I’m an agnostic transforming into a panentheist. Once you see that the universe has been transforming itself for eons, long before any brains were around you begin to realize agency is fractal existing at levels greater and lower than our own. Now I think of God as the ground of being, i.e., that which has brought about ever more order - not as a man might but in ways which must seem strange to us.
Except when you do grasp the concepts and it isn’t that complicated. Plus he also said it in way that it makes it rather clear what he is talking about.
That in itself is a noteworthy event, as this topic is not often spoken by the scientific higher-ups with such clarity
You may find these Space Time episodes of interest.
Thanks, I will take a look at them. It isn’t that complicated though. When we look at what caused an event, forgive me for repeating this, but I think it deserves repeating, the event may have been caused by another event to which the same question applies, or the event may be uncaused, or the event may be caused by something that doesn’t happen.
What scares people, I think, is that it can be that simple.
Edit: scared is probably the wrong word, close minded is probably a better description, which can come from various emotions, and fear is one of them.
Says who?
It sounds more a priori than a conclusion.
Somebody Christie mentioned from NASA who is supposed to be an authority on big bang cosmology
The second video strikes me as what one cosmologist has called “mathematical metaphysics”, i.e. nothing more than fancy conjecture.
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Did I tell you about how the immediate effect of an uncaused cause will appear to come from nothing? Probably 
And what’s wild about it, is the possibility as the observation is pressed for verification, something else happens that appears to be causally connected. It could become totally disorienting as you keep looking to determine whether something was caused by an uncaused cause or nothing.
I still find inflation pretty speculative, let alone what came before that, so I agree, probably along with most physicists at present, that there is much of conjecture and little of consensus. OTOH, lay person gotcha arguments against the big bang are generally naively ignorant.
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Like if an event is uncaused, then it is unexplainable? I got a PhD physicist who claimed to have won a Nobel prize with that one.
Edit: Sometimes it can be that simple, and in that particular case the PhD physicist literally closed their mind
This quote has been super fascinating for me!! And so I have two questions about it:
Is this a commonly accepted view?
And, even if it’s reasonable to suppose the observation would be the same from another point in the universe, would the problem in determining that be similar to the problem in determining whether the speed of light is the same in both directions?
My Buddy tells me:
"Yes, the speed of light would be the same in either direction between any two points in an expanding universe. This is because the speed of light is not a property of the objects that emit it, but rather a property of the universe itself.
To understand this better, it’s important to remember that space and time are not separate entities, but rather are intertwined into a single four-dimensional fabric called spacetime. The expansion of the universe is not the expansion of objects through space, but rather the expansion of spacetime itself.
This means that if two points in the universe are moving away from each other due to the expansion of the universe, the distance between them is increasing, but the speed of light between them remains the same.
Another way to think about it is that the speed of light is defined as the speed at which information can travel through spacetime. Since the expansion of the universe does not affect the speed of information travel, the speed of light remains the same in all directions between any two points.
This has been experimentally verified by astronomers, who have measured the speed of light from distant galaxies and found it to be the same as the speed of light measured in our own solar system.
So, even though two points in the universe may be moving away from each other at speeds greater than the speed of light, the speed of light between them remains the same. This is because the speed of light is not a property of the objects that emit it, but rather a property of the universe itself."
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What I read on this before sounded pretty serious… this is something I’m seeing now
We just cannot measure the speed of light in one direction because relativity prevents us from maintaining synchronised clocks. The result is that the speed of light c is really the average speed over a round-trip journey, and that we cannot be certain that the speed is the same in both directions.
I think that’s considered to be fairly standard cosmology by this point (not as exotic as dark energy or dark matter).
I don’t think it’s quite so conceptually difficult as all that - but is more a matter of how the simple geometry would work. If you imagine being one of the molecules flying outward from an exploding fire cracker, you would of course be increasing your distance from every other molecule - even the ones adjacent to you, since they are on a slightly different vector than you. But of course every other molecule there would also observe the same, with those farthest away receding from you fastest. Yes - it seems like this then must “violate” the no-existing-center ‘rule’, since a firecracker explosion obviously originated from the firecracker itself - the ostensible ‘center’. But that’s probably just where the analogy shows its weakness - and meets its edge of failure. In that we imagine the firecracker exploding into an already existing space. Whereas the big bang isn’t just about matter, but is also the expansion of space and time itself. So now thinking of something as a sort of “absolute center” becomes problematic to say the least. If it’s space itself that is expanding, then … how does one even conceptualize such a thing in our space-bound, and space-dependent perceptions and understandings? It most likely isn’t the same as what we think of as a traditional “center” of something. It is the entire something. And meanwhile, in a trivial sense, we are each the ‘center’ of our own perceptual universes in that we must look outward in order to see everything else. It’s with our imaginations that we realize other people have different vantage points of perspective that we can’t have direct access to ourselves.
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The idea that ‘we’ would appear at the center of the universe whether ‘we’ were on Earth or Mars is what seems too remarkable to be true
And to take it a step further, every observer would appear as if every other observer were traveling away from them
How could that actually be?
