The Glade 4.0

So I watched "Curiosity: Did God Create the Universe?" with Stephen Hawking. It was rather unsatisfying.



From what I gathered, these are the bullet points:

- Universe originated from a microscopic point, a singularity, and expanded (I assume he believes) via Guth's inflation theory. I'm good with this.

- Universe = Space + Energy. As per Einstein, energy is also mass. Fine with that.

- There is also "negative energy" in the universe in equal amounts. (around 25 minutes in) Essentially, everything in the universe sums to zero when you combine positive and negative. So you get "something for nothing". - Errr... am I misunderstanding this? Because... ok positive and negative I'm ok with, but he deduces "Because the universe adds up to nothing, you dont need a god to create it." Uhh...?

- What caused the whole thing to happen? Since the singularity is sub-atomic in size and thus subject to quantum mechanics. Fine with this too, interesting point. But then he suggests everything "just popped into existing without violating natural law"

- What caused it to pop into existence? What happened "before"? Well, there is no before because there was no time before the universe.

So, to sum up: What caused the Big Bang and thus the universe and everything in it according to Dr Hawking? Nothing. It just happened. And nobody could have done it because there was no time before the big bang for him/her to do it.

So now my choices are: God is behind creation, or nothing is. It just happened.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

You misunderstand him. IMO, he's saying that since OWS believes you can get something for nothing, then OWS created the universe. Duh!

Having read the book and watched the episode in question I can say that I don't think you're interpreting everything correctly. That said, I'm not sure I should be the one clarifying.

Did you feel like he gave a satisfactory answer though?

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

I felt like it was explained as clearly as it could have been (though still confusing) after reading the book. Yeah, there are some parts about the theory or our understanding of things that still make us go, "Wait, what?" but I do feel like everything he presents is grounded in pretty strong, valid reasoning. I did give the chapter regarding the singularity and how it "just popped in" multiple reads, but I still don't feel versed enough to be explaining where your understanding gets mixed up.

His ultimate point is that we don't "need" a creator in order to understand our universe, or for it to exist. What we need, and what we need to understand, is the catalyst that set it all off. From what we can tell, the matter that exists today is what has always existed, independent of [what we perceive to be] time or creation.

One very good thing about the book is that it gives you a breakdown of each method of thought, and where it came from, that is going into the current theory. Hawking gives a good writeup on "things you should know before moving forward". The show touches on some of these things (the episode pretty much follows the flow of the book in general) but I didn't think it had enough time to really let you sit and digest most of the ideas like you would with a book.

I haven't read The Grand Design, and really am not all that interested in Hawking's musings on monotheistic deities. I do have a point to raise that is germane to the discussion, however, which goes along with what Lenas is trying to say.

I have read A Brief History of Time, which is noted for how many copies it sold, and how many adults have read it. There is suspicion that the number of people who have read the book in its entirety is far smaller than the number of copies sitting on coffee tables. A common joke among the physics community is that it is the world's most popular Chapter One. So many people who have a copy of the book only ever read the first chapter.

The first chapter of that book is extraordinarily well-written and easy to follow. The rest of the book is no less well-written, and if ever a layman were going to learn something about quantum physics it would probably be from A Brief History of Time, but many of the things Hawking includes don't make sense. Now, this is not an indictment of Hawking. He does a fantastic job. The stuff he's writing about just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

There are many subtle nuances that the lay person simply does not get an appreciation for upon reading the book. According to a number of physicists I've talked to, that's simply the nature of the material. After reading a text and attending a lecture, and having the subject explained to you, one still doesn't really grasp what's going on. It's only after doing the math and running the experiment to find out what actually happened that a person starts to understand why it works that way and what implications that has on the universe as a whole.

There's a lot of stuff that a person just misses when they read one of Hawking's books. Lenas mentioned he read a particular section of The Grand Design numerous times. What do you want to bet Lenas is the exception, and not the rule? That most people read each section of the book one time? Lenas also gives the impression that he still feels like there were some things that slipped past him. What do you suppose slipped past the other people who only gave The Grand Design a single liesurely read?

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Our brains are essentially programed with an understanding of classical physics, geometry, etc. Some of it becomes hardwired in. (Your eyes/brain do trig every time you judge distance to an object, with a high degree of accuracy many times a second.) Our brains rapidly develop an understanding of gravity and what 'should happen' We can visualize and metaphorize (yes, I just invented that word) things on a macro scale so they fit into our existing hard-wired models.

The problem is that at the quantum level, things cease behaving anything like we've experienced. Physicist try to create more examples and metaphors, trying to squeeze our understanding into the models our brains are equipped to handle (wave-particle duality, double slit experiment, etc)

There comes a point though, when you run out of things to compare it to and that's when we have to fall back on mathematics and abstracts to deal with much of it. They're just so far out of our experience it becomes difficult to visualize (spin 1/2 particles come to mind, anything with more than 4-5 dimensions) which is where I think most people's understanding breaks.

As good as he can be at communicating this material, on the first, second and third viewing of the video it still seemed to me like he glossed over the one critical area of existence in the big bang theory: where did the initial singularity come from. Which would be fine, if he wasnt presenting the conclusion as if he had proven something. I mean I dont see how it's answerable in any event although I'll grant that he did make some interesting points along the way.

So far as I can tell, this quick summation from Ed Witten is still where science stands on the whole thing:

http://www.sns.ias.edu/~witten/papers/string.pdf



This is basically what I took into the program and I didnt learn much more after having viewed it so I was kinda disappointed.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

I think the problem here lies in the fact that whatever occurred "before" the singularity/Big Bang occurred is unobservable, and essentially outside the realm of physics. It "just happened" is a way of saying "we can't know how or why it occurred".

In that sense, I don't see that it really matters what Hawking or any other physicist says on the matter of why it occurred or whether God is "necessary" for it, at least not any more than any other person who understands the basic limitation of science to that which is observable. I would rather hear Hawking speak on it than quite a few nitwits of a wide variety of beliefs, but I think when he says it "just happened" that's just a way of saying "I'm at the limit of what human science can explain."

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

My understanding of what he's saying:(Without watching the video or having read the book) the creation of the universe doesn't violate the 'hard and fast' rules. Conservation of Energy/Mass still hold. If that law was violated then you're left with requiring a miracle. Since the laws of physics as we understand them hold, there is no need to suppose an act of deity.

Creator proven to be not necessary != Creator proven to not exist

A cigarette lighter is proven to not be necessary to start a fire, but there are plenty of fires started with them just the same.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

He doesn't exactly say that it "just happened". He offers multiple explanations about how the singularity may have come to be, one of which would be a cyclical model universe. One that expands and eventually collapses on itself infinitely. You can't really take any of his points out of context, which is why I think it's so important to have read the book (hopefully more than once) before even engaging in a discussion about it. I've been through the whole thing twice, certain sections even more, and I still try to read/watch all I can on the stuff because you can still get lost wrapping your head around it.

I don't disagree.

I suspect that his take, is that if God is wholly unnecessary for the universe, then the existence of God is 100% speculation. A theory that provides no predictions, no observable effects, and no evidence of its prior existence is useless to science.

Yeah he doesnt literally say "it just happened", but it's more he chooses not to acknowledge he has nothing empirical to explain the origin of the universe and yet makes his conclusion as if he figured out the answer scientifically.

The reality is, science needs either infinite universes (multiverse) or the eternal expanding contracting universe to explain why things are as they are. And even then all of those theories just move the goalposts further back.

I'll probably buy the book though. =p

He's in the same mold as a Carl Sagan or Brian Greene in making the material presentable even if I disagree with the formats and conclusions.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

I realize that, but since all of them are unobservable, they all basically amount to "it just happened".

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Faith does not compute.

That doesn't mean it's not applicable, it just means that it's not going to be an argument someone who searches for understanding about the mysteries of the universe ... who believes themselves capable of understanding those mysteries ... will advocate.

Faith happens after you stop trying to come up with answers for questions that rely on proof where no proof will ever be available. I'm of the opinion Hawking isn't at that point.

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In time, this too shall pass.

^ This. And I'll go one further. Faith happens when you still have some need to continue trying to answer those questions, but you've abandoned logic and/or honesty, whether due to unwitting programming or knowing intention.

Something for nothing and the chicks for free.

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Ron Paul 2012

I realize you put quotation marks around the word "before", because you are aware time started with the big bang, but the statement itself is a flawed result of it being very hard to wrap one's mind around this idea -- hard for any of us. This isn't a matter of observable time, it's a matter of time itself. It helps to think of time as just another observable spacial dimension (because that is ultimately how it behaves, even if we are not able to traverse it in both directions.) An outside linear observer who was somehow able to watch the big bang would find their experience beginning at that moment, nothing "before" because "before" does not itself exist. The big bang is a boundary, there is no before, at all. Time is a part of the universe, and where the universe begins, time does as well. "What happened before" the big bang is "outside the realm of physics," because nothing happened before the big bang...there is no before. There were no aeons of inactivity, there was no eternity of a massive singularity as the whole of existence. Everything starts at that one point. This is not an abstraction or a matter of perception -- time itself is created at the point of the big bang.

Once one can wrap their mind around this point, a few things become immediately apparent that answer a lot of questions, both for those who believe in God and those who do not. (1) For the atheist, the question of "first cause" becomes irrelevant. The big bang itself is the first cause. Where did the singularity come from? Nowhere - it was there at the beginning of time. Its existence and immediate inflation actually starts time. That is a lot easier to accept than "Maybe it was always there." (2) Where did God come from? What did God do in the eternity before Creation? These questions that bothered me as a child cease to have meaning if God created time along with the universe. There was no eternity before creation; linear time itself would become something God created with that first creative spark. God had no existence before the universe, because there is no such thing as "before the universe." The term has no meaning.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

If Time as a dimension only exists within the confines of our expanding Universe, then it would make sense that Time existed within the confines of the singularity, so there was a "before" the Big Bang. At least listening to theoretical physicists discussing the nature of forces and the singularity.

But then, the biggest question to me is what is the Universe expanding into? Or is some infinity large hard drive being formatted as the edges are reached?

That is not the general understanding of physics, no. Of course, much of that is speculative, but in general, it is thought time did not flow prior to the big bang.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That's only one model Talya (one Hawking subscribes to). Cyclic models suggest that the universe continues to bang/crunch in a pulsing fashion. Other models suggest a flow of events prior to the big bang, but may or may not indicate a multiverse.

Not sure what you are using as "general understanding", but under your scenario, there was also no singularity. There was just the Big Bang and everything was created.

The big crunch was mostly abandoned as a likely scenario when they discovered the universe is still accellerating.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Just watching for a minute from 35:00 in, he sums up by asserting the universe popped into existence like a proton, required nothing in terms of energy, and nothing caused it.

EDIT: Guess i cant do an auto start from 35:00 in so just skip ahead to that point.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe