Before the Big Bang? (Origins)

by dhw, Thursday, July 31, 2014, 21:10 (3528 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The more you talk of “pure energy”, the more nebulous the concept becomes. How “pure” can it be if it is able to give rise to all these particles? I can understand the argument that matter came from energy, so perhaps we need a definition of “pure”. -DAVID: I have to admit there is no such thing as pure energy in particle physics. All of us have trouble putting what has been found into words. What I envision to be present before the bb is a nebulous 'energy" which contains the particles we have found and the ones yet to be found. In my belief this is organized as a universal consciousness which went on to create the universe.-Thank you for your honesty. You have gone on to suggest that your God may be a cool plasma containing all particles joined together, or “pure plasma with unseparated particles or perhaps separated”, or later “it had to be energy, or energy-matter as the physicists define it.” It's clear from the Strassler article that there is no clear definition of matter, and many of the terms he deals with actually refer to things nobody knows much if anything about. But he does emphasize that energy and matter are totally different, which makes your term “energy-matter” even more confusing, since in the past you have always stressed that matter IS energy. I am probably much happier than Strassler would be with this idea, as I keep asking why the first cause should not have been energy constantly transmuting itself into matter.
 
DAVID: As you can tell I get myself confused, because I started reading this stuff in the 1960's when as Strassler notes particles were particles and not smudges in fields. Now we have bosons that make fields and forces, and fermions which are the main basis of matter. Whew! 
But the whole basis of the universe is in a quantum layer. We are not in that layer but are affected by it constantly. And I think Kastner has a good approach to it. Your questions are helping me clarify my own thinking.-That is a great compliment, but in all honesty I see nothing other than confusion in all these discussions concerning the origin and even the nature of the universe, from distortions of language and logic to attempts at naming and defining phenomena which nobody understands and which therefore can only be defined in terms of the incomprehensible. Unfortunately, the very fact of naming something endows it with some kind of reality, as though it were known, even if it is not. Perhaps the word “God” is a prime example. It's muddled enough to turn any truth-seeker into an agnostic, wouldn't you say?


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