"The issue is that physicists can’t accept the scientifically honest answer: We don’t know, and leave it at that."
This sentence jumped out for me. Is there some kind of crusade going on that I have missed the beginning of? This feels like a strange sentence in this piece and feels like a (misguided) attack.
She's fantastic. She doesn't hesitate to call out the physics community on its idiosyncrasies. She is a necessary check and balance on the mainstream body of researchers.
So you're right - Research Fellow at Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Science [1]
However her broad ranging commentary which tends to take the tone of "this field should listen to me but doesn't" as is the case with this article (and a few others she's done such as about the LHC[2] or black-hole information loss[3]) leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Suggests that the universe may be older than the Big Bang theory predicts. There are a lot of qualifiers on both sides of this, so I would suggest sitting back with some popcorn and enjoying the spectacle of a lot of primate descended life forms earnestly debating something that in many cases they couldn't even be bothered to read up on.
Haven't read the article but I remember some mentioning these analysis are quite useless without spectra. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can explain this.
Our best cosmological theory applied backwards results in singularity. That's bad. See her droplet example.
According to maximally projected Penrose diagrams in singularity time and space evert into the multiverse. You move in time and space flows around you.
https://youtu.be/4v9A9hQUcBQ
And according to our other most successful theory, space-time is divided into chunks. And boiling. Opposite of infinitely divisible, smooth relativistic space-time.
Not to mention if we go with current astronomy theory, we end up with unexplained dark matter and dark energy, that give different answers depending on the methodology.
I think she justifies the "attack" towards the end of the piece, where she talks about the many theories that purport to explain how the universe began. Her point is that you can always create a coherent mathematical model that "explains" this, but since it is logically impossible to check it, you're not proposing a scientific theory.
I don’t often go looking in Astronomy or cosmology journals, but I’d be surprised if either scientists were trying to publish articles like that — or if they were, that they could pass peer review.
On the other hand, if you are working on theories that can extend into the early universe, it’s not unimportant to try and figure out where the model breaks down. Maybe t=0 isn’t possible, but t=1s? 1ns? 1ps? How much can we feasibly describe?
I’d argue that not exploring the limits of models is also bad science. Knowing the limits is a fundamental part of communicating a model.
> I’d be surprised if either scientists were trying to publish articles like that — or if they were, that they could pass peer review.
The article we're discussing itself even links to one such paper [0]. All of the others she mentions are also published works - Penrose's CCC [1], the ekpyrotic universe [2], Hawking's no-boundary state [3] etc.
> On the other hand, if you are working on theories that can extend into the early universe, it’s not unimportant to try and figure out where the model breaks down. Maybe t=0 isn’t possible, but t=1s? 1ns? 1ps? How much can we feasibly describe?
Sure, but this is a different thing. Many of these are adding elements to the existing theories, and then predict a new initial state given the modified evolution laws.
The point of publishing those articles is...to publish them though. Like, you have an idea, you write it up, submit it and note that it can fit known data but isn't currently testable. Done, and important. Maybe it goes nowhere, maybe it inspires someone, but the point of journals is in the name: they're journals of work in the field, shared so the community can explore and benefit from them.
They're not publications of "what is definitely true", they are fundamentally explorations of what could be, or the more important "this is kind of interesting where could it lead?".
> note that it can fit known data but isn't currently testable.
But the thing is, theories about the beginning of the universe will never be testable, they aren't just not currently testable.
So, if your theory has no novel predictions about the future, but it adds extra parameters to obtain a different prediction about a past which exists beyond what can be measured, then you're wasting your time creating this theory, and wasting reviewers' and readers' time publishing it; and you're wasting money researching it.
This is what Sabine usually writes and complains about - research money being spent on research that is at best unlikely to bear any fruit, and at worst navel-gazing, especially when there are very real problems in physics that are not receiving significant research.
This is why she complains about people researching the beginning of the universe, or black hole entropy, or grand unified theories, or the hierarchy "problem", or looking for supersimmetry or for WIMPs in ever larger particle accelerators.
Instead, she wishes more people were researching the measurement problem, non-linearity in quantum mechanics, high-energy physics through radio-telescopes instead of particle accelerators, to name a few things.
Now, I don't know anywhere near enough to say that she is right, but I do believe she is not trivially wrong, like you seem to be suggesting.
What we do know is that the universe didn’t begin from nothing. It’s impossible for something to arise out of nothing, so there has always been something.
Nothingness is the space that holds everything.
From there it can be argued that the universe began with the adjacent possible of nothing.
I think most statements like this have an underlying conceptual problem in that they assume the existence of causality.
Since the Big Bang is the beginning of space and time, it doesn’t make sense to say it “came from” anything - not nothing, anything. Nothing could have “caused” it because causality depends on there being a before in which the cause could take place. Causality breaks down with the beginning of time and that causes us a lot of conceptual confusion.
It's not impossible for something to arise out of nothing. Well, what I really should say is, it's not impossible for two somethings to arise out of nothing, as long as they have opposite charge and annihilate when they come into contact.
I like to imagine there's an anti-universe moving backwards in time from the start of the universe, and that's where all the unexplained missing baryonic antimatter ended up.
Put in other words, something is a subset of nothing! This idea fits in well with the unprovable MWI as well. If every possibile configuration of spacetime exists, and in a symmetry where everything has an opposite, doesn't it all kind of "add up" to 0? This idea has been in my head since high school physics many years ago.
>What we do know is that the universe didn’t begin from nothing. It’s impossible for something to arise out of nothing, so there has always been something.
Got proof?
...and isn't that the whole point of the discussion?
It is not obvious to me whether one could determine if the phrase "the adjacent possible of nothing" refers to something, as opposed to merely resembling phrases that do. Regardless, there is an evocative ring to it.
Please, how can any human being be so absolute about anything? Modern humans emerged ~300K years ago (or at least that's what we know so far), so how on earth can we be sure about anything? Our science is nice and all, and can help us built amazing devices that save lives and allow us to explore... but all we have are models. Theories. Zero certainty.
If anything, science is all about: "I have no idea what this is, but I have a model that seems to explain certain scenarios. Let's stick with it until someone more intelligent than us provides a better model". We may be "sure" about certain "laws" (e.g,, thermodynamics, speed of light, etc.)... but I think it's a mistake to be so absolute about them.
or when it will end, despite university profs trying to justify their high salaries by confidently predicting exactly what will happen to the universe...no one knows, despite lying university blowhards telling us that they know everything
Which one? The Hindu / Buddhist / Sufi Islamist philosophy of everyone being connected and being reborn / recycled comes pretty close to the scientific postulation that "energy is constant and can neither be created nor destroyed but only converted from one form to another". So when we die, our energy conserved in our body becomes something else. The caveat of the first law of thermodynamic is that all this happens only "in a closed system". So is God within this system, a part of the system and part of the energy in this system (which would mean that when we attain Moksha / Nirvana and escape the cycle of rebirth / reconversion, we become a part of God)?. Or is God outside this system?
"So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics. It’s not wrong, but it isn’t scientific either. The Big Bang is the simplest explanation we know, and that is probably wrong, and that’s it. That’s all that science can tell us."
I think that this is the TL;DR of the whole piece:
> So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics.
We sometimes also rule out other ways it "could" have happened, because they're further from our current paradigm, or just harder (or maybe impossible) to verify. In this sense, it may not be a "religion", but there is an element of "faith"
The most relevant definition (i.e. the only one that states anything about evidence) from your link seems to agree:
> 2.b. firm belief in something for which there is no proof
With respect to the Christian Bible reference, I don't read it as saying there's no evidence for what they believe; I think you'd have a hard time finding a Christian who does.
"We don't know how fire comes to life, and we will never know."
"We don't know how to defend ourselves against beasts, and we'll never know."
"We don't know how disease spreads, let's just hug it out, we'll never know."
"We don't know how to fly like a bird, we'll never know."
"We don't know how to land the booster of a rocket, we'll never know."
"We don't know how to cure that form of cancer, and we'll never know."
What a ridiculous defeatist attitude. History has proven that, so far, we've been very reliable at figuring out things that were deemed impossible.
I'd say we already know. It would be infinitely arrogant of us to think we're the originals. We're likely inside an inescapable but observable simulation, inside a simulation, repeat for any unknown number of times. That's probably how "the universe" (our universe) began.
Our parent universes probably have far more complexities to them that have been stripped from ours, for the sake of computational simplicity. Perhaps the actual originals, or any of our parent simulators, know exactly how the universe came to be. We might figure it out, too.
None of those things are impossible based on known physics. Traveling backwards in time to observe the beginning of the universe, and/or somehow existing outside the universe in order to do the observation, is impossible. Could we learn new physics that make it possible? Yes, but it is still a totally different class of problems than the ones you listed. Those were ONLY a question of knowledge. The problem at hand is a question of both knowledge AND the laws of physics actually allowing for that knowledge to be had. There was never any reason to assume that we would be unable to cure a certain type of cancer with the right knowledge alone.
I agree that the title is kind of defeatist and I'm not against scientific research on finding the source of universe, heck I optimistically hope humans find it within my lifetime. That said, all your examples are really miniscule and dare I say, easy, as compared to the scale of understanding the universe.
You present an interesting semi-fictional point on simulation.
> We're likely inside an inescapable but observable simulation, inside a simulation, repeat for any unknown number of times. That's probably how "the universe" (our universe) began.
That's just deferring the question. If we're a simulation inside a larger universe, then how did that universe begin? Although I'd argue if we're in a simulation then we're still a part of the host universe, even if kept in isolation, and it's that host universe we should ultimately care about when asking the big questions.
First, we would need to solve time.
I am not sure if we are able to grasp it.
Then we must figure out what happened at T-1 or T-2,
which I think will be simple once we understand time.
The theory creates a start and then explains the progress from there.
but not what caused it.
In theory of the cylinder than the universe travels to that is good
but it does not explain how everything came to be.
We have a simple to state problem.
There was nothing, then there was something.
Much like in Genesis
""And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.""
Instead:
Science says there was a big bang and from that everything was created.
and we have figured out a model to explain (most) of the evolution since
the big bang. Which means we can say no god did it.
But the way the story begins is in my opinion quite similar.
In one version god is used to explain what created us.
Which then leads to the question of who created god
and to answer that we need to figure out time.
(I am aware that there are equations that explain what was at t-1
or explain that there was nothing and even asking the question
of what was at t-1 is crazy. I do not have the background that
could allow me to understand the equations, but every which way you do
it you end up with a question of what started it, or what was before
what was the trigger to get it going.
Perhaps you can say that the universe has always been there, forever,
sometimes it shrinks sometimes it expands, and we have a nice perpetuum mobile.
> However, you play around with words the same question always remains what was before.
> Where did this super dense black hole come from? What caused it to be? What was it before it was a black hole?
These theories are just that - thought experiments to try to come up with possible explanations. They are not claimed as proven or facts.
There are a lot of open equestions. It is work in progress.
> Our current theories for the origin of black holes as far as I know does not include the spontaneous appearance of a black hole for no reaosn.
There are actually theories that black holes can form spontaneously. This is because particles are theorized to be able to spontaneously form and under the right circumstances they'd form a black hole. They would most likely though evaporate nearly instantly. But again that is not proven.
The story's title isn't explicit about the means by which the knowledge is gained, nor exactly which details are being sought.
I think it's a mistake to treat the scientific method as the only plausible source of knowledge. My opinion is obviously based on a particular worldview, but so is a claim that the only useful source of knowledge is the scientific method.
> We have a simple to state problem. There was nothing, then there was something.
Natural language is woefully inadequate to express these issues, but believe it is a mistake to state the problem like this. There can be no concept of “before” if there is a T0. Perhaps the “why is there something rather than nothing?” version comes closer to what we are asking.
Hawking’s history of time actually anwsers this question with „we don’t know and don’t have any information from before big bang we can access to use in research”.
Not quite. There is still the possibility that at some point in the future we will be able to figure it out unless it can be proven that it is impossible.
The only observation is that currently we don't know. Could it be the spaghetti god monster? Maybe. Maybe not. We simply can't tell at the moment.
There are things we don't know the answer to. We just have to keep looking.
Watching tons of PBS Spacetime the only theories oI see is that Universes are constantly being created with different properties, with an externally rare one having the right conditions for life to be possible.
Still leaves the same questions as to why a bunch of universes are being created or where the energy comes from.
End of day there isn’t anything I’ve seen other then a true all powerful God or equivalent being responsible.
I sense you just expressing your view on the matter, but I think that this is a very weak argument for God's existence. It's completely plausible that we will at some point in the future have good materialist explanations for the existence of energy or the size of the multiverse etc.
I'm happy for physics that finally someone from their ranks is trying, at least trying, to say that cosmology is a hoax. I've been writing this for ages. Here's one article I dug: https://notlar3.blogspot.com/search/label/Big%20Bang
Maybe it stops being science and starts being math, but I don’t think that means we should discourage people from doing it. That said, I am sympathetic to an argument that we may not need to fund such inquiries.
“We will never know” sounds overly pessimistic to me; I could imagine someone from the 10th century claiming we will never know the trillionth prime number.
I think that the evolution of physics has actually been a series of discoveries of new things that are impossible. We used to think that many things were possible if only we knew the right spell, or invoked the right god, or just worked hard enough.
Then as people studied nature more thoroughly and systematically, they started observing laws that simply can't be crossed - conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, the increase of entropy , the limited speed of causality, the uncertainty principle - to name some of the bigger ones. All of these have put limits on something we used to think of as unlimited.
There are many more non-existence proofs in math as well - so even in pure math, you can't escape this accumulation (probably the most famous such problem, one long attempted that ultimately proved impossible, is "squaring the circle", or in modern terms, the fact that pi^n is irrational for any rational n).
> “We will never know” sounds overly pessimistic to me; I could imagine someone from the 10th century claiming we will never know the trillionth prime number.
There are tons of stuff we as human beings we'll discover and be pretty confident about it. There are other things we'll never know. I think that's part of being human, to know our limits.
What if it never began and has simply always existed? That is the likely scenario, as the moment you think about it beginning, you again face beginning from what? What was that called before the universe other than the universe?
Our human brains cannot grasp the idea of "it simply always existed".
Imagine a non-human being (e.g., "god", "beings from another dimension", "beings from an advanced civilization", etc.) telling us the theory of everything (with maths and all, if you want), and the end saying: "btw, there is no origin, and no end. Realiy has always existed". Do you think our scientists (or any other kind of curious human being) will say "Alright, got it. Won't keep investigating then. Thanks!". That won't happen, our human brains cannot understand that concept, and there will always be the "but how does it work?!"
Just because everything within this universe has some preceding cause doesn’t mean that the universe itself can’t have a beginning without anything preceding it.
This is an interesting and important point. I'll attempt to rephrase your point slightly differently:
Everything we observe in the universe has a sequence of linear causes stretching backward in time. However we can't be sure from these observations that Universe (or multiverse or something similar) itself has been caused in a similar way. -- I hope I got that right.
But is the physical universe (or multiverse or something similar) that we experience a good candidate for the uncaused base reality that just exists?
A good reason to think not is that universe is composed of stuff and parts that change relative to each other. If something changes, ie goes from potential to actual, then there is something that is more actual, or more real, from which we should be able to explain the change.
Another way to say it is that we may not know what base reality is, but in order for it to be a good candidate for 'the' base reality, it should be completely simple. And the universe as whole, by all appearances, is quite complex.
If the universe is infinitely old - well, what’s the probability that, untold (yet finite) aeons ago, a planet existed just like this one, in which history unfolded in exactly the same way, even the pettiest details of our lives being precisely the same? I think the probability is arbitrarily close to 1 - not just that our lives have happened exactly the same before once, but an arbitrary - even infinite - number of times - and we should expect will again in the future. Would it follow that Nietzsche was correct in his doctrine of eternal recurrence?
But if there exist an infinite number of copies of myself, all exactly the same - why should I consider myself to be any one of them individually, as opposed to all of them equally? If they are all the same, are they not identical? In which case - the past isn’t infinite after all - rather time is finite and circular.
Another way to put it - any finite spatial volume must contain finite information (see the Bekenstein bound) - hence can only exist in a finite number of distinguishable states. Given infinite time but only a finite number of possible states to visit in them, it has to visit the self-same states again and again - an infinite number of times
Well, there's also the possibility that the universe occupied some single state (say, the singularity posited by the big bang theory) since t=-inf to some t0 when it exploded, and that the dynamical laws are of such a nature that it can never return to that state.
Right now, the prevailing model of cosmology (lambda-CDM) basically says that the universe can never return to an earlier state, as it is constantly expanding (and that expansion is accelerating). In this model, the universe has an infinite number of possible states, and is in fact guaranteed to never visit a previous state, even though it has an infinite future ahead of it.
> Well, there's also the possibility that the universe occupied some single state (say, the singularity posited by the big bang theory) since t=-inf to some t0 when it exploded
What's the actual difference between these two positions:
(A) the universe was in state X for an infinite amount of time, then suddenly transitioned to some other state Y
(B) time began at t=0 with the universe in state X, and it immediately transitioned to some other state Y
They seem effectively identical, with seemingly no way for us to tell them apart. (B) seems simpler than (A), so by Occam's razor we ought to prefer it to (A), unless we have some specific reason not to. What could such a reason be? Well, I suppose (A) might lead to simpler mathematics. However, in actual fact, I don't believe that's true; and even if it were, it still might be reasonable to conclude that the "infinite static before-life of the universe" was just a mathematical artefact, without any physical reality.
Other problems with this view: (i) time is usually understood as a succession of instants which are somehow distinct – could an infinite succession of instants, all exactly the same as each other, actually count as "time"? (ii) why, if the universe had existed forever in a single state, did it suddenly transition to a new one? That seems harder to explain than the universe just existing with a finite past.
So, I think an infinite past only really makes sense if the infinite past involved an infinity of distinct universe-states – which I think might lead to the consequences I was suggesting.
> In this model, the universe has an infinite number of possible states, and is in fact guaranteed to never visit a previous state, even though it has an infinite future ahead of it.
Let me present a variation on the Boltzmann brain argument: the universe is vast, yet the volume of it which is actually relevant to humans is quite small. Humans cannot ever know or care about the state of the universe as a whole, only that subsection of it we can somehow observe–which is at most the observable universe; but, if we accept the possibility (even only as exceedingly unlikely) that nature is deceiving us (other galaxies don't really exist, it is just randomly arranged photons which by amazing fluke are exactly the same as what we'd observe if other galaxies did), the knowable subsection could be a lot smaller. No matter how stupendously unlikely such as scenario may be – so long as its probability is not strictly zero, in an infinite future, any constant non-zero probability is going to converge to unity.
Consider the current state of this galaxy – does Lambda-CDM guarantee that the universe will never visit a future state, which contains a Milky Way-sized volume, whose state is exactly the same as the state of this galaxy right now? You can repeat the question for "solar system-sized volume with exact same state as our solar system has right now" or "Earth-sized volume with exact same state as Earth has right now". Or a volume with the same size as the current observable universe, and the same state as it?
> So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics.
I thought that was very insightful. Today people try to pawn of all sorts of opinions as “science” by covering them with the language of science.
I think one thing that humans have not come to terms with is the possibility that some fundamental fields are essentially dead in terms of possible new discoveries that most people will care about. That doesn't mean that there's nothing left to do. There are minor details in some fields but they are more like engineering problems. Physics may be one of those fields and I certainly think math is as well. However, it's sometimes hard to recognize because there is a core group of people that keep it going because it's their nest egg.
I quite disagree with this. Visionaries come along to unseat centuries of limitations, raising the ceiling forever. Those visionaries are rare, but there will be more.
Maybe, but if you look at the list of famous unsolved problems in math, it has been dwindling for a long time. The list used to contain problems that undergrads could understand. Biology is still like this -- you can take quite a few interesting unsolved problems in biology and explain it to most people.
Math has a few left like the Riemann hypothesis, but the vast majority of new work that has been coming out is more like refinements (I say this as a PhD in math who as actually read them). We look at history and expect it to repeat itself, but if you closely examine math history you can actually see a decline. Take the time to truly examine "visionary" things that have happened in math and those events are actually getting fewer and fewer. I seriously doubt there is much left to do that is of interest to more than 5-10 people in each subfield.
Well, due to the nature of math there are technically hundreds of questions you can ask (specific behaviour of the infinite number of diophantine equations, improving constants in estimation, whether there exists a prime number that satisfies XYZ, etc), but those problems are becoming so hyperspecialized that very few people if any will care about them. There may be one more paradigm shift that is related to stuff that Sholze is doing and there is certainly some work to do in proof theory ala Voevodky's univalent foundations so we could see a couple more things but the vast majority of basic foundational work in math is done.
So while we have a few more fundamental problems that most people have heard of like the Riemann hypothesis and the twin primes conjecture, don't expect to have any more of those. (Certainly the more recent ones are already so specialized that few people outside the immediate area would ever understand or even care about them).
I'm also not sure why there's such a negative view towards the end of progress on this site---a lot of people seem to take it as an axiom that currently "useless" things will eventually become useful but I simply do not believe that is the case (and this is coming from someone who has published quite a few papers in pure math).
Physics still has major gaps right in the middle - our two main theories of how the world works are mathematically incompatible. This leaves room for some significant new discoveries that could upend everyone's understanding of the world.
Not to mention that both QM and GR in themselves have inconsistencies or infinities. GR famously has a singularity in the center of a black hole, which means the math doesn't actually apply there. QM has the measurement problem, and the (probably related) problem of making the laws of motion linear, when we can clearly see highly non-linear behavior in reality.
Depends what you mean by care about, because the majority of praised discoveries are an extra foot on the millipede. Precisely because we designed our universities and technologies that way.
You can nurture in systems and cultures that break open the fundamentals again if you so wish. Most people don't wish it, they are happy living out incremental improvement in the city and surrounds.
My pet theory: Something has always existed. There was no beginning. No origin. No first cause. No t=0. No start. It's always been there. What was before that? That. And that. And that. Always that.
And the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not absolute and can be broken.
Understanding what time is and what time isn't can deeply affect ones view of the universe. Being stuck down here in a gravity well we think of time as a fundamental thing that ticks along the same for everyone. But when we start looking at things at cosmological scales even the idea of a t=0 starts to bend and break.
For example look at particle interactions. The vast majority of them you can play them forward and backwards and they look exactly the same. You wouldn't be able to tell which way the video is running. The only way we can tell there is an arrow of time is because at some point a field asymmetry occurred. In a universe where all fields are symmetrical the idea of time simply breaks down and has no meaning.
The history of the Universe channel touches on this in their latest video.
If time exists then there's always a before. Unless at some point time didn't exist. But if time didn't exist and then suddenly something started to tick, that's still a transition from "no time" to "time" and this "no time" was before "time".
These thoughts are driving me crazy. There must be a piece of the puzzle we're missing.
There must be something about time that isn't or wasn't always linear. Otherwise there's no end to the "who created it" question.
It's similar to asking what contains the universe. And what contains the thing that contains the universe.
It feels as if there's a force (?) that we're not yet recognizing. Else, it's a crazy infinite loop.
Not that I'm saying this is true (just an example), but is the Big Bang simply (?) the introduction of time into the then time-less universe? It just doesn't make sense to say "The universe started with the Big Bang" when what that was prior was the universe but in a different form (or so we guess).
So it seems that something else had to be introduced to change the nature of the old universe into the new universe. Else the "start" is more like a "transformation" and even that opens a ton of questions.
> My pet theory: Something has always existed. There was no beginning. No origin. No first cause. No t=0. No start. It's always been there. What was before that? That. And that. And that. Always that.
Your pet theory is the view of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the Roman Catholic Church. The mistake that people make (you can even see it in this thread), is that they start with some preconceived conception of God, with all it's baggage, and then they attempt argue for, or against, this concept.
The more productive approach is to recognize and acknowledge the necessary existence of a base reality. Then you simply assign the English word 'God' as a reference pointer to this base reality.
const God = (the one base reality that exists necessarily)
> The more productive approach is to recognize and acknowledge the necessary existence of a base reality. Then you simply assign the English word 'God' as a reference pointer to this base reality.
You can, but I'm not sure how "then" onwards is going to help — the people I've seen conflating these things before will still conflate them after doing this.
Yup. I see what you mean and I do think in practice conversations may proceed this way. And I think you are illustrating well the point I made above.
The key idea though is that if you make a dispassionate analysis of what this base reality must be, you find that it has certain 'attributes'. So for example, anything that has horns would not be good candidate for base reality since the contingent concept of 'horn' would need to be explained by, and derive its very existence from something much more simple. So that simpler thing would be the less bad candidate. Etc.
The YouTube link I provided is to a professional astronomer and science communicator and she is explicitly saying JWST data does no such thing and that reports claiming it does are wrong.
I don't have a prevailing interest is how the universe was formed. The subject matter doesn't interest me. What does interest me is that the generally accepted position of all scientists who worked in this field said "Big Bang" was the de facto position. Until is suddenly isn't.
That just throws the whole reputation of all those scientists into doubt with the average Joe.
Everyone should be willing to change their position often and without shame. Scientists in particular should not be elevated for holding unmovable conclusions about anything. They must be open to evidence proving their theories wrong.
Those who prefer blind trust in unchanging authorities will be disappointed.
The Big Bang theory is still very much the de facto theory. The JWST findings while interesting are just one data point and they'll be further investigated. But it's way too early to say that BBT is dead.
Scientists are constantly finding better theories for explaining things and I think the population in general understands and accepts that.
Looking at a static stone and deducing where it fell from may work based on the current rules you know today but no one tells you these are the only rules. We have to look at science as best guess for the moment and not as absolute truth.
But, after all, who knows, and who can say
Whence it all came, and how creation happened?
the gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it has arisen?
Whence all creation had its origin,
the creator, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
the creator, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows — or maybe even he does not know.
Okay, this is truly bizarre. I came here to share this exact quote (after reading a prior comment about how the universe itself may never know), only to find that someone already posted it... whose handle is the same one I use on other sites, because I share the same initials.
Genuinely thought I'd gone crazy for a moment and posted this with an alternate account.
I would say it's an unlikely coincidence, but not truly bizarre.
- It's common for desi names to start with A or K
- It's common for desis to use initials when referring to themselves
- Some desi surnames are over-represented in the population
- People with desi names are likely to come in contact with South Asian culture irrespective of their environment or if they speak the relevant languages. Or rather, they are more likely to have these avenues to begin with if they ended up with such a naming scheme.
- There are only so many foundational or well-known texts in any culture, so if there is a relevant passage, it has a high likelihood of being cited
It's not that different from a Jay Smith and a John Smith quoting a relevant C.S. Lewis or Biblical passage and having a jsmith handle.
609 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 366 ms ] threadThis sentence jumped out for me. Is there some kind of crusade going on that I have missed the beginning of? This feels like a strange sentence in this piece and feels like a (misguided) attack.
If she was a software developer we'd rightly start to wonder about grand pronouncements coming from someone no longer practicing in the field.
When your market doesn't exist if you actually agree with anyone, the incentives start to be questionable.
What are you talking about?
She is still publishing proper research papers as recently as this month!
https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=author&query=Hossenfeld...
Some people pick up weird ideas about her and I really wonder why.
However her broad ranging commentary which tends to take the tone of "this field should listen to me but doesn't" as is the case with this article (and a few others she's done such as about the LHC[2] or black-hole information loss[3]) leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
[1] https://www.fias.science/en/fellows/detail/hossenfelder-sabi...
[2] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/10/particle-physicists...
[3] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/i-stopped-working-o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
Maybe save the unanswerable questions for after.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09428.pdf
Suggests that the universe may be older than the Big Bang theory predicts. There are a lot of qualifiers on both sides of this, so I would suggest sitting back with some popcorn and enjoying the spectacle of a lot of primate descended life forms earnestly debating something that in many cases they couldn't even be bothered to read up on.
If so: https://youtu.be/I7lxzS6K9PU
and: https://youtube.com/shorts/1S2CxPUZDOY?feature=share
Whether time has an origin, and whether we can measure how distant it is from us are questions that could be answered.
Our best cosmological theory applied backwards results in singularity. That's bad. See her droplet example.
According to maximally projected Penrose diagrams in singularity time and space evert into the multiverse. You move in time and space flows around you. https://youtu.be/4v9A9hQUcBQ
And according to our other most successful theory, space-time is divided into chunks. And boiling. Opposite of infinitely divisible, smooth relativistic space-time.
Not to mention if we go with current astronomy theory, we end up with unexplained dark matter and dark energy, that give different answers depending on the methodology.
On the other hand, if you are working on theories that can extend into the early universe, it’s not unimportant to try and figure out where the model breaks down. Maybe t=0 isn’t possible, but t=1s? 1ns? 1ps? How much can we feasibly describe?
I’d argue that not exploring the limits of models is also bad science. Knowing the limits is a fundamental part of communicating a model.
The article we're discussing itself even links to one such paper [0]. All of the others she mentions are also published works - Penrose's CCC [1], the ekpyrotic universe [2], Hawking's no-boundary state [3] etc.
> On the other hand, if you are working on theories that can extend into the early universe, it’s not unimportant to try and figure out where the model breaks down. Maybe t=0 isn’t possible, but t=1s? 1ns? 1ps? How much can we feasibly describe?
Sure, but this is a different thing. Many of these are adding elements to the existing theories, and then predict a new initial state given the modified evolution laws.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10714-021-02790-7
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.01740?context=astro-ph
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0103239
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07702
They're not publications of "what is definitely true", they are fundamentally explorations of what could be, or the more important "this is kind of interesting where could it lead?".
But the thing is, theories about the beginning of the universe will never be testable, they aren't just not currently testable.
So, if your theory has no novel predictions about the future, but it adds extra parameters to obtain a different prediction about a past which exists beyond what can be measured, then you're wasting your time creating this theory, and wasting reviewers' and readers' time publishing it; and you're wasting money researching it.
This is what Sabine usually writes and complains about - research money being spent on research that is at best unlikely to bear any fruit, and at worst navel-gazing, especially when there are very real problems in physics that are not receiving significant research.
This is why she complains about people researching the beginning of the universe, or black hole entropy, or grand unified theories, or the hierarchy "problem", or looking for supersimmetry or for WIMPs in ever larger particle accelerators.
Instead, she wishes more people were researching the measurement problem, non-linearity in quantum mechanics, high-energy physics through radio-telescopes instead of particle accelerators, to name a few things.
Now, I don't know anywhere near enough to say that she is right, but I do believe she is not trivially wrong, like you seem to be suggesting.
Nothingness is the space that holds everything.
From there it can be argued that the universe began with the adjacent possible of nothing.
Since the Big Bang is the beginning of space and time, it doesn’t make sense to say it “came from” anything - not nothing, anything. Nothing could have “caused” it because causality depends on there being a before in which the cause could take place. Causality breaks down with the beginning of time and that causes us a lot of conceptual confusion.
I like to imagine there's an anti-universe moving backwards in time from the start of the universe, and that's where all the unexplained missing baryonic antimatter ended up.
If you assume that 'nothing' is what cannot exist, then everything becomes a matter of scale and instrument sensitivity
Got proof? ...and isn't that the whole point of the discussion?
If anything, science is all about: "I have no idea what this is, but I have a model that seems to explain certain scenarios. Let's stick with it until someone more intelligent than us provides a better model". We may be "sure" about certain "laws" (e.g,, thermodynamics, speed of light, etc.)... but I think it's a mistake to be so absolute about them.
"So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics. It’s not wrong, but it isn’t scientific either. The Big Bang is the simplest explanation we know, and that is probably wrong, and that’s it. That’s all that science can tell us."
Currently perhaps. There’s a ton of big brains out there and even more yet to be born.
And since we created God, we're The Masters of the Universe.
Cue He-Man music.
Tough for finite things to try and understand much less comprehend such a simple and complex quandary.
What happens if there really is infinite no beginning and no end. Or what if there is an Alpha and Omega - such a beautiful thing to not understand.
> So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faith
> 2.b. firm belief in something for which there is no proof
With respect to the Christian Bible reference, I don't read it as saying there's no evidence for what they believe; I think you'd have a hard time finding a Christian who does.
In software engineering, we do have black holes, it's where the code is a mess, untestable.
So, in conclusion, the universe were born as a dense mess, from a "strange" matter , from there all basic physic atoms were born.
"We don't know how to defend ourselves against beasts, and we'll never know."
"We don't know how disease spreads, let's just hug it out, we'll never know."
"We don't know how to fly like a bird, we'll never know."
"We don't know how to land the booster of a rocket, we'll never know."
"We don't know how to cure that form of cancer, and we'll never know."
What a ridiculous defeatist attitude. History has proven that, so far, we've been very reliable at figuring out things that were deemed impossible.
I'd say we already know. It would be infinitely arrogant of us to think we're the originals. We're likely inside an inescapable but observable simulation, inside a simulation, repeat for any unknown number of times. That's probably how "the universe" (our universe) began.
Our parent universes probably have far more complexities to them that have been stripped from ours, for the sake of computational simplicity. Perhaps the actual originals, or any of our parent simulators, know exactly how the universe came to be. We might figure it out, too.
You present an interesting semi-fictional point on simulation.
That's just deferring the question. If we're a simulation inside a larger universe, then how did that universe begin? Although I'd argue if we're in a simulation then we're still a part of the host universe, even if kept in isolation, and it's that host universe we should ultimately care about when asking the big questions.
First, we would need to solve time. I am not sure if we are able to grasp it. Then we must figure out what happened at T-1 or T-2, which I think will be simple once we understand time.
The theory creates a start and then explains the progress from there. but not what caused it.
In theory of the cylinder than the universe travels to that is good but it does not explain how everything came to be.
We have a simple to state problem. There was nothing, then there was something.
Much like in Genesis ""And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.""
Instead:
Science says there was a big bang and from that everything was created. and we have figured out a model to explain (most) of the evolution since the big bang. Which means we can say no god did it.
But the way the story begins is in my opinion quite similar.
In one version god is used to explain what created us. Which then leads to the question of who created god and to answer that we need to figure out time.
(I am aware that there are equations that explain what was at t-1 or explain that there was nothing and even asking the question of what was at t-1 is crazy. I do not have the background that could allow me to understand the equations, but every which way you do it you end up with a question of what started it, or what was before what was the trigger to get it going.
Perhaps you can say that the universe has always been there, forever, sometimes it shrinks sometimes it expands, and we have a nice perpetuum mobile.
IIUC, the hypothesis is that everything was packed into one super-dense black hole.
Wouldn't there not be any time?
Where did this super dense black hole come from? What caused it to be? What was it before it was a black hole?
Our current theories for the origin of black holes as far as I know does not include the spontaneous appearance of a black hole for no reaosn.
There are a lot of open equestions. It is work in progress.
There are actually theories that black holes can form spontaneously. This is because particles are theorized to be able to spontaneously form and under the right circumstances they'd form a black hole. They would most likely though evaporate nearly instantly. But again that is not proven.I think it's a mistake to treat the scientific method as the only plausible source of knowledge. My opinion is obviously based on a particular worldview, but so is a claim that the only useful source of knowledge is the scientific method.
Natural language is woefully inadequate to express these issues, but believe it is a mistake to state the problem like this. There can be no concept of “before” if there is a T0. Perhaps the “why is there something rather than nothing?” version comes closer to what we are asking.
So a spaghetti god monster could have created it? It could but you would never be able to prove it.
The only observation is that currently we don't know. Could it be the spaghetti god monster? Maybe. Maybe not. We simply can't tell at the moment.
There are things we don't know the answer to. We just have to keep looking.
Still leaves the same questions as to why a bunch of universes are being created or where the energy comes from.
End of day there isn’t anything I’ve seen other then a true all powerful God or equivalent being responsible.
Grafting god onto science by cherry picking things that were guessed while throwing away all the incorrect statements is a bit disingenuous, no?
That was around 9 billion years before the Sun.
“We will never know” sounds overly pessimistic to me; I could imagine someone from the 10th century claiming we will never know the trillionth prime number.
Then as people studied nature more thoroughly and systematically, they started observing laws that simply can't be crossed - conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, the increase of entropy , the limited speed of causality, the uncertainty principle - to name some of the bigger ones. All of these have put limits on something we used to think of as unlimited.
There are many more non-existence proofs in math as well - so even in pure math, you can't escape this accumulation (probably the most famous such problem, one long attempted that ultimately proved impossible, is "squaring the circle", or in modern terms, the fact that pi^n is irrational for any rational n).
There are tons of stuff we as human beings we'll discover and be pretty confident about it. There are other things we'll never know. I think that's part of being human, to know our limits.
If it was "before the universe" then it wasn't called anything, because there was nobody here to give it the name "universe"?
Imagine a non-human being (e.g., "god", "beings from another dimension", "beings from an advanced civilization", etc.) telling us the theory of everything (with maths and all, if you want), and the end saying: "btw, there is no origin, and no end. Realiy has always existed". Do you think our scientists (or any other kind of curious human being) will say "Alright, got it. Won't keep investigating then. Thanks!". That won't happen, our human brains cannot understand that concept, and there will always be the "but how does it work?!"
Everything we observe in the universe has a sequence of linear causes stretching backward in time. However we can't be sure from these observations that Universe (or multiverse or something similar) itself has been caused in a similar way. -- I hope I got that right.
But is the physical universe (or multiverse or something similar) that we experience a good candidate for the uncaused base reality that just exists?
A good reason to think not is that universe is composed of stuff and parts that change relative to each other. If something changes, ie goes from potential to actual, then there is something that is more actual, or more real, from which we should be able to explain the change.
Another way to say it is that we may not know what base reality is, but in order for it to be a good candidate for 'the' base reality, it should be completely simple. And the universe as whole, by all appearances, is quite complex.
But if there exist an infinite number of copies of myself, all exactly the same - why should I consider myself to be any one of them individually, as opposed to all of them equally? If they are all the same, are they not identical? In which case - the past isn’t infinite after all - rather time is finite and circular.
Another way to put it - any finite spatial volume must contain finite information (see the Bekenstein bound) - hence can only exist in a finite number of distinguishable states. Given infinite time but only a finite number of possible states to visit in them, it has to visit the self-same states again and again - an infinite number of times
Right now, the prevailing model of cosmology (lambda-CDM) basically says that the universe can never return to an earlier state, as it is constantly expanding (and that expansion is accelerating). In this model, the universe has an infinite number of possible states, and is in fact guaranteed to never visit a previous state, even though it has an infinite future ahead of it.
What's the actual difference between these two positions:
(A) the universe was in state X for an infinite amount of time, then suddenly transitioned to some other state Y
(B) time began at t=0 with the universe in state X, and it immediately transitioned to some other state Y
They seem effectively identical, with seemingly no way for us to tell them apart. (B) seems simpler than (A), so by Occam's razor we ought to prefer it to (A), unless we have some specific reason not to. What could such a reason be? Well, I suppose (A) might lead to simpler mathematics. However, in actual fact, I don't believe that's true; and even if it were, it still might be reasonable to conclude that the "infinite static before-life of the universe" was just a mathematical artefact, without any physical reality.
Other problems with this view: (i) time is usually understood as a succession of instants which are somehow distinct – could an infinite succession of instants, all exactly the same as each other, actually count as "time"? (ii) why, if the universe had existed forever in a single state, did it suddenly transition to a new one? That seems harder to explain than the universe just existing with a finite past.
So, I think an infinite past only really makes sense if the infinite past involved an infinity of distinct universe-states – which I think might lead to the consequences I was suggesting.
> In this model, the universe has an infinite number of possible states, and is in fact guaranteed to never visit a previous state, even though it has an infinite future ahead of it.
Let me present a variation on the Boltzmann brain argument: the universe is vast, yet the volume of it which is actually relevant to humans is quite small. Humans cannot ever know or care about the state of the universe as a whole, only that subsection of it we can somehow observe–which is at most the observable universe; but, if we accept the possibility (even only as exceedingly unlikely) that nature is deceiving us (other galaxies don't really exist, it is just randomly arranged photons which by amazing fluke are exactly the same as what we'd observe if other galaxies did), the knowable subsection could be a lot smaller. No matter how stupendously unlikely such as scenario may be – so long as its probability is not strictly zero, in an infinite future, any constant non-zero probability is going to converge to unity.
Consider the current state of this galaxy – does Lambda-CDM guarantee that the universe will never visit a future state, which contains a Milky Way-sized volume, whose state is exactly the same as the state of this galaxy right now? You can repeat the question for "solar system-sized volume with exact same state as our solar system has right now" or "Earth-sized volume with exact same state as Earth has right now". Or a volume with the same size as the current observable universe, and the same state as it?
I thought that was very insightful. Today people try to pawn of all sorts of opinions as “science” by covering them with the language of science.
Math has a few left like the Riemann hypothesis, but the vast majority of new work that has been coming out is more like refinements (I say this as a PhD in math who as actually read them). We look at history and expect it to repeat itself, but if you closely examine math history you can actually see a decline. Take the time to truly examine "visionary" things that have happened in math and those events are actually getting fewer and fewer. I seriously doubt there is much left to do that is of interest to more than 5-10 people in each subfield.
So while we have a few more fundamental problems that most people have heard of like the Riemann hypothesis and the twin primes conjecture, don't expect to have any more of those. (Certainly the more recent ones are already so specialized that few people outside the immediate area would ever understand or even care about them).
I'm also not sure why there's such a negative view towards the end of progress on this site---a lot of people seem to take it as an axiom that currently "useless" things will eventually become useful but I simply do not believe that is the case (and this is coming from someone who has published quite a few papers in pure math).
Not to mention that both QM and GR in themselves have inconsistencies or infinities. GR famously has a singularity in the center of a black hole, which means the math doesn't actually apply there. QM has the measurement problem, and the (probably related) problem of making the laws of motion linear, when we can clearly see highly non-linear behavior in reality.
You can nurture in systems and cultures that break open the fundamentals again if you so wish. Most people don't wish it, they are happy living out incremental improvement in the city and surrounds.
Even if we answer how it began there is still:
1) Why?
2) What was there before that?
3) And before that?
4( And before that? And so on.
It's the rabbit hole only hallucinogens can fill.
And the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not absolute and can be broken.
For example look at particle interactions. The vast majority of them you can play them forward and backwards and they look exactly the same. You wouldn't be able to tell which way the video is running. The only way we can tell there is an arrow of time is because at some point a field asymmetry occurred. In a universe where all fields are symmetrical the idea of time simply breaks down and has no meaning.
The history of the Universe channel touches on this in their latest video.
Linked the wrong video, this is the one I meant to link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9m0sz2sUfU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSCrSkK2HcQ
These thoughts are driving me crazy. There must be a piece of the puzzle we're missing.
There must be something about time that isn't or wasn't always linear. Otherwise there's no end to the "who created it" question.
It's similar to asking what contains the universe. And what contains the thing that contains the universe.
Not that I'm saying this is true (just an example), but is the Big Bang simply (?) the introduction of time into the then time-less universe? It just doesn't make sense to say "The universe started with the Big Bang" when what that was prior was the universe but in a different form (or so we guess).
So it seems that something else had to be introduced to change the nature of the old universe into the new universe. Else the "start" is more like a "transformation" and even that opens a ton of questions.
My head hurts.
Your pet theory is the view of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the Roman Catholic Church. The mistake that people make (you can even see it in this thread), is that they start with some preconceived conception of God, with all it's baggage, and then they attempt argue for, or against, this concept.
The more productive approach is to recognize and acknowledge the necessary existence of a base reality. Then you simply assign the English word 'God' as a reference pointer to this base reality.
const God = (the one base reality that exists necessarily)
You can, but I'm not sure how "then" onwards is going to help — the people I've seen conflating these things before will still conflate them after doing this.
Bob: "Yup."
Christine: "Sure. And because this base reality exists, that proves I was right all along about Jesus: he did die for our sins."
Dhvan: "You mean it proves me right about Brahma."
Eris: "…the horned god."
Freya: "…Ragnarök."
and so on.
The key idea though is that if you make a dispassionate analysis of what this base reality must be, you find that it has certain 'attributes'. So for example, anything that has horns would not be good candidate for base reality since the contingent concept of 'horn' would need to be explained by, and derive its very existence from something much more simple. So that simpler thing would be the less bad candidate. Etc.
I am stealing this.
Only in newspaper headlines. Gell-Mann amnesia effect applies.
https://youtube.com/shorts/1S2CxPUZDOY?feature=share
I really love Grant Morrisons theory. Treat yourself, especially if you dont want to take that amount of drugs yourself.
https://youtu.be/KTMFBYXmvMk?t=282
edit: Alternatively the transcript starting at
>The universe we live in is designed to grow larvae.
till
> There’s not one adult on this planet.
http://dedroidify.blogspot.com/2013/09/grant-morrisons-must-...
That just throws the whole reputation of all those scientists into doubt with the average Joe.
Those who prefer blind trust in unchanging authorities will be disappointed.
Scientists are constantly finding better theories for explaining things and I think the population in general understands and accepts that.
Genuinely thought I'd gone crazy for a moment and posted this with an alternate account.
- It's common for desi names to start with A or K
- It's common for desis to use initials when referring to themselves
- Some desi surnames are over-represented in the population
- People with desi names are likely to come in contact with South Asian culture irrespective of their environment or if they speak the relevant languages. Or rather, they are more likely to have these avenues to begin with if they ended up with such a naming scheme.
- There are only so many foundational or well-known texts in any culture, so if there is a relevant passage, it has a high likelihood of being cited
It's not that different from a Jay Smith and a John Smith quoting a relevant C.S. Lewis or Biblical passage and having a jsmith handle.
Or perhaps creation to the creator is like breathing to us. Do you remember how many breaths you took yesterday?
Or maybe there is no creator, only a self-creation.