Far out cosmology (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 25, 2013, 22:28 (4582 days ago) @ David Turell

Matt: I follow Krauss, not Brian Greene. An unanswered question by Krauss, if the universe as it is guarantees a multiverse, at what point does this begin? > > Still all supposition which may make sense to you but not many:-And other quotes:-"In an Amazon.com's review of Krauss' book, Don N. Page, professor of (theoretical gravitational) physics, University of Alberta, strongly disagrees with Krauss: Many physicists recently, not least Hawking himself, have ventured to make many controversial philosophical speculations going far beyond the science that is presently well understood. But in my mind as another physicist working in the same general area of cosmology (and perhaps focusing deeper into the quantum aspects of cosmology), its philosophical argumentations fall far wide of the mark of answering the age-old question of why there is something rather than nothing. Krauss essentially redefines the ancient difficult question into different forms that science 26 David J. Turell, M.D. can address, discusses possible solutions to the restricted questions (themselves highly speculative, as Krauss carefully recognizes) and then seems to imply that these speculative answers to the restricted questions solve the ancient difficult problem. In his preface, Krauss admits that philosophers and theologians have objected to his meaning of "nothing" and claim that he does not understand it. Krauss's initial response is to make the gratuitous ad hominem reply, "I am tempted to retort here that theologians are experts at nothing." He then says that for them, "Nothing is 'nonbeing,' in some vague and ill-defined sense." Well, even though I am a scientist rather than a philosopher or theologian, on this issue I agree with them and think that the idea of nothing as the absence of anything not logically necessary is much more precise and well-defined than Krauss's imprecise ideas of "nothing," such as "the absence of space and time itself." Page also noted a comment by Richard Dawkins: "In the final paragraph of his afterword, Richard Dawkins makes the prematurely triumphalist statement, 'And now we can read Lawrence Krauss for what looks to me like the knockout blow.' To me as a fellow scientist, it appears Krauss has instead swung far wide of the goal, striking only the air with his philosophical speculations that do not address the truly deep questions of existence" (http://www. amazon.com/review/R20NRSZ698T31J)."-"John Horgan of Scientific American is also horrified by Krauss and Dawkins: "But Krauss asks us to take the quantum theory of creation seriously, and so does evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages," Dawkins writes in an afterword to Krauss's book. If On the Origin of Species was biology's deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe from Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.( h t t p : / / b l o g s . s c i e n t i f i c a m e r i c a n . c o m / c r o s s - check/2012/04/23/science-will-never-explain-whytheres- something-rather-than-nothing/?WT_mc_id=SA_ DD_20120423)."