The Glade 4.0

So, am I just an ignoramus or does this make no sense?

"given the existence of gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing"


http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europ ... &wom=false

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

I'm no quantum physicist, and in fact, my opinion of quantum theory is that, although it appears to be quite accurate, it requires a suspension of conventional logic in order to even begin to understand it, and i'm not sure what M-Theory --an extension of string theory-- has to do with it (and I'm skeptical about String Theory to begin with, since it is unfalsifiable it resembles religion more than science), but if I understand correctly, String Theory allows for an infinite number of possible universes, and in an infinite number of universes representing all legitimate possibilities, random chance becomes nonexistent. Even without a creator, we are guaranteed to exist, in at least one universe.

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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
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I find string theory and M theory very interesting, but I guess I'd have to read the book for a fuller explanation. Although lately Hawking seems like he's going more and more over the edge.

As I see it one thing or another needs to be eternal, either the universe (or seed of said universe) or a creator. That or you need to just have some sort of blind faith that something came from nothing... Just cause it did that's why!

Explaining the universe in terms of a classic big bang or Guth's inflation theory or multiple universes caused by massive branes colliding or whatever... just pushes the question back to: "ok well where did x come from then?" where x is whatever you're using to explain the creation of our universe.

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

The question of "First Cause" is not a logical problem unique to an atheistic construct of the universe, because the problem also exists for the theist ("Ok well where did X come from then?" where X=God), whether or not they choose to ignore it. Regardless, "something from nothing" isn't really entertained seriously by any science. As you said, some "seed" must have always* existed, be it God, or some other factor. An eternal God is no more logical than some less sentient eternal element --and Occam's Razor suggests the less sentient path as being the more likely place to start looking.

*-The word "Always" highlights another problem with this line of questioning, both for the theist and the atheist -- we are attaching the existence of "time" as we know it to the issue. We assume "eternity" actually exists, in either direction. In fact, the moment of creationmay have started the whole process of time. We already know for an absolute, testable fact that the flow of time is not a constant (hell, time dilation effects actually had to be factored into the calibration of the clocks on GPS satellites), and it may not even have always existed, nor is it guaranteed to always exist in the future. Assuming the Big Bang Theory as fact, for instance, relativity implies that time itself started to flow with the Bang. I'm not discussing merely the perception of time, but the actual flow of time itself. It very well could have been "the beginning of time." For the Theist, this actually helps answer an unfathomable question, "What did God do alone in the void during the eternity before Creation?" There was no eternity before creation. If God exists, then He created time itself.

_________________
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
█ ♣ █

I suspect that's more of CNN and Larry King taking Hawking out of context and selectively pruning whatever he said for media use. I'd look for an unedited transcript first.

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I think we're in agreement. Or at least that sounds like what I was trying to get across. Universe always existed or God always existed, thus there is no answer to where did either come from. As for Occams Razor I'd disagree if we're talking a single, non-infinite universe. Now that theories of multiverses and such are abound it seems even more convoluted. It's far too well structured to be a lucky one time thing if it only happened one time.

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

After reading about/contemplating what makes the universe tick (or at least, our understanding of how it ticks), there is no way that these incredibly complex processes could have come about without some sort of divine creative force. Whether that is the Christian God, or any other god for that matter, is unknowable at this time. But for as powerful of forces as gravity and quantum mechanics are, I just don't buy the whole "spontaneous creation" thing. Obviously, Hawking is a brilliant man who understands way more about physics than I do, so I will differ to him on those issues. But he, like me, is ultimately only making an assumption based on the evidence available to him.

There's got to be something more, IMO.

It's like the whole evolution vs creation debate.

To me the logical answer is . . . *drumroll* God (or some other divine entity) used evolution to create life on Earth.

This doesn't make much sense to me based on what I know of Hawking- especially since the bet that time travel is possible was settled decades ago (the conclusion being that it isn't).

Also it supposes that gravity pre-exists our universe which Hawking would know to be rubbish. The only thing I can get out of this is that people are reporting things out of context.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Gravity is merely the curvature of space that takes place around mass. If one presupposes the Big Bang Theory to be correct, then gravity surely did exist before the universe, else the supermassive singularity which exploded would not have existed.

_________________
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
█ ♣ █

Gravity is a force along with the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces, complete with a particle, in theory although afaik it's yet to have been found.

None of it is making much sense to me, and I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. This is harder lately since Hawking has been on about space aliens coming to suck our resources dry and such.

Anyway in this excerpt he says a "law such as gravity" not gravity itself, maybe that's somehow relevant although I dont see how. And the bit about observing another planet orbiting another star, again, was that really questioned? Was anyone out there saying "see?! where else would you find the star and planet set up??? Musta been the G man!"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/ ... ng-creator

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

The one point my simple brain cannot grasp.

If there is literally nothing, how can gravity have any affect on it ?

Gravity is itself something, in the form of a Graviton particle, as predicted by string theory anyway. I also remember in Guth's inflation theory he mentions gravity coming about some absurdly small amount of time after the big bang. It's actually some weird function of gravity that Guth suggests caused the inflation.

Hmm and in looking into it I find this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Guth



Which is still a punt of the question of origin.

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

Theology is unnecessary does not mean theology is incorrect. That's the first point that I can see people taking out of context. Theology is unnecessary also does not mean that theology can not intermingle. That's the second point being taken out of context. Most people are fine with, "Buddhism says this, Islam says this, and Christianity says this." They're okay with the idea that Buddhism exists, and doesn't prevent them from being Christian. If you then present to them, "Okay, well modern science says this," they flip a gasket.

That all takes place before the article is written and presented to the audience. The story then turns from, "Well, here are our findings," to, "Prominent scientists claims to have proven there's no god!" Even if nobody comes right out and says it, that's the real headline. That's what we all take from it, regardless of our philosophical leanings.

Anyway, on to string theory.

When you were in grade school, you probably learned about a coordinate plane. Somewhere around 5th or 6th grade, maybe a little earlier, you learned about points, lines, and planes. The word "ray" might've popped in there somewhere, also. The main idea, however, is that the universe is composed of these little tiny dots, or points. That's how we conceptualize the world around us. The atomic model even fits it - atoms are these tiny little dots, and they're made up of even smaller dots.

That concept turns into our mathematical model. When engineers design stuff, we usually think of things in terms of "particles" which is just a fancy word for "dot." When we put a man on the moon, somewhere along the line NASA reduced the space shuttle to a dot that was going to travel between one dot (Earth) and another dot (moon). Just like the internet is a series of tubes, the universe is a series of dots. You'll see shortly why I picked that metaphor.

General relativity and quantum mechanics **** up our neat concept of the universe as a collection of dots. This is where string theory arose from. We needed a way to model the universe that worked better. Rather than envisioning the universe as dots, we started to think of it as a bunch of line segments. Now, if you have a ring, that isn't a bunch of dots connected in a circle. Instead, it's one object. Just take a "string" and make a loop out of it. These line segments can interact with each other and do all sorts of goofy stuff, but the idea is that now the universe is a series of tubes just like the internet. Atoms now are not dots, they are lines.

This isn't really that bizarre of a notion. Circuit diagrams and plumbing diagrams were using that same model for a hundred years prior to the introduction of string theory. Anybody who was dealing with electricity or water flow was already used to the notion that the line between this water heater and that pump, or this battery and that resistor, was one entire thing.

Somewhere along the line, someone decided it might be easier to understand physics if instead of thinking of atoms as lines, we started thinking of them as sheets. Then it went from sheets to boxes. Eventually we got to M-theory. I forget exactly what dimension is where we jumped from superstring to M, but for the lay person, it would probably suffice to tell you that string theory is lines, and M theory is sheets, boxes, and higher dimensional objects. The analogy works, even if I haven't put the dividing lines in exactly the correct place.

Now here's the problem with the article. There is something that the average lay person just doesn't get that causes us to misunderstand Hawking. Hell, some physicists don't get this distinction.

String theory and M-theory are mathematical models. A string or a brane is not a real thing. The real thing is the atom, and an atom is not a string, nor is not a dot, a sheet, or whatever other thing we've conceptualized it as. An atom is an atom. Lines, points, planes, boxes, circles, spheres - these are not real things. They are mathematical models we use to describe and predict how real things behave.

That's also why it isn't a problem that M-theory isn't falsifiable. A circle isn't falsifiable, either. A circle is a collection of points equidistant to a center point. It has certain properties that arise because of its definition, but you can not prove a set of points equidistant to a center to be something other than a circle. It was totally arbitrary, we could've called it a fnord. But the circle isn't the real thing. A collection of concentric circles isn't a real thing, either. A DVD is a real thing.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Gravity is definitely a force from our point of view, because the curvature of spacetime is not something we can discernably see. How it is actually believed to work is a bit different. The late science fiction author Dr. Michael Crichton actually wrote a very good "layman's terms" explanation of the curvature of space and how it relates to gravity (in addition to the existence of dimensions beyond 3) in his book "Sphere."

Imagine a universe had only two obvious spacial dimensions. Ours has three obvious dimensions, but let's imagine a two dimensional universe. Space seems flat. Let's use a table to represent the universe. Now, let's use an orange to represent a star in this flat universe, so we set it on the table. Now, let's use a marble to represent a wandering space object of some kind. Roll it past the orange...but the marble goes straight, so the model is innaccurate. What's wrong?

This apparent two dimensional space exists in more than two dimensions, just as our three dimensional universe has more than three dimensions. Imagine instead of a table, that our two dimensional universe is something softer, like a trampoline. Now use something heavier, like an orange-sized lead ball in the center. Now roll the marble past it. Now the indentation on the formerly flat space of the trampoline causes the marble to curve as it goes past the ball. Roll it too close, or too slowly, and it will circle right into the ball. This two dimensional space is curved in a third dimension that affects the path of objects which adhere to its two dimensional plane.

Similarly, gravity is the curvature of space (and actually, time as well) into a hitherto unseen dimension. The mass travelling through three dimensional space must still adhere to the three dimensional "plane" that represents our space, but the curvature of space causes what we see as gravitational effects. One of the really mind-blowing aspects of this, is a gravitational orbit, while eliptical, is actually a straight line through space-time. Earth is not losing momentum or forced to change course as it circles, tethered by the gravitational curve of space around our sun, but is rather following a completely straight and unerring course through spacetime in all its unknown dimensions.

I love Relativity and astrophysics in general, but I can't say the same for quantum mechanics, which give me a headache...

_________________
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
█ ♣ █

I think you misinterpret my point.

String Theory may be a "mathematical model," but it's a model that can never be used to predict anything. A true "Theory of Everything" could be used in a predictive way, like Relativity or Quantum Theory, in practical applied science. But String (and therefore M) theory is a model that can never be disproven or proven, you cannot test it in any way. Relativity and quantum theory can be used to make predictions about the behavior of objects and particles, but String Theory cannot, and if it is true, will never be able to be used in the same way. It is simply a very complex guess.

_________________
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
█ ♣ █

Reminds me of this quote from Bruce Willis:

That's a result of what it models. Someone said, "Hey guys! What if we thought of atoms as lines instead of dots," and the response he got from a few of his colleagues was, "Oh, I see. That makes sense, now."

It doesn't have to make predictions. Its purpose can just be to make something easier to understand or picture in your mind.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Ha that's my favorite explination of it too. That book was so good then they decided to go with Dustin Hoffman and Queen Latifah for the movie.

Anyway, for Corolinth's point that Hawking is simply saying it's now not necessary for a creator, fair enough. He does seem to suggest that Science could describe spontaneous existence though which ... err... hmmm. I get that quantum theory is the stuff of really weird principles like being in two places at once and solid objects passing through one another and seemingly complete chaos, but he's making a big leap to say the universe could have just created itself from nothing.

Strings are indeed real things though, if the theory is to be believed. Unless my information is just way outdated. Strings are impossibly small closed loops of energy that vibrate in a particular manner and exist in up to 11 dimensions including space-time, last I heard. Branes are a collection of strings, basically, at least that's how I understood it. All of this is theory though of course, and unproven, possibly unprovable.

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

And yet the lines don't make the universe make more sense, or easier to predict. Thinking of atoms as dots still provides the only way for us to make use of those atoms, and still provides the only methods of making predictions on the behavior of those atoms. String Theory has done NOTHING to assist scientists in understanding the universe. It's simply a big "What if?" scenario.

I'm not the first one to make such an accusation, and people more educated in the field than any of us have admitted it. This is why scientists like Mathematical Physicist Peter Woit have described String Theory as nothing more than "science fiction modeled in mathematical terms."

_________________
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
█ ♣ █

Actually, speaking of Peter Woit, he has a very good criticism of Hawking's latest book and comments here:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

For the little my uneducated opinion matters, as much as I admire Hawking, I agree with Woit. Accepting M-Theory is tantamount to "giving up," throwing in the towel and abandoning a search for a real theory of everything.

A telling exerpt:

_________________
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 you read Timeline (as opposed to watching the crappy movie), The author points out as the end of the 1800s pulled around that people thought "We knew everything about everything." That the corners of the scientific map were more or less drawn out. Then we discovered electrons, and all the great innovation of the next century that built on that. So excuse me if I don't consider the scientific account complete.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Dash, you are describing a de Broglie wave:



That is what an electron does within an atom which gives rise to the different energy states and orbital patterns. From looking at that picture, can you see how it could be helpful to think of the electron as a string rather than a dot? This does not mean that an electron is, in fact, a line rather than a dot. It's an electron. There are certain other applications where it's more helpful to think of the electron as a sheet rather than a line. This is sort of like the question of whether light is a particle or a wave. It has properties of both, and this gave rise to the idea of the photon. The truth of the matter is that the distinction isn't meaningful.

Protons and neutrons also have quantum numbers associated with them, and they too have wave properties, so it becomes helpful for certain applications to look at them as lines rather than dots.

Everything else is just pouring on more and more math. Now, that might be useful as far as understanding what's going on, provided you have a strong enough math background to follow along, but it doesn't change the fundamental idea behind string theory: Conceptualizing the universe as being made up of something other than dots. Saying a string or a brane is real is misleading. I could say that rectangles are real because my laptop screen is a rectangle. That's disingenuous. My laptop screen has the shape of a rectangle, and therefore all of the math associated with rectangles works for doing calculations regarding my laptop screen. It does not actually make "rectangle" a real thing. The rectangle is a mathematical model. My laptop screen is the real thing. "Rectangle" is the model that allows me to study laptop screens, tables, boxes, and shelves without having to invent four different forms of math.

Actually, even when Albert Michelson said that, all of his contemporaries knew he was wrong. Then, within a few short years, a different Albert published a paper that opened up the floodgates. Ever since, the idea that we've discovered everything there is to discover has been regarded as preposterous. Society would be in a much better place if religions took a similar mentality.

If we want to bring quotes by famous scientists into the mix, Richard Feynman is purported to have said that theoretical physicists are physicists who lack the skill to perform real experiments, while mathematical physicists are mathematicians who lack the skill to perform real mathematics. The guy doesn't like string theory, and thinks that funding should be going to researching other models. Well, he's got a point. If string theory looks like it's a dead-end, other avenues do need to be explored. Saying string theory is a dead end, it's going nowhere, and we need to pursue other ideas is a fair statement. Which, from looking over Peter Woit's wiki article and blog, seems to be the crux of his argument.

The statement that it does nothing to assist scientists in understanding the universe is hyperbole, and to say it gives no method of making predictions is demonstrably false. I cited two examples in a previous post where we use core ideas from string theory. Neither one resembles high-brow notions of the shape and composition of the universe, and instead call to mind more mundane occupations such as plumbers and electricians. That's the rub. It may not be useful to particle physicists trying to figure out gravity, but it has been useful to other disciplines. You are being just as myopic as some of the proponents of string theory. Of course, you at least have an excuse.

When people talk about string theory, they start looking at all the crap that's been piled on top of it rather than the underlying premise of using lines rather than dots to build the universe out of. I'm not suggesting that the multiple universe idea is rock solid, and quite frankly, I'm not sure how we get there from using lines instead of dots. People are making wilder and crazier hypotheses based off of something that's never been tested in a lab. Is it time to knock that **** off, rein people back in, and run some tests? Yes, it is.

At any rate, the question of whether string theory is useful is a separate question from whether it's falsifiable, and whether it matters if it's falsifiable. It's also a separate issue from completeness. Religion provides a "complete" account of the creation of the universe. It's not much good for making accurate predictions, but it's complete. The Flood doesn't help scientists understand **** about the universe, but it's complete. Something can be both complete and wrong. In fact, it's a whole lot easier than finding something that's complete and correct, which is why we keep looking as religions spring up and die out around us.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Actually, the Flood, the rest of Genesis, and any other religion's creation story if it has one, is usually wildly incomplete. In fact that's rather the point. The message is "This happened, and God caused it, don't worry about how or why" and the "how" is (or at least should be) left to science.

The problem arises when certain types of people get ahold of these stories and then try to make them be complete because they are too fearful or too unsophisticated to understand that the stories being less than complete does not somehow make them worthless. That's when you start seeing the absurdity arise.

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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."

Our universe is defined as what is composed of spacetime. It is the ever expanding bubble of spacetime that makes up our Universe. Although most recently there is discussion if time exists at all and is just a by product of our observation in our minds.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Hey at least with string theory you can predict quantum entanglement. Can't do that with anything else in the toolbox. I gave up trying to pay attention when they said that maybe 16 dimensions isn't enough.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville