If you want the article klax had mentioned, I will find that for you. i think I deleted it a while back, but can get to it again. It is a discussion of multiverse concepts in relation to Christian theology.
I’m not even close to being a scientist. I recognize that I am in no way qualified to evaluate physicists’, mathematicians’, cosmologists’, biologists’, etc theories, certainly not on philosophical or apologetic bases entirely unrelated to their fields of expertise.
Actually, I misunderstood eternal inflation as @pevaquark was writing about it here,
Some models of inflation, deemed eternal inflation, keep going to produce other bubble universes amidst the multiverse landscape.
and figured it could also apply to an infinitely old universe that is in an eternal state of becoming.
So, putting that aside, what I read into your comment about those apparent natural causes, is they too as natural events will also apparently have a cause.
I’m not talking about asking a question to the group. I’m saying to ask a simple question like, “Is this what you mean?” before jumping to conclusions. I come here to learn a bit, pass on my little bit of learning to others, and maybe have a stimulating conversation. This constant game of “gotcha” that it’s turning into is not appealing to me in the least.
There’s the question. I then poked at the non-response and tried to make a response in the hope of having a real discussion about this topic. You then chimed in with your comment to poke at me, while ignoring the topic.
If you want to discuss this, I would like to hear the possible forthcoming explanation you referred to yesterday.
The question wasn’t directed to me, and if Matthew, who has a PhD in physics, says the question is beyond his paygrade, I’m certainly not going to weigh in with my uninformed opinion. Now, to say you “poked” in hopes of having a discussion is a mischaracterization, at best. “That’s a whiff” isn’t an invitation to dialogue. It was a condescending remark. I didn’t “chime in” to poke at you. I spoke up for Matthew because he has more expertise in the subject than either of us. Intellectual humility is a good thing.
Is this the question you want to discuss?
I’d be glad to do so with two caveats: You can’t reply with snappy one-liners or ChatGPT replies. That’s not a discussion (or even interesting).
No, that wasn’t your fault. Matthew quoted me in reply to my tag, so that showed up in my notifications. I jumped straight to that and never saw your earlier reply. Sorry. If it happens again, feel free to give me a shout-out later in the thread. Just be warned that I don’t always reply immediately.
We can start here. The opening paragraphs of the article alternate between “a Universe” and “the Universe” that preceded the hot Big Bang. Of course that invites confusion. You seem to have understood it as referring to “a universe” previous to our own. I understood “the Universe” to mean “the early (present) Universe,” which I think the rest of the article makes clear was the author’s intended scope. For example, nowhere does he mention a multiverse or previous universes. Chalk that up to a misunderstanding.
What the article says is the exponentially rapid inflation that preceded the hot Big Bang somehow preserved the signature of the QM fluctuation that preceded (caused?) the event. That tells me a couple of things. Rapid inflation had to happen in less than a nanosecond to retain the signature of the quantum fluctuation that preceded it, and the “signal” of that event in our present universe is empirical evidence that something, rather than nothing, existed prior to the Big Bang. (@pevaquark correct me if I’ve misunderstood any of this.) The existence of that prior state, whatever its exact nature, makes it impossible to say “God did it” as opposed to natural causes. (It’s similar to the origin of life in that respect.) So one can’t point to the Big Bang as proof of an “absolute” beginning of the Universe (this universe) ex nihilo.
Likewise, some version of our early Universe preceded the QM fluctuation. I say it “apparently” caused the rapid inflation that preceded the Big Bang because we can’t presently measure anything beyond that horizon, but it seems obvious some type of “natural” Quantum state existed prior to the fluctuation that eventually gave rise to the hot Big Bang. Logic can get us that far, at least. Beyond that, logic and evidence are lacking. Perhaps there was an absolute beginning when something sprang from nothing (or a singularity, as we used to think), but I don’t think it’s possible to point to a “first cause” in the physical realm.
Absolute proof of God is denied us, as Pascal said long ago.
No warning necessary. Sometimes I reply immediately, and sometimes I may add an additional reply if some new idea occurs to me while I am about my daily business, but this doesn’t mean I expect a reply immediately.
I totally agree, but this doesn’t mean a convenient agnosticism is a reasonable choice. As an irrational choice, like believing your friend’s dad was a married bachelor because he said so, is a choice I guess.
There is what reason can tell us about a QM fluctuation and there is what it cannot. And whether it concerns previous universes or causes matters very little.
This QM event was either caused or it was uncaused. Right? This question is genuinely irrespective of the static “stuff” that eternally preceded the event.
Sidenote: When I was talking about the ontological argument with Draper, and telling him about how the version I was using originated with Jonathan Edwards. He found it all quite engaging. At one point as he thought of picturing an eternal being or “stuff” he leaned back in his chair and tried to form an object with his hands in the space before him.
This argument is not even close to being sound. Quantum mechanics can only speak of a vacuum in a space-time structure and not about a nothingness in which there is no such space-time structure.
Rather overstated… I will acknowledge that this idea of a quantum fluctuation being the origin of the universe is a possible/reasonable explanation and an alternative on somewhat equal footing with the idea of creation by God, but it is hardly a complete theory nor is it required by our current understanding of the laws of nature.
This will take us on a little bit of a detour of how thoughts about cosmology evolved over time.
one of the questions that Isaac Newton and others grappled with was how are there galaxies or stars at all, especially if the universe was “eternal” (please, for the love of God, DON’T freak out at this word Mike. It’s not that important and I put it in quotes). The logic here is that if gravity is an attractive force, given enough time, you should end up with one giant clump of stuff given enough time. Here is a paper (I can send PDF if you want) summarizing his thoughts here.
Fast forward several hundred years, and Einstein’s theory of general relativity has a way to answer Newton’s problem, but nobody could solve it until the concept of a dynamic spacetime was sufficiently developed. It was still a mystery as to how gravity hadn’t collapsed the entire universe together, but there were now a few more solutions. Einstein invented a term to his equations, the cosmological constant, which he realized was necessary to prevent the universe from collapsing into a giant ball. It was a perfectly fine thing to add to his equations and it was like an anti-gravity/energy of spacetime itself. The other solutions were that the universe was either expanding or contracting. Seeing that there were galaxies at all meant the universe was on its way out or its way in, similar to seeing a picture of a rock in midair. With redshift data (suggesting the universe was expanding), Einstein considered his cosmological constant term the biggest blunder of his career (note: we’ve added this term back in with Dark Energy today, but it’s way smaller than Einstein could have imagined - and Einstein may have never used this phrase).
The expanding universe still didn’t necessarily prove that the universe had a beginning, as other models came about, like the Steady-state model that also had an expanding universe, but it was still eternal into the past and future. However, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) discovery in the 1960s and the distribution of light elements in the universe launched the big bang idea into scientific stardom. BUT a major problem was how did the universe get structure. The CMB seemed to suggest the universe had been completely uniform in all directions AND no structures could form if the universe was really homogenous and isotropic.
In the late 60s, a few cosmologists began to work out that maybe the CMB wasn’t completely uniform. If this was the case, then such perturbations could grow over time thanks to gravity. But the only problem was that there was no apparent source of such perturbations. By the early 1980s, the idea of quantum fluctuations in a vacuum, combined with inflation, could give rise to these initial perturbations. The reason why inflation was an important step is that such quantum fluctuations are occurring all the time, but they quickly disappear and cannot lead to any anisotropies. However, inflation was a solution to a number of other theoretical problems, and some cosmologists combined the two. The only problem is that by the end of the 1980s, we had never seen any deviations from uniform in the CMB.
The COBE mission in the early 90s proved that the CMB signal was thermal in origin and then began to discover something more remarkable. Small anisotropies were discovered, and the project lead, George Smoot, offered two free plane tickets to anyone who could figure out what was causing the anisotropies OR if they were really in the signal themselves. (Funny store here - CTRL F - plane tickets. Side note: two free plane tickets is a sweet deal for scientists who don’t make much money contrary to what conspiracists claim). And after they could find no cause, the anisotropies really were from the CMB signal itself and were the seeds of early galaxies.
Even more remarkable is the specific predictions from said quantum calculations and inflation match what we would then begin measuring all the way into the 2010s. So now, we have really strong evidence for quantum fluctuations being frozen into space by inflation - and then the regular big bang theory takes over.
And then one can ask since this puts quantum fluctuations being active before “the big bang,” could quantum fluctuations of sorts also be responsible for the universe beginning? That is an exciting possibility to explore, but I’m not sure how we might explore this (beyond theoretical) until we enter the quantum gravity era and have other empirical data.
Did you have a point, or just didn’t want to miss an opportunity to be rude?
I’m not agnostic about God, but in many cases agnosticism is a reasonable choice. When the evidence is equally balanced or there is no evidence, it’s fair to say, “I don’t know.”
Personally, I’ve never been interested in previous universes or multiverse theories. I have enough trouble trying to understand this one. haha.
Coming back to Pascal, it matters a great deal for some “proofs” of God. For example, WLC’s “Kalam Cosmological Argument” requires a starting point. The Big Bang was a convenient place to draw that line. Now, that line has moved so far out of bounds that it’s reasonable to ask whether it can be drawn at all. That argument seems dead in light of this new (since 2010) evidence.
I can’t wrap my brain around an uncaused event. If an event had absolutely no cause – neither divine nor physical – then did it actually happen? The usual argument for God involves tracing cause-effect back to some sort of terminus or “first cause,” which is attributed to God.
I don’t think the “stuff” that preceded the QM event was static, but I’ll wait for the rest of Matthew’s post before continuing.
I’ve spoken with PhD physicists (or so they claimed) and they say QM fluctuations are uncaused, and I’m willing to grant that for the sake of a discussion, but they were unwilling to grant that an uncaused event is unexplainable. Go figure.
A starting point that can occur in the present. I think this is the sense in which Aquinas meant an eternal universe was a rational possibility. But I would need some help from more knowledgeable philosophers than myself on this… I would ask ChatGPT but that’s off the table for now.
it’s cool… I said previously that I am willing to grant an eternal universe that is in an eternal state of becoming, but objective events would also be an illusion.
That’s just a confusion of terms. haha. I can think of dozens of instances from everyday life when it’s right to take an agnostic stance. And faced with an absence of evidence, every scientist I’ve ever met had no problem saying they didn’t know for sure.
What I know about Quantum physics could fill a thimble.
I was just trying to follow the chain of events and why Mike and I were talking past one another.
but that’s off the table for now.
it’s cool… I said previously that I am willing to grant an eternal universe that is in an eternal state of becoming, but objective events would also be an illusion.