Alex Filippenko and colleagues have caused a stir by observing that the law of physics can now explain the Big Bang without one common element: God. The University of California (Berkeley) professor observed that . “With the laws of physics, you can get universes.” Before we replace the statement on our money to read “In the Law of Physics, We Trust” there is a fallback. If the law of physics can explain the Big Bang, God may have still invented the law of physics.
Filippenko was speaking at the SETICon 2 Conference at a panel called “Did the Big Bang Require a Divine Spark?” The answer, he insisted is no: “The Big Bang could’ve occurred as a result of just the laws of physics being there. With the laws of physics, you can get universes.”
Under quantum mechanics, random fluctuations can produce matter and energy out of nothingness. Panelist Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the non-profit Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute also agreed that “Quantum mechanical fluctuations can produce the cosmos.” Shostak seemed to offer an ray of hope for a super being substitute in the form of a giant kid from another universe:
“If you would just, in this room, just twist time and space the right way, you might create an entirely new universe. It’s not clear you could get into that universe, but you would create it . . . So it could be that this universe is merely the science fair project of a kid in another universe. . . I don’t know how that affects your theological leanings, but it is something to consider.”
I am not sure religious scholars will be quick to embrace Bobby The Giant Kid With The Science Kit as a substitute for God. It totally messed up the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Filippenko and Shostak could be looking at the same reaction as the Science Guy — only greater. Bill Nye, the Science Guy, was virtually stoned when he suggested in Texas that the Moon does not generate its own light despite what the Bible says. Filippenko makes Ney look like a heretical piker. First he affirms a theory that our universe came into existence 13.7 billion years ago when we all know that the Earth can be no more than a few thousand years old. Then he posits a theory that seems markedly different from the following:
First God made heaven & earth 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
Correct me if I am wrong but I could not find a single reference to Quantum Mechanical Fluctuations.
Legend has it that Galileo was convicted by the Vatican for merely stating Eppur si muove (“and yet it moves”). He was found “vehemently suspect of heresy.”
It is unclear when Filipenko and Shostak will be called upon to “abjure, curse, and detest” those opinions.
Regardless of the outcome, I for one am not about to buy all of those Bobby, The Giant Kid With the Science Kit, decorations and gifts. I find that Quantumas has already become totally commercial.
Source: MSNBC
Woosty,
To paraphrase a really old SNL skit that’s why doG also put the majority of naughty bits on women, to keep ’em all in one place so they’d be easy to find. 😉
Question: Why were there rules first? Why did the property of the particles not determine the physics of the universe?
———-
because the naughty bits needed to be reformed…
Shoot. Now the Big Bang/Divine Spark god has joined the Sun, Moon, Thunder, Rain, Wind, Fire, and Eclipse gods. I guess that just leaves us with our ever faithful War god.
Tony C: “Whenever it started, why were there rules governing the behavior of electrons, quarks, and the whole zoo of particles and fields and interactions before any of those actually existed in the nothingness?”
___
Question: Why were there rules first? Why did the property of the particles not determine the physics of the universe? If there are (potentially) a multitude of universes in an infinite space why wouldn’t the particular sprinklings of particles in each dictate the physics of each universe?
Dredd,
Listen to the recording named “Atlantis”……
Mike Spindell 1, June 26, 2012 at 6:27 pm
… The ancient writers were far more intelligent than they have been give credit for …
==================================
Yes, and there lies the distortion.
They crafted beautiful buildings, gardens, temples, art works, and literature.
To their credit they did not comprehend ecocide, extinction of species, global warming, or destruction of fundamental Earth cycles.
They had an innocent, wise, and well adjusted intellect that we misunderstand by calling it primitive or naive.
Today we are so advanced, so sophisticated, and so chic that we can destroy all of the human species many times over, are busy destroying thousands of other species, all the while claiming evolutionary exceptionalism.
Let’s face it, we have so much of reality way wrong.
Dredd,
I so agree. Leaving out technology, whether we’ve progressed or regressed as a species is not easily answered and therein lies what I believe is the worst problem. Are we equipped to deal with today’s reality? I’m not sure we are.
Oro Lee 1, June 26, 2012 at 4:12 pm
… The standard cosmological model states the universe consisted of seething, hot plasma for the first 100,000 years after the Big Bang.
========================================
What do you expect of fluctuations during their first Big Bang?
All that fluctuating for all that _______ before there was time.
Finally, the flux hit and everyone was a fan, and well, plasma happens.
@Roger Lambert: Agreed. I do not think it was a metaphor either; I think it was what they literally believed must have happened, given their reasoning at the time. It is what their tribe settled on and (in their brutally authoritarian way) enforced as the only acceptable belief.
Many of the Bible stories have been traced back to pre-3000 BC in India; I am not sure about the creation myth per se, but “Genesis” may have been a collection of stories told and refined for thousands of years before they found its way into the Bible. There is evidence of that in the plurality of “gods” in Genesis (At 1:26, 3:22, 6:4), a sign of poorly edited adaptations.
@Oro Lee: Even Einstein had a hard time getting his head around it.
Einstein did NOT have a hard time getting his head around quantum mechanics at all, he understood what Bohr was saying in its entirety, he just believed Bohr had to be wrong and there was more to discover in terms of particles, fields, or physics that would eventually sweep away the probability aspect.
That was a reasonable expectation, at the time, that the Copenhagen interpretation was just an approximation of a deeper theory. Especially so for Einstein, who had shown Newton’s physics to be just an approximation of a deeper theory, namely his own General Relativity.
Einstein did not have any trouble with QM, in fact it was many of Einstein’s first questions and proposed tests that Bohr and Heisenberg could not answer that ultimately proved to confirm QM. There is a huge difference between being skeptical of something and not understanding something. He understood just fine, it was Bohr proposing something he could not justify by reason or experiment, it was Bohr speculating and Einstein saying, correctly, “you haven’t shown that yet.”
Eventually it was shown, eventually Bohr’s speculations turned out to be correct, but they were still very much unproven speculations when Einstein and Bohr were having their campus walks and talking.
You cannot judge Einstein in hindsight and say he should have just accepted Bohr on faith; that would be ludicrous. I am no Einstein acolyte, but Einstein did what a scientist should have done, he was demanding some proof that the quantum behavior could NOT be explained by the standard particle-field models or other unsuspected hidden variables.
And you know this how, Mike?
You know who wrote Genesis and you know it was meant as metaphor? If so, what was their literal creation hypothesis?
And the folks who have turtles all the way down as their creation myth? That metaphor also?
Such sophisticates, these Bronze age thinkers! Imagine them knowing this was all metaphor, when they were a thousand years from the invention of science.
Don’t you think it just might be possible that Genesis actually WAS meant to be taken literally, just like the thousand creation stories that preceded it?
And that, once again, it is modern folks like yourself who are constantly trying to rehabilitate the Bible by deciding the uncomfortable parts are ‘obviously’ metaphor, while the deepity parts are all sincere?
“Don’t you think it just might be possible that Genesis actually WAS meant to be taken literally, just like the thousand creation stories that preceded it?”
Roger Lambert,
No I don’t think it is possible and I have spent much time thinking and reading about this. You might want to look at the writing of Joseph Campbell, Sir James George Frazer and Robert Graves for a start. The ancient writers were far more intelligent than they have been give credit for and the creation stories were always seen to be myths and an entry point into teaching the young deeper lessons about life. Do you really think that the Hindu stories about Vishnu were taken literally by those who created them, they had a far more perceptive view of the world than that. That was true of The Greeks who used Olympus as a metaphor.
@Oro Lee: No, he really is begging the question. The question people want answered is simple: We obviously have reality and time right now, that is self-evident, so has it always been thus, or did it have a beginning?
It is a brain-twister, because if time DID have a beginning, then how can there have been a change from “there is no time” to “there is time”? On the other hand, if time DID NOT have a beginning, then what does it even mean to go back infinitely far? So did time have a beginning or not?
Begging the question means engaging in a circular argument, assuming the proposition you were supposed to prove. That is what Lawrence does here, he claims there was a beginning, but only because there is another hyper-reality beyond the universe and he isn’t going to go into why that exists or how IT came to be. So he has only answered our question by regression, and the identical REAL question still exists: Did the hyper-reality exist eternally, or did it have a beginning, and the brain-twister is still embedded in his answer.
It is also in your answer: If quantum mechanics could form the hyper-reality, then is what existed before that hyper-reality nothingness? Is that INFINITE, or did IT have a beginning?
I really do not have to read his book, I am familar with the physics arguments already and they are bullshit. My position, btw, is the same as Stephen Hawking’s publicly stated position: No matter what you are left with an incomprehensible regression into an infinite past; and quantum mechanics will not save you from that. His argument is that “nothingness” is unstable, and that is true, but it doesn’t explain where “nothingness” came from, or where the laws came from, or anything else. He is simply making some money on the same misleading rhetorical trick that religionists use, and I have lost respect for him because of it.
Tony C wrote — “Then Lawrence is begging the question; because what people are interested in is how things got started. If he posits we were a quantum fluctuation in an existing environment (the hyper-inflating thingamajig) then where did THAT come from?”
Not really — you need to read his book. I’m no a physicist and my explanations are not complete, but I think this is the proper rejoinder. Since such a supraverse is possible as posited by Kraus, QM demands that it exist and QM is capable of producing it out of nothing; however, QM doesn’t demand that several such supraverses exist.
God is reputed to have said that His ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. We just have to accept that He exists and can do all this out of nothing stuff. I guess we’re suppose to feel the same way about QM. Even Einstein had a hard time getting his head around it.
I kinda feel that there may be more to nothing than nothing; that QM doesn’t act in or with nothing, but that QM is an attribute of nothing.
Bettykath wrote: “Is it not possible that the Genesis description might be a metaphor?”
Of course it is for the reasons you suggested, “Would those first (and later) learning of Genesis be able to understand the quantum mechanics if it were presented as science?”
Genesis 1 uses a mnemonic device in setting out the sequence of creation:
Day 1 – light
Day 4 – Sun, moon, stars
Day 2 – Water and sky
Day 5 – sea creatures and birds
Day 3 – land
Day 6 – plants and land animals (including man)
The standard cosmological model states the universe consisted of seething, hot plasma for the first 100,000 years after the Big Bang. Plasma isn’t energy or matter, but it has characteristics of both. Same with light – it propagates as a wave but the photons have mass.
The plasma then sorted itself out into matter and energy, but it was another 200,000 years before the universe cooled enough for visible light to exist. Then light was everywhere even though it took about 100,000 million years before the first stars formed. The model follows the Day 1&4 progression.
Development of life in the Day 2&5 and Day 3&6 combinations matches up well with modern scientific theories of development and evolution of life beginning in the ocean and moving onto land. [The bird thing might be out of order].
The Bible is not a science book – it refers to the moon as a great light. It isn’t. The Bible is a religious book, and Genesis 1is one of the ancient creation stories. Genesis 1&2 declare that there is a God and he created a really great place for people to live. Paul repeats the same sentiment in Romans 1:20.
Genesis 1 existed as an oral story long before the advent of Judaism or Christianity. It was part of a primal religion serving subsistence people with an intimate, existential connection to their environment. It is my opinion that the teachings of many primal religions contain deep truths that have been plowed under by the erection of civilized nations and their superior religions.
Gyges 1, June 26, 2012 at 1:30 pm
Mike,
“Neither I nor any other human has any answer as to how this Universe came to be…”
=======================================
You see, Mike wants to be honest about this.
Also, don’t forget that anon brought up “the Planck length at which random quantum mechanical fluctuations dominate …”
He is one sexy dude. 😉
It was “the Planck length” what dun it.
Git ‘r dun!
Mike Spindell 1, June 26, 2012 at 3:13 pm
“However, evidently fluctuations at rest tend to fluctuate. It was the children of The Focker Fluctuations that invented sex”
Dredd,
Has it occurred to you that you and I both have some weird theories about different things. I’d say we were crazy if we weren’t so smart and rational. 🙂
====================================
Yep.
Different things need different theories. 😉
Somebody gotta doit.
“Each year sitting in Synagogue I fidget as a Rabbi tries to explain the passage, simply because its meaning is so obvious…”
When talking to audiences a bout Quantum physics Neils Bohr would often tell a story about a young rabbinical student who went to a few lectures given by a famous and respected rabbi. When his friends asked him what he thought he told his friends that the first lecture was good and that he understood everything the rabbi said. Then he’d say the second lecture was even better because he didn’t understand the lecture but the rabbi did, but that his favorite was the third lecture, it was so deep that even the rabbi didn’t understand it.
“Is it not possible that the Genesis description might be a metaphor? Isn’t the Bible full of metaphors?”
Bettykath,
Not only is it possible, but it is true and the people who wrote it knew they were using metaphor. Instead of trying to understand the metaphors and therefore the morality being preached, the literalists led by power-hungry sociopaths, took it as actual history and thereby missed the point entirely. An early example is the story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac. The real point of that seeming horrific story was that God did not want human sacrifice, which was the standard of all the other surrounding religions at the time, This portion of the Torah is read on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, perhaps the most sacred of Jewish holidays. Each year sitting in Synagogue I fidget as a Rabbi tries to explain the passage, simply because its meaning is so obvious if you understand religions historically and comprehend how much metaphor is contained within all of them.
Previous post continued below (hit wrong button)
Bettykath wrote: “Is it not possible that the Genesis description might be a metaphor?”
Of course it is for the reasons you suggested, “Would those first (and later) learning of Genesis be able to understand the quantum mechanics if it were presented as science?”
Genesis 1 explains declares that God created everything and it was all good. Paul repeats the same idea in Romans 1:20.
Geneisi 1 uses a mnemonic device in setting out the sequence of creation
Day 1 — light