Far out cosmology (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, February 07, 2014, 15:18 (3940 days ago) @ George Jelliss

David has beaten me to it again, but I will post my answer to George as David and I don't agree on all points (especially time).-GEORGE: Your (DT and dhw) mantras that "There must have always been something" and that "Nothing can come from nothing" are where we disagree. [...] The idea that there must "always" have been something betrays your inability to get the Newtonian idea of time out of your head. Time and space are measurable properties that only make sense within the universe.-You're quite right that I can't get the Newtonian idea of time out of my mind, but that does not mean your alternative is more logical; it is the "nothing can come from nothing" mantra which suggests to me that there has to be an endless progression from past to present to future. -You believe that there has only ever been this universe, and nothing preceded it. However, in reply to David's argument that "true nothingness cannot have any properties whatsoever" you say: "This just shows that your concept of "true nothingness" does not exist. It is a metaphysical fantasy." If true nothingness does not exist, then clearly the universe did not spring from nothing but from something. And yet you claim that the universe "was nothing" before the BB. You can't have it both ways. If there is no such thing as nothing, how can the universe have been nothing? You wriggled round that earlier by saying you suspected "there was a certain amount of time and space before that for a short while". How about energy? What else could have generated the birth of the universe and its apparent expansion? And why "for a short while"? -The logical argument for "something" (eternal energy?) does not depend on Newtonian time but supports the Newtonian concept. It depends on the claim that there is no effect without a cause, and it is the sequence of cause and effect that demands a before and after, a Newtonian past and present. Whatever caused the big bang cannot have been the impossible nothing, and cannot itself have sprung into existence from the impossible nothing. We therefore have an infinite regression of cause and effect back into the past. -What happened in the past can only be a matter of speculation, but it seems feasible to me that if "something" led to our universe, the same something may have led to others prior to our 14-billion-year-old universe. This matters when we come to consider the odds against life arising by chance, so I'm surprised that you should reject the hypothesis out of hand. But my own focus is on what seems most likely, and eternal energy still seems more logical to me than the "metaphysical fantasy" of true nothingness. I don't see how the big bang would have been possible without pre-existing energy. What alternative is there?