₦airaland Forum

jayriginal: The likelihood that a statement is correct is no reason to assert that it is indeed correct

Now back to the question: how does one know?

Allow me to ask you the same question.

How do you know anything for sure? and How do you know that you know?

...I think we can come upon something interesting here.

I do not hold this. I emphasized on plausibility together with necessity and not plausibility on it's own.

You missed the point, it is irrelevant the shape of the rock. My point was that the attributes of Russell's rock must be such that they are necessary. Then he would be very believable until we can disprove him - either by providing something else that satisfies that necessity or by getting a telescope powerful enough to confirm that such a rock does not exist.

Good, your analogy is on point but then my point is that I would have no reason to doubt my mother's tribe without having knowledge revealed to me that she is indeed Ijaw. I must present this knowledge for scrutiny if I am ever going to accuse her of falsehood. Without this outside knowledge, Her claim may well be true from my point of veiw.

Yes. Again your analogy is apt but my point remains that for the child to question his origins, he must have assessed new information. It is based on this information that he may now question his origins. He cannot just wake up one morning and start claiming out of the blue that he is not yoruba. That's an unreasonable way to go about it as there will be no difference between him and another child who is indeed yoruba but is claiming urhobo.

lol, If wiegraf says that he does not know, then he must remain so. The moment he begins to say that something is untrue, then he must tell us how he knows what he claimed not to know.

lol, no it is not. You still have not show how a person can disbelieve something in a vacuum.

jayriginal: One can reject because one finds something absurd, one has what one feels to be a better answer, because the proposer has not put his proposal properly (which is not necessarily sufficient to negate the proposal) or for a variety of other reasons.

.....Anyway, thanks for being gracious and actually following my argument and responding to it's points appropriately without going on tangents or attacking strawmen.

wizecoder: Jay zup with you..? re u in lag...? we can exchange ideas.

MacDaddy01: If Russel had said a rock, then he would be saying something that was already known to exist. Rocks fell from space as meteors. Rocks were in space

If Russel went further to say that the rocks had a special function, he would have been debunked so quick because then, he is entering a proper scientific realm in Astronomy. A rock that has a special function can easily be provable or disprovable

However I get what you mean (also Purist and Wiegraf).
If for instance I claim that I can fly, you will immediately reject it until I actually fly and even if you actually see me flying, you will not still believe that I can fly until you have investigated properly and assured yourself that I am using no tricks to fly.

Notice that your disbelief here is based on the belief that people cannot fly. Without that belief, you would have no problem with my flying. Also, if you were able to check me properly and make sure I was not using any tricks but natural ability, your belief would change to "some people can fly".

This illustrates the point I have been making. You cannot disbelieve in a vacuum.

[size=14pt]
Part 2[/size]

To look at something slightly different, let's now come to Russell's teapot:


Note: Russell's teapot illustrates something slightly different, but I want you to note something. If Russell hadn't said there was a teapot but a little rock, he would be more readily believed (because that is more plausible and compatible with our belief of what sort of things exist in space).
What if Russell had equally said that this little rock was necessary because it had some function in the solar system. It becomes even more believable. Notice that at this point, it becomes irrelevant whether information about this special rock was written in an ancient book or not.
Let's call this Russell's little rock.

The components that russell's teapot lacks are plausiblity and necessity. That's what makes a story believable.

Russell's little rock however has plausibility and necessity. It would have to be accepted as true until it has been sufficiently disproved i.e, we get better telescopes or we find something else that performs it's function. Do you agree?

[size=14pt]Part 3[/size]

Now about God. . . . .
Remember that Dudugirl's argument (and mine also) is that God is the ultimate creator of all things and the explanation for existence.

Now whenever we see order, we infer an intelligence and we immediately seek one who gives order. When we look at the universe and nature and ourselves, we see order and a very sophisticated intelligence because of this, we infer that there must be an intelligent designer that gives order. It is even more fascinating when we find out that the universe has not always existed but has a beginning. This tells us that whatever made the universe to begin must itself not be subject to the laws within the universe i.e. it is eternal and of immense power.

Note that unlike russell's teapot, this entity is both plausible and necessary. To not believe that such an entity exists, one must believe something more sufficient that better explains what it is out to explain.

Now, when wiegraf was asked. "How do you explain your existence?" he replied "I don't".

This immediately tells me that he doesn't reject God based on reason, he only rejects God based personal bias (i.e. he finds the idea of God to be absurd). If he had a reason to reject God, he would have provided it.

As I have shown earlier, you cannot disbelieve in a vacuum. It is either you hold unto an incompatible belief which you ought to state and then we can weigh it's merits ........or you are just being irrational.

God2man: 1. Sex outside marriage. It does not matter if you use condom, a covenant is made. 1 corithian 6:16 "What? Know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? For two, saith he, shall be one flesh" so, 1+1=1. During sex many things are transfered, diseases, body fluid, and liquid. Spiritually, a lot of transaction take place, a lady dedicated to marine shrine will have many demons, let's say 100 demons, this lady now sleep with a clean man, this man will collect 50 demons from this lady. Again, this man with 50 demons is now sexually loose, he begins to sleep with another girl, the new girl will get 25 out of the 50. It goes on and on. The life of this man is divided, shared, anytime he does it,he can never remain the same.

wiegraf: @jay, that's just beautiful...

wiegraf: Anyways I want to see where @jay is going with this,

wiegraf: I can jump over the moon, all these can be shown to be false.

your statement x=y may be true or false.

If I try to prove it false and I fail, it is either the statement has no logical true/false value or it is true. The best practice would be to accept it as true until I can reasonably falsify it.

that's why the phrase: "....prove beyond all reasonable doubt."

See here my pink unicorn argument with macdaddy: https://www.nairaland.com/1053917/pink-unicorn-argument-against-religion/2

ijawkid: But my bro na true na......

ijawkid: Ok d problem we have here is mayb d bible contradicting itself.....

Deep Sight: In fact i heard him shouting, satan, die, die, die! outside their church

MyJoe: I just took a look at the write-up. It’s well-written and I’d like to find time to read everything, but my thinking right now is that the writer appears stuck in his materialist universe. I think the problem is, perhaps, that you guys look for things spiritual with the tools of science.

In asserting that consciousness cannot exist outside of a body because of observations made of humans, science or philosophy may be off its turf.

BTW, if a body is needed to have consciousness, it doesn't take anything away from the God argument.

dare2think: Dude, sorry for taking so long!

Let me start with your question.

'Here, let me make it simple for you. Answer this with a yes or no.

"Have you stopped beating your wife" (lets assume you do have a wife)'.

I cant answer with a yes or No. Why? Because the question is invalid to me. (Assuming that I do have a wife that I do not beat). The question may very well be valid to someone who beats his wife, but invalid to one who does not. Any attempt to answer yes or no will inadvertently assert that one beats his wife.

Lawrence Krauss: 'A Universe From Nothing'

Why is there something rather than nothing? What existed before the Big Bang? How can everything we know to exist in the entire observable universe have spontaneously erupted out of thin air?

That's the focus of theoretical physicist and author Lawrence Krauss's new book, "A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing." I spoke with him in search of answers to these timeless questions. To hear what he had to say, watch the video above (or click the link below for a complete transcript). And, don't forget to weigh in by leaving a comment at the bottom of the page. Talk nerdy to me!

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: The question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ has been around for as long as people have asked questions. It's perplexed people because the question is what-- people want to understand their origins. The fact that we’re living in this vast universe and understanding our place in the cosmos is really what good science is all about, and it may not produce a better toaster or a new car. That’s why people often value science, is for the practical applications, but it seems to me what’s really important are the ideas, because they change our perspective of our place in the universe and that’s what good science, art, literature, is all about.

CARA SANTA MARIA: Hi everyone. Cara Santa Maria here. And that's Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist and author of "A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing." I sat down with him to talk about what existed before the Big Bang, and how cutting-edge physics is changing the way we think about our place in the universe.

LK: Why is there something rather than nothing? Well, ultimately there are a variety of answers, which is why I wrote a whole book about it. But the remarkable thing is that our picture has changed completely because we changed what we mean by something and nothing. Nothing is far more subtle than you might imagine, for the Bible for example, nothing would have been a vast, eternal empty universe. That would have been, you know, a void. Well that kind of nothing we now understand--namely empty space if you get rid of all the particles and all the radiation--that kind of nothing is actually quite complicated. In the modern universe it’s a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles popping in and out of existence on a timescale so short you can’t see them. So there’s nothing there but actually lots of stuff is happening. You just can’t see it, and that kind of nothing, one of the remarkable things we’ve learned is that kind of nothing is unstable. Empty space is unstable.

CSM: But how can we possibly know that? Virtual particles exist in such a short time frame, we can't measure them. So, how do we know they're there?

LK: We can’t measure those particles directly, but we can measure their effects indirectly, because they affect the properties of atoms for example. And when we include them, and we can include them in the calculations and predictions we make, if we don’t include them we get the wrong answer. If we do include them, we get the right answer to nine decimal places, the best predictions in all of physics. The only place where you can predict final numbers from first principles to nine decimal places is there. So we know those effects are happening because we can measure them indirectly, and that’s why we’re so confident.

CSM: Okay, so the calculations pan out. We know that the universe came into existence 13.72 billion years ago, at the time of the Big Bang. Something came from nothing, a nothing more dynamic than we ever knew. But where is that something--the universe, us--where is it going?

LK: All of the galaxies we now see are moving away from us faster and faster and faster. And eventually, they’ll be moving away from us faster than the speed of light. It’s allowed in general relativity and they’ll disappear. So in the far future, the rest of the universe will disappear and we’ll be alone in a vast, dark, empty universe, which is the way we thought it was originally. I find kind of a poetry in that, but, and in fact eventually our stars will burn out and you’ll have nothing left. And in fact, as my late friend Christopher Hitchens who was writing a foreword for the book before he passed away, said, "Well you know in that case, nothing is heading towards us as fast as can be." And the simple answer of the question why is there something rather than nothing should be, "just wait. It won’t be for long."

CSM: From nothing to nothing. That may not sit well for some people, but as Lawrence reminds us:

LK: The important thing about the universe is, it doesn’t give a damn about what we like. The universe is the way it is whether we like it or not, which is the one thing that I really hope people would understand. But it, the way it is it’s fascinating. It may not be the way we like it to be, but it’s so fascinating that we should rejoice in this remarkable accident that lead to our existence. And that you and I are here and having this conversation. That consciousness evolved on a random planet in the middle of a random galaxy in the middle of nowhere. Four billion years into that time, consciousness evolved and we can have this conversation and enjoy learning about the universe back to its early moments and out to the indefinite future. It’s amazing, and the meaning in our lives is the meaning we create and we should enjoy it, and make the most of our brief moment in the sun.

CSM: Anything else?

LK: The two lessons I want to give people is that, you’re more insignificant than you ever thought, and the future is miserable. And those two things should make you happy not sad.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/18/lawrence-krauss-universe-from-nothing_n_1681113.html

What happened before the big bang?

A BBC documentary with this title was aired on SBS-TV in Australia in April, 2012. In it, several cosmologists discuss ‘the unthinkable’—perhaps the big bang was not the beginning of everything after all. It seems that scientists have discovered a new law. Well, not actually new—just one that has been treated as if it didn’t exist for the last half century or so by ‘big-bangers’ such as Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Paul Davies, Edwin Hubble, et al, namely the law of Cause and Effect.

The program explains that the concept of the big bang1 postulates that “everything we see in the universe today—us, trees, galaxies, zebras—emerged, in an instant, from nothing. And that’s a problem. It’s all effect and no cause.” We are then given five different explanations from five different scientists concerning what this cause may (or may not) have been.

Prof. Michio Kaku and the meaning of ‘nothing’

The big bang postulates that everything we see in the universe today emerged in an instant from nothing. And that’s a problem. It’s all effect and no cause.

Dr Michio Kaku is Professor of Theoretical Physics at City University, New York. He asks: “How can it be that everything comes from nothing?” His solution: “If you think about it a while, you begin to realise it all depends on how you define ‘nothing’!”2

We are then shown a huge NASA vacuum chamber, the largest in the world—the nearest we can get to a state of nothing, but which still has dimensions (‘nothing in 3D’), and through which light can pass. Prof. Kaku tells us: “I think there are two kinds of nothing. First there is something I call absolute nothing: no equations, no space, no time, no anything that the human mind can conceive of, just nothing. Then there is the vacuum which is nothing but the absence of matter.”

The host then comments: “Prof. Kaku’s version of nothing is the perfect vacuum where on the face of it there is only energy. But in a perfect vacuum, energy sometimes transforms itself temporarily and briefly into matter. It is one of these tiny explosions that might have been going on and ended up in the big bang.”

Prof. Kaku: “So for me the universe did not come from absolute nothing—that is a state of no equations, no empty space, no time; it came from a pre-existing state—also a state of nothing. Our universe did in fact come from an infinitesimally tiny little explosion that took place giving us the big bang, and giving us the galaxies and stars we have today.”

The host: “For Prof. Kaku, the laws of physics did not arrive with the big bang. The appearance of matter did not start with the clock of time. His interpretation of nothing tells us there was, in short, a ‘before’. If he is right, there is an opportunity for a cause to have an effect, after all.”

Prof. Andrei Linde’s ‘radical explanation’—inflation

The host continues: “The idea of the big bang was a very bold idea but it had problems. … Why is the universe as big as it is now? Who made it expand? What caused the explosion? The big bang was clearly a very special explosion. Ordinary explosions are messy. This one produced a universe that wasn’t messy at all. Our universe is, more or less, the same in every direction. It was an observation that required a radical explanation.”

According to Dr Andrei Linde, who is Professor of Physics at Stanford University: “Just after matter first appeared, rather than a messy explosion, there was instead a massive and unprecedented growth in the size of the universe. This is called Inflation. If one assumes there was a period of exponential expansion of the universe in some energetic vacuum-like state, then you can explain why the universe is so large, why the universe is so small at a very large scale, why properties of the universe in different parts are so similar to each other. All these questions can be addressed if one uses inflation.”

The host: “Inflation was a pre-existing condition that has been there, well, for ever. For Prof. Linde, the big bang wasn’t really a starting point at all; he thinks that it was simply the end of something else. The universe appeared out of what he calls eternal inflation. Our universe is not the only one. There are others, all co-existing. He has counted them. There are ten to the power 10 to the power 10 to the power 7. His ideas of a multi-verse, as odd as they seem, are now within the scientific mainstream. For many cosmologists eternal inflation is in itself a reasonable explanation of what existed before our universe. For others it’s utter nonsense.” (Emphasis added.)


Dr Param Singh, the big bounce

Dr Singh is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. In the program he tells us: “The principal mathematical objection [to the universe expanding from nothing] is that as the clock is wound back and Hubble’s zero hour is approached, all the stuff in the universe is crammed into a smaller and smaller space. Eventually that space will become infinitely small. And in mathematics, invoking infinity is the same as giving up, or cheating.” (Emphasis added.)

His solution: “Instead of emerging from nothing, our universe owes its existence to a previous one that had the misfortune to collapse in on itself. Then, thanks to some clever maths, rebounded to what we see today. So the big bang was not a bang at all. It was rather a big bounce. … Of course it might all be nothing more than a fantasy world of maths and little else, and there’s always the nagging question of what started the infinite bouncing in the first place. It was certainly not the big bang. That is impossible.” (Emphasis added.)

Prof. Lee Smolin, natural selection

Prof. Smolin is a researcher at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. We are told that his solution owes more to Charles Darwin than to Albert Einstein. It has been called ‘cosmological natural selection’. He believes that the universe had an ancestor which had another ancestor. According to this hypothesis, the universe was born inside a black hole.

Prof. Smolin: “There is a bounce inside every black hole. Material contracts and contracts and contracts again, and then begins to expand again, and that is the big bang which initiates the new region of the universe.” The commentator adds: “Smolin’s natural selection idea proposes that for a universe to prosper it must reproduce and for that to happen it must contain black holes that, according to Smolin, spawn offspring universes.”

Prof Smolin: “Before the big bang there was another universe much like our own. In that universe was a big cloud of gases. It collapsed to form a massive star. That star exploded. It left behind a black hole and in that black hole there was a region, if you were misfortunate enough to fall in, you would find it becoming denser and denser and denser. You wouldn’t survive this but imagine you did—then all of a sudden you would explode again and that would be our big bang.”

Dr Neil Turok, membranes collided

Dr Neil Turok is the Executive Director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada.3 He says: “There are essentially two possibilities at the beginning. Either time did not exist before the beginning; somehow time sprang into existence. That’s a notion we have no grasp of and which may be a logical contradiction. The other possibility is that this event which initiated our universe was a violent event in a pre-existing universe.

His solution requires ten special dimensions plus time. Dr Turok: “We live on an extended object called a brane (short for membrane). … You can’t have only one; there must be at least two, separated by a gap. These two branes collide. When they collide they remain extended; it’s not all of space shrinking to a point. … They fill with a density of plasma and matter, but it’s finite. Everything is a definite number which you can calculate, and which you can then describe using definite mathematical laws. That’s the essential picture of the big bang in our model.”

The host comments: “For many cosmologists this is mathematical sleight of hand.” (Emphasis added.)

The program then conveniently summarizes these ideas and asks which is correct:

Michio Kaku: Stop thinking of nothing as nothing, but rather just the absence of stuff.

Andrei Linde: He redefined the big bang as inflationary energy of a mega burst dying out ten to the power 10 to the power 10 to the power 7.

Param Singh: No big bang at all; just the big bounce, again and again and again.

Lee Smolin: Our big bang was simply the other side of a black hole in a galaxy far, far away.

Neil Turok: Colliding branes in another dimension.

The host: “They would be easier to dismiss as the half-baked musings of the lunatic fringe were it not for the fact that some of the very people who constructed the everything-from-nothing big bang model are themselves starting to dismantle it.”

Sir Roger Penrose

Sir Roger Penrose is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. For many years he spent much of his time dismissing the idea of ‘before the big bang’. He now says: “The current picture of the universe is that it starts with a big bang and it ends with an exponentially expanding universe, where it eventually cools off with not much left except protons. … This very expanded universe is the equivalent to a big bang of another one. … This universe is one eon of a succession of eons. Each expanding universe accounts for the big bang of the next.”

The host adds: “Because of this a nearly infinitely large universe could just as well be the infinitely small starting point for the next one. A simplistic system with a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Quite a bold thrust for a man who was until five years ago a pre-big-bang denier.”

We are then told that “in science ideas are just ideas until they are confirmed or denied by observations” and the program discusses how researchers are investigating gravity waves in an effort to observe the big bang itself.

What Happened Before The Big Bang?

New discoveries have been made about another universe whose collapse appears to have given birth to the one we live in today. They will be announced in the early on-line edition of the journal Nature Physics on 1 July 2007 and will be published in the August 2007 issue of the journal's print edition. "My paper introduces a new mathematical model that we can use to derive new details about the properties of a quantum state as it travels through the Big Bounce, which replaces the classical idea of a Big Bang as the beginning of our universe," said Martin Bojowald, assistant professor of physics at Penn State. Bojowald's research also suggests that, although it is possible to learn about many properties of the earlier universe, we always will be uncertain about some of these properties because his calculations reveal a "cosmic forgetfulness" that results from the extreme quantum forces during the Big Bounce.

The idea that the universe erupted with a Big Bang explosion has been a big barrier in scientific attempts to understand the origin of our expanding universe, although the Big Bang long has been considered by physicists to be the best model. As described by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, the origin of the Big Bang is a mathematically nonsensical state -- a "singularity" of zero volume that nevertheless contained infinite density and infinitely large energy.

Now, however, Bojowald and other physicists at Penn State are exploring territory unknown even to Einstein -- the time before the Big Bang -- using a mathematical time machine called Loop Quantum Gravity. This theory, which combines Einstein's Theory of General Relativity with equations of quantum physics that did not exist in Einstein's day, is the first mathematical description to systematically establish the existence of the Big Bounce and to deduce properties of the earlier universe from which our own may have sprung. For scientists, the Big Bounce opens a crack in the barrier that was the Big Bang.

"Einstein's Theory of General Relativity does not include the quantum physics that you must have in order to describe the extremely high energies that dominated our universe during its very early evolution," Bojowald explained, "but we now have Loop Quantum Gravity, a theory that does include the necessary quantum physics." Loop Quantum Gravity was pioneered and is being developed in the Penn State Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry, and is now a leading approach to the goal of unifying general relativity with quantum physics. Scientists using this theory to trace our universe backward in time have found that its beginning point had a minimum volume that is not zero and a maximum energy that is not infinite. As a result of these limits, the theory's equations continue to produce valid mathematical results past the point of the classical Big Bang, giving scientists a window into the time before the Big Bounce.

Quantum-gravity theory indicates that the fabric of space-time has an "atomic" geometry that is woven with one-dimensional quantum threads. This fabric tears violently under the extreme conditions dominated by quantum physics near the Big Bounce, causing gravity to become strongly repulsive so that, instead of vanishing into infinity as predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, the universe rebounded in the Big Bounce that gave birth to our expanding universe. The theory reveals a contracting universe before the Big Bounce, with space-time geometry that otherwise was similar to that of our universe today.

Bojowald found he had to create a new mathematical model to use with the theory of Loop Quantum Gravity in order to explore the universe before the Big Bounce with more precision. "A more precise model was needed within Loop Quantum Gravity than the existing numerical methods, which require successive approximations of the solutions and yield results that are not as general and complete as one would like," Bojowald explained. He developed a mathematical model that produces precise analytical solutions by solving of a set of mathematical equations.

In addition to being more precise, Bojowald's new model also is much shorter. He reformulated the quantum-gravity models using a different mathematical description, which he says made it possible to solve the equations explicitly and also turned out to be a strong simplification. "The earlier numerical model looked much more complicated, but its solutions looked very clean, which was a clue that such a mathematical simplification might exist," he said. Bojowald reformulated quantum gravity's differential equations -- which require many calculations of numerous consecutive small changes in time -- into an integrable system -- in which a cumulative length of time can be specified for adding up all the small incremental changes.

The model's equations require parameters that describe the state of our current universe accurately so that scientists then can use the model to travel backward in time, mathematically "un-evolving" the universe to reveal its state at earlier times. The model's equations also contain some "free" parameters that are not yet known precisely but are nevertheless necessary to describe certain properties. Bojowald discovered that two of these free parameters are complementary: one is relevant almost exclusively after the Big Bounce and the other is relevant almost exclusively before the Big Bounce. Because one of these free parameters has essentially no influence on calculations of our current universe, Bojowald colludes that it cannot be used as a tool for back-calculating its value in the earlier universe before the Big Bounce.

The two free parameters, which Bojowald found were complementary, represent the quantum uncertainty in the total volume of the universe before and after the Big Bang. "These uncertainties are additional parameters that apply when you put a system into a quantum context such as a theory of quantum gravity," Bojowald said. "It is similar to the uncertainty relations in quantum physics, where there is complimentarity between the position of an object and its velocity -- if you measure one you cannot simultaneously measure the other."

Similarly, Bojowald's study indicates that there is complementarity between the uncertainty factors for the volume of the universe before the Big Bounce and the universe after the Big Bounce. "For all practical purposes, the precise uncertainty factor for the volume of the previous universe never will be determined by a procedure of calculating backwards from conditions in our present universe, even with most accurate measurements we ever will be able to make," Bojowald explained. This discovery implies further limitations for discovering whether the matter in the universe before the Big Bang was dominated more strongly by quantum or classical properties.

"A problem with the earlier numerical model is you don't see so clearly what the free parameters really are and what their influence is," Bojowald said. "This mathematical model gives you an improved expression that contains all the free parameters and you can immediately see the influence of each one," he explained. "After the equations were solved, it was rather immediate to reach conclusions from the results."

Bojowald reached an additional conclusion after finding that at least one of the parameters of the previous universe did not survive its trip through the Big Bounce -- that successive universes likely will not be perfect replicas of each other. He said, "the eternal recurrence of absolutely identical universes would seem to be prevented by the apparent existence of an intrinsic cosmic forgetfulness."

The research was sponsored, in part, by the National Science Foundation.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070702084231.htm

Scientists glimpse universe before the Big Bang

In general, asking what happened before the Big Bang is not really considered a science question. According to Big Bang theory, time did not even exist before this point roughly 13.7 billion years ago. But now, Oxford University physicist Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia have found an effect in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that allows them to "see through" the Big Bang into what came before.


The CMB is the radiation that exists everywhere in the universe, thought to be left over from when the universe was only 300,000 years old. In the early 1990s, scientists discovered that the CMB temperature has anisotropies, meaning that the temperature fluctuates at the level of about 1 part in 100,000. These fluctuations provide one of the strongest pieces of observational evidence for the Big Bang theory, since the tiny fluctuations are thought to have grown into the large-scale structures we see today. Importantly, these fluctuations are considered to be random due to the period of inflation that is thought to have occurred in the fraction of a second after the Big Bang, which made the radiation nearly uniform. However, Penrose and Gurzadyan have now discovered concentric circles within the CMB in which the temperature variation is much lower than expected, implying that CMB anisotropies are not completely random. The scientists think that these circles stem from the results of collisions between supermassive black holes that released huge, mostly isotropic bursts of energy. The bursts have much more energy than the normal local variations in temperature. The strange part is that the scientists calculated that some of the larger of these nearly isotropic circles must have occurred before the time of the Big Bang. The discovery doesn't suggest that there wasn't a Big Bang - rather, it supports the idea that there could have been many of them. The scientists explain that the CMB circles support the possibility that we live in a cyclic universe, in which the end of one “aeon” or universe triggers another Big Bang that starts another aeon, and the process repeats indefinitely. The black hole encounters that caused the circles likely occurred within the later stages of the aeon right before ours, according to the scientists. In the past, Penrose has investigated cyclic cosmology models because he has noticed another shortcoming of the much more widely accepted inflationary theory: it cannot explain why there was such low entropy at the beginning of the universe. The low entropy state (or high degree of order) was essential for making complex matter possible. The cyclic cosmology idea is that, when a universe expands to its full extent, black holes will evaporate and all the information they contain will somehow vanish, removing entropy from the universe. At this point, a new aeon with a low entropy state will begin. Because of the great significance of these little circles, the scientists will do further work to confirm their existence and see which models can best explain them. Already, Penrose and Gurzadyan used data from two experiments - WMAP and BOOMERanG98 - to detect the circles and eliminate the possibility of an instrumental cause for the effects. But even if the circles really do stem from sources in a pre-Big Bang era, cyclic cosmology may not offer the best explanation for them. Among its challenges, cyclic cosmology still needs to explain the vast shift of scale between aeons, as well as why it requires all particles to lose their mass at some point in the future.


More information: V.G.Gurzadyan and R.Penrose. "Concentric circles in WMAP data may provide evidence of violent pre-Big-Bang activity." arXiv:1011.3706v1 via: Physics World © 2010 PhysOrg.com

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2010-11-scientists-glimpse-universe-big.html#jCp


http://phys.org/news/2010-11-scientists-glimpse-universe-big.html

What happened before the Big Bang?

What was there before the big bang? I appreciate that there are no facts concerning what existed prior (if anything) but are there popular theories?

Standard Answer: Nothing. So please don't ask.

I've talked a lot about the expanding universe in this column. The standard picture comes from general relativity, which describes a sort of stretching of space-time. The normal analogy is to think of us as ants on a balloon. In the past, the universe (aka "the balloon" was smaller than it is now, and, taken far enough back, the universe, presumably, was a single point. That was the moment of the big bang.

In the normal general relativity picture of things, the moment of creation produced not only space, but time; the two are incredibly intermixed, after all. To Einstein, talking about what happened before the Big Bang is just as nonsensical as asking what happens if you travel north of the North Pole. There just isn't just a place, or consequently such a time.

This is likely to make people squeamish. After all, if there was no time before the Big Bang (or no space, for that matter) where did we come from? Shouldn't there be something resembling causality in the universe?

What are our options?

We have some wiggle room, however. As I've discussed previously (and far less speculatively) not only don't we know what happened before the Big Bang, we don't even know what happened in the instant immediately following the Big Bang.

Our knowledge of physics in the first 10^-44 seconds after the beginning (which, admittedly, is a pretty damn short time) is virtually non-existent. This instant is known as the Planck Time, and since we don't know what happened before the Planck time with anything even remotely resembling certainty, we absolutely don't know what happened before the Big Bang. Regardless, logic dictates that we're left with one of two possibilities:

The universe had some sort of beginning, in which case we're left with the very unsettling problem of what caused the universe in the first place.
The universe has been around forever, in which case there's literally an infinite amount of history, both before and after us.


Neither of these is satisfying. Take the Old Testament view, for instance. We're to understand that God created the world. In that case our universe has a definite beginning. However, God himself is supposed to be eternal. What was he doing before he created our universe? It's no more satisfying to assert that the universe has been here all along. Is there literally an infinite amount of history? That doesn't make sense.

As a particularly clever cheat (or theory, if you prefer), in 1982 Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University showed how what we've learned from quantum mechanics might shed light on the how the universe popped into being.

Model #1: The Universe out of Nothing

Vilenkin noted that if we were to somehow start with a small bubble of a universe, two things could happen. If it were large enough, it would undergo exponential growth — just like our universe did in the first instants. If it were small, it would collapse.

Here's where things get weird. Quantum mechanics predicts all sorts of strange things, including half-dead/half-alive cats, or the possibility of teleportation. It also predicts the possibility that apparently impossible things are really just improbable. Image by CottonIJoe/Flickr.

For instance, it's possible (but brain-bendingly unlikely) that you could spontaneously find yourself teleported to Alpha Centauri (readers: please insert obligatory Hitchiker's reference here). More commonly radioactive decay can be thought of as a small piece of an atomic nucleus that shouldn't really be able to escape from the rest somehow randomly tunneling away. The universe is just like that sometimes.

In the same way, a small universe can randomly tunnel into a larger one. The amazing thing about Vilenkin's model is that even if you make the "little" universe as small as you like, this tunneling still can occur. It even works if the little universe has no size at all. You know what we call something with no size?

Nothing.

Prior to the Big Bang, the state of the universe was something that possessed (no fooling) zero size and for which time was essentially undefined. The universe then tunneled out of nothing into the expanding universe we know and love.

The problem is that the "nothing" that the universe popped out of wasn't really nothing. It had to know about quantum mechanics somehow, and we've always been taught to think that the physics is a property of the universe. It's troubling to think that the physics existed before the universe did, or, for that matter, before time did.

Of course, this is the basic problem with any definite origin for the universe. Somehow all of the complexity had to be created from nothing, and it's difficult to reconcile that.

The other possibility seems equally troubling. The universe might literally be eternal — or at least have an infinite history. While it's not clear what the theological implications of an infinite universe, we can at least try to figure out how an infinite universe might work.


Model #2: The Universe gave birth to itself

In 1998, J. Richard Gott and Li Xin Li, both then at Princeton, proposed a model in which the universe arose from what can only be described as a time machine. Gott and Li showed that it was possible to solve Einstein's equations of general relativity in such a way that a universe started off going around and around in a continuous loop, and that that loop could serve as the "trunk" of a tree that sprouted, giving rise to our own universe. Since a picture says a thousand words, let's illustrate with their own figure.

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/8/2012/02/f63e52dacb9c6b6ca424ddb983889b65.jpg

The way to read this image is that for the most part, time travels from bottom to top, and that everything begins with the little loop at the bottom. That is the origin of the universe. This means that the universe has no beginning, since the loop goes around and around infinitely.

We can talk about the "time after the Big Bang" as the time after the loop sprouted off into the future and a universe was born. You'll also notice that there isn't just a single horn coming out of the initial time loop, but many. This is totally consistent with the concept of a multiverse, just to add another level of speculative awesomeness to the discussion.

Model #3: This Is Not the First Universe

For a long time, cosmologists played around with the idea that the universe might ultimately collapse on itself. Then, in 1998, two teams discovered that the universe was accelerating, essentially demonstrating that we were way off base. You may also recall that these folks won the Nobel prize this year for their discovery.

Even though on the surface it doesn't look as though our universe will ultimately collapse under its own weight, there is still a great deal of allure to this picture. If the universe were somehow to end in a big crunch, then maybe what's really happening is that we'll eternally undergo a series of expansions and contractions, on and on for infinity. Our universe, in this case, is just one in an infinite series.

The problem with this (besides the fact that there is too little stuff in our universe to make it collapse again) is one of disorder. As we've discussed previously, the universe loves disorder. If you've ever stacked soda cans, there's only one way to stack them, and that's straight up. But if you knock them over, they go everywhere. There are more ways to destroy a soda can tower then there are to build one, and as time goes on, the universe finds ways of destroying all other forms of order, too.

If our universe was the result of a series of expansions and collapses, then our Big Bang occurred billions or trillions of years after some beginning (and what caused that?), so it would have had a very long time to get disordered. But it isn't. Looking back, our universe was very smooth, and in a very high state of order. This wouldn't solve the problem at all.

But in recent years, there have been a number of new cyclic models that allow an eternal universe to exist. In 2002, Paul Steinhardt, of Princeton University, and Neil Turok, of Cambridge, devised a model that exploits the extra dimensions found in string theory. String theory supposes that our universe might not be three-dimensional at all, but might have as many as ten spatial dimensions. Our own universe might simply live on a three-dimensional membrane (or "brane" for short) that is floating through the universe, barely interacting with the other universes.

However, the different branes (universes) could interact gravitationally. In this model, the dark energy that accelerates the universe isn't a real thing at all, but just a remnant of the gravitational attraction between branes, and the dark matter is just ordinary matter on the other, nearby brane. Occasionally the branes collide with one another, which would set off "Big Bangs" within the different branes and then everything would proceed as we've already seen.

These models are extremely elegant and deal with the whole "increase of disorder" problem in a really novel way. In cycle after cycle, the branes get more and more stretchy, which means that the disorder gets spread out over a larger and larger volume. The local patch that we call our universe, however, is just a small patch of the brane, so we seem to start nearly from scratch at each go-round. It sounds great, but a big problem is that these models require string theory to be correct, and on that the jury is definitely still out.

And there are even more models, some including extra dimensions, some include concepts like "loop quantum gravity," some infinite in time, and some with a definite duration. At the end of the day, the Big Bang theory has the same basic problem as evolutionary theory. Both do a nearly perfect job in explaining how the universe (or life) changed when it first came about, but neither can explain how things really got started in the first place.

This column was adapted from parts of Chapter 7 of A User's Guide to the Universe.


http://io9.com/5881330/what-happened-before-the-big-bang

Hints of 'time before Big Bang

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old.

Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow.

Details of the work have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

The CMB is relic radiation that fills the entire Universe and is regarded as the most conclusive evidence for the Big Bang.

Although this microwave background is mostly smooth, the Cobe satellite in 1992 discovered small fluctuations that were believed to be the seeds from which the galaxy clusters we see in today's Universe grew.

Dr Adrienne Erickcek, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and colleagues now believe these fluctuations contain hints that our Universe "bubbled off" from a previous one.

Their data comes from Nasa's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has been studying the CMB since its launch in 2001.

Their model suggests that new universes could be created spontaneously from apparently empty space. From inside the parent universe, the event would be surprisingly unspectacular.

Arrow of time

Describing the team's work at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in St Louis, Missouri, co-author Professor Sean Carroll explained that "a universe could form inside this room and we’d never know".

The inspiration for their theory isn't just an explanation for the Big Bang our Universe experienced 13.7 billion years ago, but lies in an attempt to explain one of the largest mysteries in physics - why time seems to move in one direction.

The laws that govern physics on a microscopic scale are completely reversible, and yet, as Professor Carroll commented, "no one gets confused about which is yesterday and which is tomorrow".

Physicists have long blamed this one-way movement, known as the "arrow of time", on a physical rule known as the second law of thermodynamics, which insists that systems move over time from order to disorder.

This rule is so fundamental to physics that pioneering astronomer Arthur Eddington insisted that "if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation".

The second law cannot be escaped, but Professor Carroll pointed out that it depends on a major assumption - that the Universe began its life in an ordered state.

This makes understanding the roots of this most fundamental of laws a job for cosmologists.

"Every time you break an egg or spill a glass of water, you're learning about the Big Bang," Professor Carroll explained.

Before the bang

In his presentation, the Caltech astronomer explained that by creating a Big Bang from the cold space of a previous universe, the new universe begins its life in just such an ordered state.

The apparent direction of time - and the fact that it's hard to put a broken egg back together - is the consequence.

Much work remains to be done on the theory: the researchers' first priority will be to calculate the odds of a new universe appearing from a previous one.

In the meantime, the team has turned to the results from WMAP.

Detailed measurements made by the satellite have shown that the fluctuations in the microwave background are about 10% stronger on one side of the sky than those on the other.

Sean Carroll conceded that this might just be a coincidence, but pointed out that a natural explanation for this discrepancy would be if it represented a structure inherited from our universe's parent.

Meanwhile, Professor Carroll urged cosmologists to broaden their horizons: "We're trained to say there was no time before the Big Bang, when we should say that we don't know whether there was anything - or if there was, what it was."

If the Caltech team's work is correct, we may already have the first information about what came before our own Universe.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7440217.stm

Deep Sight: @ thehomer, I heard you are in real life a Pastor at Mountain of Fire and Miracles.

MyJoe: Lol. Well, this is Deep Sight in the twin thread:

MyJoe: Lol. You need a body to have consciousness? That’s new to me.

thehomer: Well that is what neuroscience seems to be saying. And not just a body, but a brain of some degree of complexity.