Before the Big Bang? (Origins)

by dhw, Thursday, July 03, 2014, 23:07 (3794 days ago)
edited by dhw, Sunday, July 27, 2014, 08:36

DAVID: This essay by Paul Davies is worth reading. He uses quantum theory and proposes the Universe popped up from a perturbation. An eternal timeless sort of nothing nothing but with quantum potentials of quantum energy before. Therefore something was always eternal:-http://boingboing.net/2014/05/20/what-came-before-the-big-bang.html-I have read this essay twice, and can find no clear proposals, let alone a "therefore", let alone an eternal something. I have found no mention of "quantum potentials of quantum energy before", and sadly for you and me, he only mentions energy in relation to the fact that in due course any universe would run out of it. Nor have I found any support for your claim (under "Contingent Evolution") that "the universe comes from quantum fluctuations from eternal virtual particles. There is no support for anything "eternal". In fact the one absolute conviction he expresses here is that the notion of what happened before the big bang is "discredited". I am going to put together a series of quotes to illustrate the nebulousness of the general argument, and will put certain phrases in bold:-"After all, why should time and space have suddenly 'switched on'? One line of reasoning is that this spontaneous origination of time and space is a natural consequence of quantum mechanics." One line of reasoning of course leaves room for other lines of reasoning. Davies gives the example of decaying uranium atoms, and goes on "The key step for cosmogenesis is to apply this same idea not just to matter, but to space and time as well." This is "fairly routine for physicists, though it is true that there are special technical problems associated with the gravitational case that have yet to be resolved. The quantum theory of the origin of the universe therefore rests on shaky ground." -"In spite of these technical obstacles, one may say quite generally that once space and time are made subject to quantum principles, the possibility immediately arises of space and time 'switching on'." This is very much like you, David, saying that once we make quantum mechanics dependent on consciousness, we may say that consciousness precedes the creation of the universe. Yes, it's one line of thinking. Once we decide to run round the obstacles, we can usually get to our particular finishing line.
 
Hartle and Hawking, on the other hand, say that time does not switch on abruptly, "but emerges continuously from space. There is no specific moment at which time starts, but neither does time extend backward for all eternity." As presented here, this line of thinking is totally bewildering to me: if time doesn't stretch back over eternity, how can one argue that it had no beginning?-Davies then turns to yet another line: "Unfortunately, the topic of the quantum origin of the universe is fraught with confusion because of the publicity given to a preliminary, and in my view wholly unsatisfactory, theory of the big bang based on an instability of the quantum vacuum. According to this alternative theory, first mooted by Edward Tryon in 1973, space and time are eternal, but matter is not. It suddenly appears in a pre-existing and unexplained void due to quantum vacuum fluctuations." He dismisses anything that smacks of eternity. Or almost anything. His conclusion is extremely confusing. Again I'm selecting quotes to make the problem apparent:-"One must resist the temptation to imagine that the laws of physics, and the quantum state that represents the universe, somehow exist before the universe. They don't..." Not much support for you here, David. However, on the next page, we read: "In my experience, almost all physicists who work on fundamental problems accept that the laws of physics have some kind of independent reality. With that view, it is possible to argue that the laws of physics are logically prior to the universe they describe." This contradiction is left dangling and is followed by a swift change of direction. The above quote actually follows on from a mention of "First Cause", in which he merely goes through the list of different scientists' attitudes "to the metaphysical problem of how to explain the principles themselves." I gather Davies is an agnostic, which may explain some of his caginess, but makes it all the more surprising to me that he so firmly rejects any possibility of a "before".
 
I'm grateful to you as always, David, for drawing our attention to an article which at least makes fairly clear some of the thinking behind all these quantum theories, but it's also clear that there is no consensus, a vast amount remains unexplained, and there is no support whatsoever for our shared belief in energy as an eternal first cause, let alone your belief that eternal energy is conscious .