Challenge Vanni

Extrafire

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Vanni has challenged others to defend their belief and since he thinks it's only fair to do the same, that is the purpose of this post.

So, since we don't know exactly what you believe Vanni, let's just start at the beginning, the way the Bible does.

What is your belief about the origin of the Universe?
 

Vanni Fucci

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I believe the Big Bang Theory...and before you go off on your creationist little tangent, and say "well what happened before the Big Bang"...

This happened...

In the beginning was Nothing. No space, no matter or energy. But according to the quantum principle, even Nothing was unstable. Nothing began to decay; i.e. it began to "boil," with billions of tiny bubbles forming and expanding rapidly. Each bubble became an expanding universe.
 

LadyC

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This has always fascinated me, too, whether from the Creationism or Evolution theory...

What is this "nothing" of which you speak? How can "nothing" boil and create bubbles?
 

Reverend Blair

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I like string theory...specifically the part where the universe next to ours bangs into us and causes the big bang. That's cool....like a Deep Purple drum solo.
 

Vanni Fucci

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Re: RE: Challenge Vanni

LadyC said:
This has always fascinated me, too, whether from the Creationism or Evolution theory...

What is this "nothing" of which you speak? How can "nothing" boil and create bubbles?

It is nothing...no energy, and no matter...however, the quantum principle dictates that it cannot remain in that state, and so nothing spontaneously erupts into matter and energy...

Universes can literally spring into existence as a quantum fluctuation of Nothing. (This is because the positive energy found in matter is balanced against the negative energy of gravity, so the total energy of a bubble is zero. Thus, it takes no net energy to create a new universe.)
 

Extrafire

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This is the Genesis hypothesis, where the universe was hatched from a Cosmic Egg

They got this wrong. I believe it's Hinduism that believes in the cosmic egg. Genesis has it comming from nothing (singularity).

A remarkable consensus has been developing recently around what is called "quantum cosmology," where scientists believe that a merger of the quantum theory and Einstein's relativity

This would refer to superstring theory which is "mathematically elegant" and Michio Kaku himself has said that not a thread of experimental evidence exists to confirm superstrings. (A good book that explains the theory is The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene.) I like the theory (not that I fully understand it)and it is the only candidate that could be able to provide the mechanism to produce the bubble universes.

Stephen Hawking is doubtful; he believes that our universe may co-exist with other universes, but our universe is special. The probability of forming these other bubbles is vanishingly small.

To put it simply (since I am not a scientist) you would have to have all the background laws of physics in place. If even one of them was missing or different it's impossible that any life permitting universe could be produced. And you would need to make mega-multiple trillions of universes just to increase the odds that the cosmological constant would come out right. The likelyhood that any universe-generating system would have all the right components, ingredients and information just by random chance is so small as to be scientifically impossible as Hawking attests. If such a system actually does exist and function, it would best be explained by design.
 

Vanni Fucci

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Extrafire said:
This would refer to superstring theory which is "mathematically elegant" and Michio Kaku himself has said that not a thread of experimental evidence exists to confirm superstrings. (A good book that explains the theory is The Elegant Universe by Michael Greene.) I like the theory (not that I fully understand it)and it is the only candidate that could be able to provide the mechanism to produce the bubble universes.

I'll read Greene if you read Kaku's Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension... 8)

Stephen Hawking is doubtful; he believes that our universe may co-exist with other universes, but our universe is special. The probability of forming these other bubbles is vanishingly small.

To put it simply (since I am not a scientist) you would have to have all the background laws of physics in place. If even one of them was missing or different it's impossible that any life permitting universe could be produced. And you would need to make mega-multiple trillions of universes just to increase the odds that the cosmological constant would come out right. The likelyhood that any universe-generating system would have all the right components, ingredients and information just by random chance is so small as to be scientifically impossible as Hawking attests. If such a system actually does exist and function, it would best be explained by design.

...but the possibility exists, even if the probablility does not...and if all variables were satisfied, quantum theory states that the predicted result will occur, because it must...there is no design in that...
 

EmmaDibbs

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It makes my head hurt thinking about things like this- it's like when you lay down looking at the stars and start thinking...'where does it all end?' 'What is beyond it all?' 'There must be an end somewhere?'
It's the stuff of head aches
When I was much younger I had a theory that the universe was a ring shape and so there was no end...then I started to think....so what's outside the ring!! DOH!!
 

Dexter Sinister

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... it would best be explained by design.

Design, and the necessary assumption of a designer, explains nothing in any scientific sense. One must then explain the origins of the designer, and the origins of those origins, and so on in an infinite regression. Attempting to terminate that regression by claiming that the designer has always existed begs the question. This is highly unsatisfactory to the scientific mind, which seeks naturalistic explanations of all phenomena.

It does, however, look very much like, as Freeman Dyson put it, that the universe must in some sense have known we were coming. That's the essence of the fine tuning argument that's appeared in other posts here and elsewhere: the constants of nature, like the relative strengths of the four forces, the charge to mass ratio of electrons and protons, and a lot of more esoteric numbers like the nuclear fine structure constant, appear very carefully tuned to permit life as we know it to exist. I've never been sure what the point of that argument is; to me it just says that if things were different, then things would be different and we wouldn't be here to observe them.

One possibility that has a certain appeal to me is the notion that there's an infinity of possible values for those constants, and thus an infinity of possible universes, very few of which would be capable of sustaining life. We just happen to live in one of the ones that does, though it's worth noting that most of the universe we can see is pretty hostile to our kind of life.

Another possibility that also appeals to me is the idea that the values of those constants we measure may be the only possible ones, for deep reasons we don't understand yet. They may emerge as the smarter folks delve deeper into things like string theory and loop quantum gravity, but right now the best we can say is, "we don't know."

One thing is sure though. The two most successful physical theories we have, general relativity and quantum mechanics, despite being confirmed to umpteen decimal places repeatedly by every test anyone's ever been able to devise, remain fundamentally incompatible. There's at least one more layer of reality we haven't discovered yet, which might be strings, or quantum loops, or something else nobody's thought of yet. But invoking a designer at this point is the end of the research program; in one sense it explains everything, but in another way it explains nothing, it merely denies the need for further explanations.

And if you really want a headache, study up on Godel's Incompleteness Theorem: scientific proof that not only don't we know everything, we can't, not even in principle.
 

Gonzo

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Listen to the Modest Mouse song "Third Planet". They know what’s going on. Or that Monty Python song that says "We prey that there’s intelligent life out there in space, because there’s bugger all down here on earth". Truer words were never spoken.
 

MMMike

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String theory... quantum physics, big bang... Nope, I've gotta go with the "Fred theory". :lol: :lol:
 

peapod

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:lol: :lol: I knew this thread would bring dexter back 8) Continue please dexter, secretly peapod admires your knowledge greatly, and vanni's also. Yours is like music tho dexter. 8)