Nothing (General)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Monday, December 07, 2009, 12:01 (5277 days ago) @ dhw

dhw again says that Stenger's claim that the universe "looks exactly as it would be expected to look if there is no God." is silly "Since we have no other universe, designed or non-designed, to compare it to. It would seem then on this criterion that we can't say anything definite about our universe unless we have experience of other universes. This is definitely silly. -I quoted Stenger: "The model in which the universe is made of matter and nothing else and had a spontaneous, uncaused, natural origin from a state of chaos equivalent to "nothing" agrees with all the data." and dhw asks: "Do we have all the data? and asks "Do terms like "spontaneous" and "uncaused" represent objective scientific conclusions?" -On this basis one could never arrive at any conclusions on anything! There could always be other data. If dhw was ever on a jury he could never convict anyone of anything.-If one traces back the evolution of the universe to a state in which it appears to have come out of nothing, I think the terms 'spontaneous' and 'uncaused' are perfectly reasonable to use. How else would you describe it?-dhw also dosn't like Stenger's use of the word "expected". His arguments are based on point-of-view invariance leading via Noether's theorem to the laws of conservation of energy and momentum. Given these minimal assumptions, which do not involve anything supernatural, he derives the laws of physics as they are known. The mathematics leads to results in agreement with what is observed in physics. No further hypotheses such as the influence of Gods are needed.-dhw takes the view that "The equations of physics are derived from our observation of the universe and everything in it. It's therefore scarcely surprising that the equations of physics (as we know them) lead to the present cosmos (as we know it)!" This may have been true in the historical sense, but as I've indicated above, many of the equations of physics can now be derived by pure mathematics from simple assumptions. The observations confirm these results.-dhw still wants to know what it was that "went bang". This satirical term is usually taken to refer to the period of "inflation" that occurred after the initial "fluctuation in the void" that began everything.

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GPJ