Far out cosmology (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, February 07, 2014, 16:01 (3730 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: 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?-Let me add the thought that our spacetime is energy and only that. Stenger assumes it is eternal because he uses it to conjure up something from nothing, that is, our universe. But it is possible to conceive of pure energy without time, as the eternal source, which if it is unchanged offers no sequence to create time as we know it. I am saying that our spacetime is sequential as dhw notes. How does Stenger know what kind of anything existed before the big bang? Is our spacetime the only kind that can exist? In my view Stenger is an inept philosopher of cosmologic science.