far as we can see, which is a light-cone some 13.7...
Actually, that's still up for debate. We know there was a big bang event that shaped our entire cosmos including spacetime itself - out to as far as we can see, which is a light-cone some 13.7 billion years in every direction. We even measure the curvature of that space and come up with evidence that it's totally flat, so it's likely infinite in all directions if it doesn't pitch even a little over a 13.7 billion light year distance. The reason we don't see further is because light has only existed for 13.7 billion years. The light from further away hasn't had time to reach us yet.
It's important to note that inflation moves faster than light - likely a lot faster. Since it's an effect of space rather than matter it doesn't have to play by matter's rules.
Some physicists get mentally handicapped on the big bang being the point 'time' began and refuse to talk about 'before' the big bang on principle. Others insist that was an effect that had a cause somewhere/somewhen else. I like CNS (and CNS-I even more) because it has an answer for most of the unsolved problems in cosmology.
Shall I tell you the story of our universe through the lens of CNS?
This universe started life as a black hole in another universe. In and in it collapsed, but with spacetime torsion, we never get to a singularity, just to something universe-mass that's about 50nm wide (and yes, the math is in his papers to back this up, and more). Torsion (think whirlpool of spacetime) gets out of control at that point and rebounds the collapse like a spring, upending gravity's march to singularity and generating a big bang - which is an explosion so powerful it creates for itself a new region of spacetime. This region inherits the arrow of time from the parent universe, and that's one open issue in cosmology solved.
It's also likely that these other universes have subtly different physical properties and constants, based on the parent but mutated slightly. That's where the 'natural selection' comes in - universes are selected for if they produce more black holes than their sickly neighbors who end up with a bad set of constants that hamper their reproduction.
Torsion also creates rather a lot of matter and energy from nothing, using the matter that fell into that black hole as a seed mass which kickstarts the process. It does this by interfering with virtual particle production, ripping the particles and antiparticles apart before they have a chance to self-annihilate. This produces a lot of brand new particles, so we're violating conservation, but in a way consistent with quantum mechanics in near-singularity conditions, so it's all good. Torsion is one of Einstein's almost forgotten little gifts from relativity. It's normally so small as to be inconsequential, but when you spin a universe down to the size of a cpu transistor, torsion makes gravity look like a sissy.
Poplawski's work explains why the antimatter ends up disfavored by the process, converted into dark matter and energy instead. That's two major cosmology problems handled. Three, actually - since he's eliminated the nasty singularity divide-by-zero error in favor of multiply-by-infinity, which while just as crazy does tend to make the math a lot happier.
Odds are the mass isn't enough to overcome gravity, so the new universe expands, halts, and collapses, then explodes again, probably repeating this bouncy process multiple times until it finally generates enough energy for itself to overcome gravity and enter the universal inflation phase we find ourselves in now. For all we know we're only witnessing the after-effects of big bang number 157 in this universe. Anything that existed between 1-156 got converted back to elementary particles. There won't be a 158. since we can see that expansion is accelerating. And that's four problems - now we know why inflation is out of control and even why/where it comes from. We model this well enough and listen to the gravity waves, we might be able to guess how many bounces we've had.
We've always been asking where are the white holes? All that has to go somewhere. The answer is, you're living inside one right now. The big bang is the white hole.
This means every black hole is basically a big bang that hasn't happened yet... and never will happen, unless you decide to cross over the event horizon and enter its timeline. Good luck on that trip - surviving being within pissing distance of a big bang's flash point is the kind of challenge a Type V civilization could get stuck on. Nature's firewall, stick to your own universe and don't bother the neighbors.
Comments like this are one of the reasons I still love reading this site. Thanks for putting it together. I assume that CNS refers to Lee Smolin's cosmological natural selection that you mentioned...
Comments like this are one of the reasons I still love reading this site. Thanks for putting it together. I assume that CNS refers to Lee Smolin's cosmological natural selection that you mentioned in another comment further down. I just thought I'd say it again here because I read this comment first and got temporarily confused.
Yep, sorry about that order problem. :) CNS is the 'big picture' for universe evolution. CNS-I is interesting because it postulates that when intelligence arises in a universe, it has a chance,...
Yep, sorry about that order problem. :)
CNS is the 'big picture' for universe evolution. CNS-I is interesting because it postulates that when intelligence arises in a universe, it has a chance, through some luck and mastery of knowledge, to take charge of this process. That means designer universes could be possible, setting the physics up in favorable ways, perhaps even rewriting nature's laws to suit the designer's tastes. That also presumes you have a mechanism to traverse a black hole somehow, which isn't possible in the reverse direction (going back to your parent universe is impossible, going forward into new ones might be).
Poplawski's rather obsessed with this theory and he's done a lot of work on it. The best summary of the whole thing is his response to the recent Cosmic Controversy papers. He does a fairly remarkable job of explaining his theory to a layman, considering how insanely complicated all of this actually is when you dig into the math.
If you judge your theories both on their ability to out-explain their competition and also make useful, testable, verifiable predictions, Poplawski's got a ringer on his hands. Of all the theories for the larger structure of the universe, this one has the most elegance going for it. It's definitely my favorite.
It has to do with quantum fluctuations. Energy is popping into and out of existence all the time at every point in the universe, but when it manifests, it does so as particle-antiparticle pairs...
It has to do with quantum fluctuations. Energy is popping into and out of existence all the time at every point in the universe, but when it manifests, it does so as particle-antiparticle pairs that self-annihilate each other and go back to a state of zero. If that doesn't make sense, welcome to the wonderful world of quantum theory, where if you say you understand it, you're only proving that you don't. This is why we say that even empty space itself isn't 'nothing' because it has energy and properties on its own that aren't tied to the things that are present in that space.
They always show you spacetime as a trampoline in science shows, with the planets sitting in it and their gravity warping it. What they are leaving out is that the trampoline material itself is alive, electric, constantly flickering with possibilities and energy, but you can only see this energy at the subatomic scales where quantum theory becomes the dominant physical model. Yes, we have measured this in the lab and we know it actually does exist - this is science fact, not fiction.
Hawking radiation and his proposed black hole evaporation relies on this particle-antiparticle activity. When a pair pops into existence with one particle on the outside of the event horizon, and another on the inside, they can't self-annihilate like they usually do - instead one gets pulled in and the other gets ejected at incredible speeds.
The near-singularity inside the black hole is much more powerful than the event horizon itself. Where the event horizon only separates the particles that appear in its razor edge, the mass at the center of the black hole is spinning so fast and pushing out so much gravitational energy that it begins to separate the particle-antiparticle pairs based on electric charge and the sheer velocity of the rotation of space time. This can only happen in black-hole gravity conditions.
That means the almost-but-not-quite singularity inside a black hole generates a phenomenal amount of particles and antiparticles. It's creating universe-sized quantities of matter and energy. Once the mass hits a certain point, the trampoline finally decides it's had enough for today, and it rebounds kicking off the big bang. It seems that trampoline really does not like to break/tear, and if you hit it hard enough, it punches back with a big bang. Black holes are the only things that can hit it hard enough to do this.
If you put in a mass of X, you'll get out a mass of X to the power of some really big numbers, all contained in a new universe. Poplawski even has a paper proposing the formula for how much you get out based on what you put in, so we can derive the mass of the baby universe based on the mass that fell into the black hole in the parent universe.
If you're looking for the face of god / force of creation, that's it - at the center of a black hole. Out of nothing comes an entire universe. As to why that happens, well, that's our new 'big question' if these theories pan out.
LIGO is basically black-hole sonar, giving us the ability to read what's inside them much the way we read what's inside the earth by watching waves set off by earthquakes. Our first attempts at these entirely new kind of universe-piercing telescopes are primitive but already showing results.
Once we have an array of these things orbiting or parked happily at some lagrange point far from all forms of interference, we're going to be learning a lot about what goes on inside the black holes - they ring like bells, and that ringtone can tell us what's happening inside. It's just hard to make a good one on earth when a train 200 miles away creates so much interference your detector can't operate. They really need to be isolated from all other forms of energy to work well.
Not really, most of cosmology describe the expansion of the universe. For earlier time you need to go to theories that unifies quantum theory and general relativity and there's no very clear...
Current scientific understanding is that there was a starting point to our universe, about 14.5 billion years ago.
Not really, most of cosmology describe the expansion of the universe. For earlier time you need to go to theories that unifies quantum theory and general relativity and there's no very clear answer there yet.
The following is a partial list of the popular misconceptions about the Big Bang model:
The Big Bang as the origin of the universe: One of the common misconceptions about the Big Bang model is the belief that it was the origin of the universe. However, the Big Bang model does not comment about how the universe came into being. Current conception of the Big Bang model assumes the existence of energy, time, and space, and does not comment about their origin or the cause of the dense and high temperature initial state of the universe.[133]
The Big Bang was "small": It is misleading to visualize the Big Bang by comparing its size to everyday objects. When the size of the universe at Big Bang is described, it refers to the size of the observable universe, and not the entire universe.[134]
@geosmin originally posted it in ~talk, but I moved it to ~humanities because they had tagged it "philosophy", it is a philosophical question, and philosophy is one of the humanities. Scientism is...
@geosmin originally posted it in ~talk, but I moved it to ~humanities because they had tagged it "philosophy", it is a philosophical question, and philosophy is one of the humanities.
Scientism is not forbidden when discussing philosophy. You don't get to put science off-limits to philosophical discussions.
I think ~science would get (rightly) annoyed if I came over and started making epistemological arguments against the scientific enterprise and insisting that our subjective consciousness makes...
I think ~science would get (rightly) annoyed if I came over and started making epistemological arguments against the scientific enterprise and insisting that our subjective consciousness makes knowledge acquisition impossible. Likewise I'm going to be annoyed if someone comes to ~humanities and reduces every question to a basic scientific one.
Funny, I thought philosophy's job was to fill in the gaps where we haven't locked down hard factual knowledge yet using reason, and help us ponder the kinds of things that don't have objective...
Funny, I thought philosophy's job was to fill in the gaps where we haven't locked down hard factual knowledge yet using reason, and help us ponder the kinds of things that don't have objective basis in reality - like the meaning of truth.
Nature is out there and she's going to come out the way she is, not the way this or that philosophy or theory says she will. Seems like ignoring what little factual information we have available when discussing philosophy is leaving the path of wisdom. Science is such a tiny part of knowledge overall.
I think it's a grudge match because science has clawed the nature of the universe largely out of philosophy's hands of late, and there's some jealousy over that. Take comfort in the fact that science is never going to produce anything like meaning. 'What is the meaning of life' is not something science is built to answer. It can only give you the mechanism, not the reasons.
Not all philosophical questions will involve or invite scientific answers. But, let's be honest: there's a whole branch of science devoted to working out where the universe came from: cosmology....
I'm going to be annoyed if someone comes to ~humanities and reduces every question to a basic scientific one.
Not all philosophical questions will involve or invite scientific answers. But, let's be honest: there's a whole branch of science devoted to working out where the universe came from: cosmology. It's not solely a philosophical issue.
Actually, maybe the problem is that I moved this to the wrong group; maybe I should have moved it to ~science.
Something that doesn't solve your problem but may be worth considering: What if someone asked a question about a question relating to the philosophy of science (for example, theory-ladenness,...
Something that doesn't solve your problem but may be worth considering: What if someone asked a question about a question relating to the philosophy of science (for example, theory-ladenness, coherentism or the works of someone like Popper)? Or for a different example, something within logic (e.g. Russell and Whitehead's incidental proof that 1+1=2)? Arguments could be made that these belong in ~science and ~science.mathematics respectively, but in most cases I would disagree. There will always be overlap between topics and particularly when discussing philosophical ideas because it's not a field at all detached from evidence and reality - if you come into a philosophy thread (or classroom, etc.) and expect there to be nothing but thought experiments and hand-waving, you are going to be very disappointed.
I think the best rule of thumb you could use is to look at what sort of answers the OP is inviting. In the case of this thread most of the answers will be of a philosophical rather than a scientific bent, so being in ~humanities seems the most appropriate. Meanwhile if the question was primarily about scientific processes, ideas or proof it would belong in ~science instead.
I don't think there needs to be a lot of territorial dick-swinging about which topics are or aren't off-limits so long as they are actually relevant to generating decent discussion.
When Tildes is a lot bigger, I wonder if it might make sense to have some threads multi-homed in multiple groups simultaneously. It's like crossposting, except instead of separate threads in...
When Tildes is a lot bigger, I wonder if it might make sense to have some threads multi-homed in multiple groups simultaneously. It's like crossposting, except instead of separate threads in separate groups, anyone clicking on it in any group is sent into the same thread directly.
The conversation exists in one place, but subscribers can see it in their home page if they are subscribed to any group where the topic has been crossposted. We'd de-dupe it if they are subscribed to more than one, of course, so they don't see it multiple times in their feed. We could even have separate thread views or chains for people coming in from the different groups.
That could make for some very busy/interesting threads when topics are appropriate in multiple places at once.
This is an interesting question! I don't feel justified to dismiss it. I think another way to ask such a grand question is, "Why are there anything at all, as compared to nothing?" There's a ready...
This is an interesting question! I don't feel justified to dismiss it.
I think another way to ask such a grand question is, "Why are there anything at all, as compared to nothing?"
There's a ready answer: "Non-existence of the Universe has not been a possibility, and the evidence is that we are here. Had there been nothing, we wouldn't have been here at all." This is known as the anthropic principle, something like a "cheat code" in the philosophy of cosmology. One may even be try to answer more specific questions, like "Why is the Universe constituted by such-and-such forms of matter, in such-and-such combination, rather than any alternative?" The AP answers with "Had there been any deviation from 'the' actual condition of the Universe, we wouldn't have been here to ponder such question." (which is a much stronger statement, one of necessity, and one may attempt to back it up, with physical theories of various levels of speculation.)
We may find it cheating, for the anthropic argument sounds like an evasion from the question "why". Moreover it doesn't seem to simplify the question once we get to the physical details. Nevertheless its at least an attempt of explanation, which I think is what the question "why" beckons.
My hunch feeling is that the AP argument could be used as an antidote to our (or rather, mine) tendency of conflating what is and what explains. Any explanation is a mental model that exists in a sea of contexts. Science, ideally, is an organized endeavour to generate those contexts and calibrate them under certain standards of intellectual rigour, honesty, and the preference of aesthetic simplicity. I think it's always sobering to consider that any science, no matter how wondrous the intellectual achievement, does not say what ought to be, what's "underlying everything". I tend to think it's really about building contexts, connecting concepts ("this, because of that").
Sometimes, with genius insight (or loads of funding $$$), some of us may hit a pathway that suddenly simplifies the connections, reduces differences to common principles, and opens up new grounds for exploration. Then we might be tempted to regard this exciting experience as somehow revealing, somehow penetrating "what is". I think the intellectual excitements have all been very real and awe-inspiring, but they probably say more about us than about "what is".
TLDR: Pondering on this question helps me to visualize our limitations.
It depends what you mean by "why". If one asked "Why does a star exist?" there answer would be that it is merely the inevitable product of some underlying laws of nature. That's how it came to...
It depends what you mean by "why". If one asked "Why does a star exist?" there answer would be that it is merely the inevitable product of some underlying laws of nature. That's how it came to exist. However, there is no motive behind it existing.
So, which "why" are you asking:
What's the process by which the universe came to exist?
What is the motive or purpose for the universe to exist?
If you mean the first question, you're too early. We don't have the answer yet to what process caused the universe to exist. Come back in a millennium or so, when we've sorted it out.
If you mean the second question, it's a pointless question. There is no purpose to the universe's existence. It just is. It's an unanswerable question.
Best we can do is what shaped our immediate region of spacetime. It's just so annoyingly difficult to gather data on events that occurred before time as we know it existed. I'm partial to Lee...
We don't have the answer yet to what process caused the universe to exist.
Best we can do is what shaped our immediate region of spacetime. It's just so annoyingly difficult to gather data on events that occurred before time as we know it existed. I'm partial to Lee Smolin's cosmological natural selection and Nikodem Poplawski's musings on black holes birthing universes.
I'll be honest: I don't pretend to understand half the theories various cosmologists are proposing for the cause of our universe. However, I sort of like the theory where there are an infinite...
I'll be honest: I don't pretend to understand half the theories various cosmologists are proposing for the cause of our universe. However, I sort of like the theory where there are an infinite number of universes, each existing simultaneously, and we just happen to live in the one that allows for our type of life to start and survive - the anthropic principle writ large.
Of course, that merely pushes the question up a level: where did the multiverse come from? :)
Okay. In that case, come back in a million years, when humanity has worked out the purpose for the universe's existence. But here and now, it's a pointless question - like a 3-year-old asking why...
Okay. In that case, come back in a million years, when humanity has worked out the purpose for the universe's existence. But here and now, it's a pointless question - like a 3-year-old asking why the sky is blue. Without an understanding of the physics of light and refraction, the child simply can't understand the answer.
Or it's like asking me to guess what's inside a locked room, when I have no way of seeing what's inside. I can guess "elephant" or "emeralds" or "ectoplasm", but they're just baseless guesses.
The fun part of science is, that locked room doesn't exist in a vacuum. Can you hear anything? Is something in there thumping and shaking the floor, tapping out prime numbers? What do you smell?...
The fun part of science is, that locked room doesn't exist in a vacuum. Can you hear anything? Is something in there thumping and shaking the floor, tapping out prime numbers? What do you smell? Is the door warm, or vermillion for some reason? Are there tracks on the floor near the door? Is light shining under the door? Did someone leave a signed guest book just down the hall? (No, nature's not that nice).
Sometimes it's hard to figure out what the right questions are. :)
Don't take "locked room" quite so literally. It's a metaphor for "a place I can't get access to, and can't get data about". I'm trying to say that some questions are pointless because we have...
Don't take "locked room" quite so literally. It's a metaphor for "a place I can't get access to, and can't get data about". I'm trying to say that some questions are pointless because we have absolutely no information upon which to base our answers.
I might counter with the spirit that there's always a way to get more information. It just takes rigor, patience, dedication, and most of all imagination.
I might counter with the spirit that there's always a way to get more information. It just takes rigor, patience, dedication, and most of all imagination.
Again, don't be quite so literal: it's a metaphor. I'm trying to say that, when we have no information now (regardless of whether we might get some information in the future), there is no point...
Again, don't be quite so literal: it's a metaphor. I'm trying to say that, when we have no information now (regardless of whether we might get some information in the future), there is no point just guessing at things. In this sense, I'm a strong agnostic: I won't pretend to have knowledge I can't possibly have.
I agree that we can always try to get more information. I'm optimistic that, one day in the future, humanity will understand how the universe came to be. However, that day isn't now, and, right now, there's no point guessing in the absence of any real information.
My answer to that obvious question is we don't know. My assertion that we were put here is of course my own theory or working hypothesis or opinion, based on the information that I've gathered and...
My answer to that obvious question is we don't know. My assertion that we were put here is of course my own theory or working hypothesis or opinion, based on the information that I've gathered and evaluated.
Loaded question that implies there's a state other than existence. There's no science behind that proposition, and there's no such thing as 'nothing.' It's a figment of our collective imagination, dreamed up by a primitive brain that barely learned how to count, likely while it was trying to conceptualize 'zero'.
Always been here, always will be. Some people like to put god in there, but since they can't explain where god comes from I find god is just an unnecessary step in the process.
Has it, though? Current scientific understanding is that there was a starting point to our universe, about 14.5 billion years ago. The universe did not exist before then (whatever "before" means without time).
There might be some meta-verse that has always existed, within which our universe resides, but the universe itself seems to have a starting point.
Actually, that's still up for debate. We know there was a big bang event that shaped our entire cosmos including spacetime itself - out to as far as we can see, which is a light-cone some 13.7 billion years in every direction. We even measure the curvature of that space and come up with evidence that it's totally flat, so it's likely infinite in all directions if it doesn't pitch even a little over a 13.7 billion light year distance. The reason we don't see further is because light has only existed for 13.7 billion years. The light from further away hasn't had time to reach us yet.
It's important to note that inflation moves faster than light - likely a lot faster. Since it's an effect of space rather than matter it doesn't have to play by matter's rules.
Some physicists get mentally handicapped on the big bang being the point 'time' began and refuse to talk about 'before' the big bang on principle. Others insist that was an effect that had a cause somewhere/somewhen else. I like CNS (and CNS-I even more) because it has an answer for most of the unsolved problems in cosmology.
Shall I tell you the story of our universe through the lens of CNS?
This universe started life as a black hole in another universe. In and in it collapsed, but with spacetime torsion, we never get to a singularity, just to something universe-mass that's about 50nm wide (and yes, the math is in his papers to back this up, and more). Torsion (think whirlpool of spacetime) gets out of control at that point and rebounds the collapse like a spring, upending gravity's march to singularity and generating a big bang - which is an explosion so powerful it creates for itself a new region of spacetime. This region inherits the arrow of time from the parent universe, and that's one open issue in cosmology solved.
It's also likely that these other universes have subtly different physical properties and constants, based on the parent but mutated slightly. That's where the 'natural selection' comes in - universes are selected for if they produce more black holes than their sickly neighbors who end up with a bad set of constants that hamper their reproduction.
Torsion also creates rather a lot of matter and energy from nothing, using the matter that fell into that black hole as a seed mass which kickstarts the process. It does this by interfering with virtual particle production, ripping the particles and antiparticles apart before they have a chance to self-annihilate. This produces a lot of brand new particles, so we're violating conservation, but in a way consistent with quantum mechanics in near-singularity conditions, so it's all good. Torsion is one of Einstein's almost forgotten little gifts from relativity. It's normally so small as to be inconsequential, but when you spin a universe down to the size of a cpu transistor, torsion makes gravity look like a sissy.
Poplawski's work explains why the antimatter ends up disfavored by the process, converted into dark matter and energy instead. That's two major cosmology problems handled. Three, actually - since he's eliminated the nasty singularity divide-by-zero error in favor of multiply-by-infinity, which while just as crazy does tend to make the math a lot happier.
Odds are the mass isn't enough to overcome gravity, so the new universe expands, halts, and collapses, then explodes again, probably repeating this bouncy process multiple times until it finally generates enough energy for itself to overcome gravity and enter the universal inflation phase we find ourselves in now. For all we know we're only witnessing the after-effects of big bang number 157 in this universe. Anything that existed between 1-156 got converted back to elementary particles. There won't be a 158. since we can see that expansion is accelerating. And that's four problems - now we know why inflation is out of control and even why/where it comes from. We model this well enough and listen to the gravity waves, we might be able to guess how many bounces we've had.
We've always been asking where are the white holes? All that has to go somewhere. The answer is, you're living inside one right now. The big bang is the white hole.
This means every black hole is basically a big bang that hasn't happened yet... and never will happen, unless you decide to cross over the event horizon and enter its timeline. Good luck on that trip - surviving being within pissing distance of a big bang's flash point is the kind of challenge a Type V civilization could get stuck on. Nature's firewall, stick to your own universe and don't bother the neighbors.
Comments like this are one of the reasons I still love reading this site. Thanks for putting it together. I assume that CNS refers to Lee Smolin's cosmological natural selection that you mentioned in another comment further down. I just thought I'd say it again here because I read this comment first and got temporarily confused.
Yep, sorry about that order problem. :)
CNS is the 'big picture' for universe evolution. CNS-I is interesting because it postulates that when intelligence arises in a universe, it has a chance, through some luck and mastery of knowledge, to take charge of this process. That means designer universes could be possible, setting the physics up in favorable ways, perhaps even rewriting nature's laws to suit the designer's tastes. That also presumes you have a mechanism to traverse a black hole somehow, which isn't possible in the reverse direction (going back to your parent universe is impossible, going forward into new ones might be).
Poplawski's rather obsessed with this theory and he's done a lot of work on it. The best summary of the whole thing is his response to the recent Cosmic Controversy papers. He does a fairly remarkable job of explaining his theory to a layman, considering how insanely complicated all of this actually is when you dig into the math.
If you judge your theories both on their ability to out-explain their competition and also make useful, testable, verifiable predictions, Poplawski's got a ringer on his hands. Of all the theories for the larger structure of the universe, this one has the most elegance going for it. It's definitely my favorite.
Why do the successive explosions produce more energy in this model?
It has to do with quantum fluctuations. Energy is popping into and out of existence all the time at every point in the universe, but when it manifests, it does so as particle-antiparticle pairs that self-annihilate each other and go back to a state of zero. If that doesn't make sense, welcome to the wonderful world of quantum theory, where if you say you understand it, you're only proving that you don't. This is why we say that even empty space itself isn't 'nothing' because it has energy and properties on its own that aren't tied to the things that are present in that space.
They always show you spacetime as a trampoline in science shows, with the planets sitting in it and their gravity warping it. What they are leaving out is that the trampoline material itself is alive, electric, constantly flickering with possibilities and energy, but you can only see this energy at the subatomic scales where quantum theory becomes the dominant physical model. Yes, we have measured this in the lab and we know it actually does exist - this is science fact, not fiction.
Hawking radiation and his proposed black hole evaporation relies on this particle-antiparticle activity. When a pair pops into existence with one particle on the outside of the event horizon, and another on the inside, they can't self-annihilate like they usually do - instead one gets pulled in and the other gets ejected at incredible speeds.
The near-singularity inside the black hole is much more powerful than the event horizon itself. Where the event horizon only separates the particles that appear in its razor edge, the mass at the center of the black hole is spinning so fast and pushing out so much gravitational energy that it begins to separate the particle-antiparticle pairs based on electric charge and the sheer velocity of the rotation of space time. This can only happen in black-hole gravity conditions.
That means the almost-but-not-quite singularity inside a black hole generates a phenomenal amount of particles and antiparticles. It's creating universe-sized quantities of matter and energy. Once the mass hits a certain point, the trampoline finally decides it's had enough for today, and it rebounds kicking off the big bang. It seems that trampoline really does not like to break/tear, and if you hit it hard enough, it punches back with a big bang. Black holes are the only things that can hit it hard enough to do this.
If you put in a mass of X, you'll get out a mass of X to the power of some really big numbers, all contained in a new universe. Poplawski even has a paper proposing the formula for how much you get out based on what you put in, so we can derive the mass of the baby universe based on the mass that fell into the black hole in the parent universe.
If you're looking for the face of god / force of creation, that's it - at the center of a black hole. Out of nothing comes an entire universe. As to why that happens, well, that's our new 'big question' if these theories pan out.
LIGO is basically black-hole sonar, giving us the ability to read what's inside them much the way we read what's inside the earth by watching waves set off by earthquakes. Our first attempts at these entirely new kind of universe-piercing telescopes are primitive but already showing results.
Once we have an array of these things orbiting or parked happily at some lagrange point far from all forms of interference, we're going to be learning a lot about what goes on inside the black holes - they ring like bells, and that ringtone can tell us what's happening inside. It's just hard to make a good one on earth when a train 200 miles away creates so much interference your detector can't operate. They really need to be isolated from all other forms of energy to work well.
Not really, most of cosmology describe the expansion of the universe. For earlier time you need to go to theories that unifies quantum theory and general relativity and there's no very clear answer there yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang
This the humanities group, please don't bring scientism here.
@geosmin originally posted it in ~talk, but I moved it to ~humanities because they had tagged it "philosophy", it is a philosophical question, and philosophy is one of the humanities.
Scientism is not forbidden when discussing philosophy. You don't get to put science off-limits to philosophical discussions.
I think ~science would get (rightly) annoyed if I came over and started making epistemological arguments against the scientific enterprise and insisting that our subjective consciousness makes knowledge acquisition impossible. Likewise I'm going to be annoyed if someone comes to ~humanities and reduces every question to a basic scientific one.
Funny, I thought philosophy's job was to fill in the gaps where we haven't locked down hard factual knowledge yet using reason, and help us ponder the kinds of things that don't have objective basis in reality - like the meaning of truth.
Nature is out there and she's going to come out the way she is, not the way this or that philosophy or theory says she will. Seems like ignoring what little factual information we have available when discussing philosophy is leaving the path of wisdom. Science is such a tiny part of knowledge overall.
I think it's a grudge match because science has clawed the nature of the universe largely out of philosophy's hands of late, and there's some jealousy over that. Take comfort in the fact that science is never going to produce anything like meaning. 'What is the meaning of life' is not something science is built to answer. It can only give you the mechanism, not the reasons.
Not all philosophical questions will involve or invite scientific answers. But, let's be honest: there's a whole branch of science devoted to working out where the universe came from: cosmology. It's not solely a philosophical issue.
Actually, maybe the problem is that I moved this to the wrong group; maybe I should have moved it to ~science.
Something that doesn't solve your problem but may be worth considering: What if someone asked a question about a question relating to the philosophy of science (for example, theory-ladenness, coherentism or the works of someone like Popper)? Or for a different example, something within logic (e.g. Russell and Whitehead's incidental proof that 1+1=2)? Arguments could be made that these belong in ~science and ~science.mathematics respectively, but in most cases I would disagree. There will always be overlap between topics and particularly when discussing philosophical ideas because it's not a field at all detached from evidence and reality - if you come into a philosophy thread (or classroom, etc.) and expect there to be nothing but thought experiments and hand-waving, you are going to be very disappointed.
I think the best rule of thumb you could use is to look at what sort of answers the OP is inviting. In the case of this thread most of the answers will be of a philosophical rather than a scientific bent, so being in ~humanities seems the most appropriate. Meanwhile if the question was primarily about scientific processes, ideas or proof it would belong in ~science instead.
I don't think there needs to be a lot of territorial dick-swinging about which topics are or aren't off-limits so long as they are actually relevant to generating decent discussion.
When Tildes is a lot bigger, I wonder if it might make sense to have some threads multi-homed in multiple groups simultaneously. It's like crossposting, except instead of separate threads in separate groups, anyone clicking on it in any group is sent into the same thread directly.
The conversation exists in one place, but subscribers can see it in their home page if they are subscribed to any group where the topic has been crossposted. We'd de-dupe it if they are subscribed to more than one, of course, so they don't see it multiple times in their feed. We could even have separate thread views or chains for people coming in from the different groups.
That could make for some very busy/interesting threads when topics are appropriate in multiple places at once.
I agree with everything you say.
I don't have the problem you think I have... ;)
This is an interesting question! I don't feel justified to dismiss it.
I think another way to ask such a grand question is, "Why are there anything at all, as compared to nothing?"
There's a ready answer: "Non-existence of the Universe has not been a possibility, and the evidence is that we are here. Had there been nothing, we wouldn't have been here at all." This is known as the anthropic principle, something like a "cheat code" in the philosophy of cosmology. One may even be try to answer more specific questions, like "Why is the Universe constituted by such-and-such forms of matter, in such-and-such combination, rather than any alternative?" The AP answers with "Had there been any deviation from 'the' actual condition of the Universe, we wouldn't have been here to ponder such question." (which is a much stronger statement, one of necessity, and one may attempt to back it up, with physical theories of various levels of speculation.)
We may find it cheating, for the anthropic argument sounds like an evasion from the question "why". Moreover it doesn't seem to simplify the question once we get to the physical details. Nevertheless its at least an attempt of explanation, which I think is what the question "why" beckons.
My hunch feeling is that the AP argument could be used as an antidote to our (or rather, mine) tendency of conflating what is and what explains. Any explanation is a mental model that exists in a sea of contexts. Science, ideally, is an organized endeavour to generate those contexts and calibrate them under certain standards of intellectual rigour, honesty, and the preference of aesthetic simplicity. I think it's always sobering to consider that any science, no matter how wondrous the intellectual achievement, does not say what ought to be, what's "underlying everything". I tend to think it's really about building contexts, connecting concepts ("this, because of that").
Sometimes, with genius insight (or loads of funding $$$), some of us may hit a pathway that suddenly simplifies the connections, reduces differences to common principles, and opens up new grounds for exploration. Then we might be tempted to regard this exciting experience as somehow revealing, somehow penetrating "what is". I think the intellectual excitements have all been very real and awe-inspiring, but they probably say more about us than about "what is".
TLDR: Pondering on this question helps me to visualize our limitations.
It depends what you mean by "why". If one asked "Why does a star exist?" there answer would be that it is merely the inevitable product of some underlying laws of nature. That's how it came to exist. However, there is no motive behind it existing.
So, which "why" are you asking:
What's the process by which the universe came to exist?
What is the motive or purpose for the universe to exist?
If you mean the first question, you're too early. We don't have the answer yet to what process caused the universe to exist. Come back in a millennium or so, when we've sorted it out.
If you mean the second question, it's a pointless question. There is no purpose to the universe's existence. It just is. It's an unanswerable question.
Best we can do is what shaped our immediate region of spacetime. It's just so annoyingly difficult to gather data on events that occurred before time as we know it existed. I'm partial to Lee Smolin's cosmological natural selection and Nikodem Poplawski's musings on black holes birthing universes.
I'll be honest: I don't pretend to understand half the theories various cosmologists are proposing for the cause of our universe. However, I sort of like the theory where there are an infinite number of universes, each existing simultaneously, and we just happen to live in the one that allows for our type of life to start and survive - the anthropic principle writ large.
Of course, that merely pushes the question up a level: where did the multiverse come from? :)
It's just a question of human limitations. Surely something smart enough could get it, prime mover or not.
Okay. In that case, come back in a million years, when humanity has worked out the purpose for the universe's existence. But here and now, it's a pointless question - like a 3-year-old asking why the sky is blue. Without an understanding of the physics of light and refraction, the child simply can't understand the answer.
Or it's like asking me to guess what's inside a locked room, when I have no way of seeing what's inside. I can guess "elephant" or "emeralds" or "ectoplasm", but they're just baseless guesses.
The fun part of science is, that locked room doesn't exist in a vacuum. Can you hear anything? Is something in there thumping and shaking the floor, tapping out prime numbers? What do you smell? Is the door warm, or vermillion for some reason? Are there tracks on the floor near the door? Is light shining under the door? Did someone leave a signed guest book just down the hall? (No, nature's not that nice).
Sometimes it's hard to figure out what the right questions are. :)
Don't take "locked room" quite so literally. It's a metaphor for "a place I can't get access to, and can't get data about". I'm trying to say that some questions are pointless because we have absolutely no information upon which to base our answers.
I might counter with the spirit that there's always a way to get more information. It just takes rigor, patience, dedication, and most of all imagination.
Again, don't be quite so literal: it's a metaphor. I'm trying to say that, when we have no information now (regardless of whether we might get some information in the future), there is no point just guessing at things. In this sense, I'm a strong agnostic: I won't pretend to have knowledge I can't possibly have.
I agree that we can always try to get more information. I'm optimistic that, one day in the future, humanity will understand how the universe came to be. However, that day isn't now, and, right now, there's no point guessing in the absence of any real information.
We were put here.
But, as per the OP: why were we put here?
Of course, you've left open the obvious question of who or what put us here.
My answer to that obvious question is we don't know. My assertion that we were put here is of course my own theory or working hypothesis or opinion, based on the information that I've gathered and evaluated.
I think the Universe exists because it could/can without any deeper meaning than that.
Simple. The universe exists so that I can observe it. Why do I exist? To observe the universe. Duh.