Yes, I’m still at Cambridge.
Man of Honour
People in the past said the same about lightning. Many other things as well, but lightning is the one that came to my mind first because it was so very often associated with gods. Extremely dramatic and powerful and with no known cause - it must be sent by a god!
"I don't know how it happened" does not mean "It's a miracle or magic". It just means that the cause is unknown. People tend to dislike admitting that they don't know something, so it's common for people to make up any old explanation to make themselves feel better. It doesn't matter that the "explanation" explains nothing - it's just a placeholder to avoid having to admit ignorance.
Apart from the existence of the universe, obviously. Quite a lot of atoms in that. Assuming that it came into existence from nothing. We don't know that, either.
The argument you're making makes no sense. You're assuming that nothing can exist without being created by something and you're also assuming that the creator exists without being created by something. Your argument contradicts itself!
There was one suggestion I remember reading that the net energy of the Universe = 0 (Gravitational energy balances the mass energy and so on)
IE The entire universe could indeed simply have come into existence as a very large example of a quantum foam event. Very much a case "Of coming into existence from nothing"
(Of course, this no more solves the infinite regression problem than does the idea of a creator God, but there we are)
i'm not, you're just trying to put words/views onto me and evading a response, which , to be frank, is the stock reaction whenever a person is asked to prove their belief in a god.
nothing more annoying than argumentative furniture!
I'm not assuming anything I am simply pointing out the immutable law of cause and effect which clearly has been pointed out by others elsewhere that this governs our very existence, I am only basing my opinion on observation of the universe and that of others and of the natural world we live in. If someone or a group of people are going to attempt to prove the existence of natural phenomena through natural processes the problem is proving it true by natural processes or through nature alone, but no scientists or groups of scientists anywhere on earth has been able to prove it irrefutably. People choose to believe what ever they choose to and many have an opinion how the universe came into existence or how life started on planet earth, was it Prof Stephen Hawkings who suggested the multi universe hypothesis? others have suggested gradual evolution like Charles Darwin, nothing inherently wrong with that but there is no irrefutable proof of any of it, just postulation and opinions, that's all. Life begets life and there is no escaping that fact, how all of it came about in the very first place is disputed heavily. We agree to disagree. I'm sure if and when irrefutable proof is certainly found that it will be all over the news. Take care have a nice day.
Soldato
The thing that feels a little off about that, is that there's an imbalance between matter and anti-matter in the universe. It's not symmetrical. The laws of physics seem to have a very slight bias in favour of matter rather than anti-matter.
Yes, and the matter has the gravitational potential energy bound up in it. (And whatever)
One of the puzzling things about the laws of nature is that a lot of things are almost, but just not quite, symmetrical.
As for the 10 dimensions thing.
I think a lot of the argument there is a sort of occums razor thing.
A bit like comparing geocentric models of the solar system with heliocentric ones.
In a sense, in that you can create a perfectly valid mathematical model for both scenarios, both positions are "Valid"
But the maths for the heliocentric model is relatively simple where as the maths for a geocentric one is a bloody nightmare.
In the same vein, the mats for a 10 dimensional universe is (Apparently) a lot simpler than the maths for a three dimensional one.
Therefore there is good reason to believe it to be "Correct" even though it is not something that our monkey brains are equipped to really comprehend.
Time, as a remarkably astute lady of my acquaintance, who has absolutely no physics education at all, put it, Is Gods way of allowing causes to have effects.
As she put it "Without Time, there is no action!"
Frankly, I cant really think of a better way of putting it.
What is time in a actual concept of time? You live in the here and now the is no tomorrow the was no yesterday. You might think the was but its just here and now even as I am typing this message it will be in the past.
Even looking at it from a past, present and future its all the same I could in 0.0000001 seconds from posting this.
Man of Honour
There is a great deal of difference between a rational explanation that matches every single piece of evidence and an "explanation" that simply states "it's magic". They're simply not the same thing at all.
There is also a great deal of difference between "we don't know" and "it's magic". They're also not the same thing at all.
And yes, you are assuming that the universe was created by a god. You stated so explicitly when you described it as "a miraculous event or thaumaturgic." You're making the "it's magic" statement, since a miracle is also magic. You have also stated it again just now when you stated that the universe was created by an external cause.
There is plenty of evidence of things happening in the universe that have no apparent cause. "the immutable law of cause and effect" might not be so immutable at a very small scale. Or maybe it's simply that no human understands the cause yet.
You're apparently failing to understand a key point of science, namely that it's willing to make rational explanations based on evidence. For that reason, strictly speaking no scientific theory should ever be considered irrefutably proven. If an explanation is considered irrefutably proven, it is a declaration that if any evidence that the explanation is wrong to any extent in any way in any circumstances is ever discovered then the evidence must be ignored. That's the opposite of science. It's also a declaration that if any other rational explanation that matches all known evidence is ever deduced it must be decreed to be false without consideration of its merits. That's the opposite of science. You are ordering science to be anti-science. Do you understand how wrong that is?
Of course, some theories can be treated as proven on a day to day basis. When an explanation holds up every time to every evidence from every experiment and every observation, over and over again from a multitude of independent observers, and that explanation correctly predicts what will happen in specific circumstances, all the time, every time, it can reasonably be treated as proven on a day to day basis. But even then, scientists will allow for the possibility of change, accept the possibility that an explanation was in some way incomplete or even incorrect. Even really fundamental theories that underpin many other things and which have overwhelming evidence for them, far more evidence than would be required to consider something proven outside of a scientific context. An example that comes to mind was the suggestion of the existence of superluminal neutrinos a few years back. That was an extremely radical idea because it quite fundamentally contradicts the most basic part of the theory of relativity. Rather a big deal, since much of modern knowledge is built partly on relativity. Did scientists treat the suggestion as heresy? No. They treated it as probably a mistake but also an opportunity. There were theoretical physicists who were downright happy about it because if superluminal neutrinos did exist then that meant there was suddenly an unexpected new area of knowledge to seek and that's a great treasure to scientist.
You're treating science as a religion. You're fundamentally wrong to do so.
Associate
Well, the one thing I've learned from this is, if a genie gives you three wishes, don't ask to live forever.
Soldato
I've not tried to put anything onto you wolfie. There is as much proof that there is a god as not... That is to say zero.
Dark matter has been observed through gravitational lensing, they don't just "assume it exists" lol.
Soldato
And the Earth has been observed through the fall of an apple. Hence we know the Earth is there.
Man of Honour
Something has been observed through gravitational effects, but we don't know what it is. It's matter, Jim, but not as we know it
Or maybe it isn't matter, although it interacts with gravity like matter and like nothing else we know of.I think danoliver1 is mistaking not knowing what something is for not knowing whether or not it exists.
Something has been observed through gravitational effects, but we don't know what it is. It's matter, Jim, but not as we know it
Yep, something has been observed to cause gravitational lensing, we dont know what it is, but on past experience, we assume that this is something that has the same properties as matter/mass
But we also may be totally mistaken in making this assumption. It might be some aspect of the universe that is totally unknown as yet and might have nothing to do with matter/mass at all.
The Earth has been observed because when I fell out of the apple tree, I hit it and it hurt!
The Apple has been observed because the Apple I was climbing for then followed be down to the Earth and hit me on the head.
And that hurt too!
(Cosmology is all about Me and My existance! Just like it is for everybody else!)
Man of Honour
The Earth has been observed because when I fell out of the apple tree, I hit it and it hurt!
The Apple has been observed because the Apple I was climbing for then followed be down to the Earth and hit me on the head.
And that hurt too!
(Cosmology is all about Me and My existance! Just like it is for everybody else!)
I didn't see you fall out of the tree, therefore the Earth doesn't exist!
On a slightly related note:
It a channel about objects that have some relevance to the history of science. That video (the first one - I think the presenting improves with practice) is mainly about objects made from wood from an apple tree in what was Newton's garden, but I think the most interesting object is the manuscript of a biography of Newton, written by someone who knew him well and spent a fair bit of time with him and in which he says that Newton recounted the story to him while they spent a pleasant evening drinking tea in a garden shaded by apple trees and talking, with Newton saying that it reminded him of when he was sitting in his garden, saw an apple falling and thought about gravity, prompted by wondering why the apple fell perpendicular to the ground. So the apple didn't hit him on the head, but it did fall while Newton was there and it was what he remembered as a key event in his thinking about gravity. Unless the author of the manuscript was lying, of course.