Far out cosmology: spacetime explained (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, July 17, 2019, 16:04 (1954 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: This explains the importance of the concept of spacetime as real and necessary. Time is not simply a sequence of events as our minds see it. It is built into the universe, Note my bold. At the basis of reality is the quantum state. And that is where the mind of God exists.

dhw: I am perfectly happy to accept that time as the sequence of before and after, cause and effect, is “built into the universe”, and if the BB happened, there was a sequence in which all forms of energy and matter broke up into particles, planets and eventually people. If there hadn’t been a sequence of before and after, cause and effect, and if there hadn’t been energy and matter, there would have been no you and me. I don’t know what “the quantum state” means or is, and I don’t know if whatever it is has a mind. Nor, as far as I am aware, does anybody else.

DAVID: I'm happy you see the concept of before and after as we all do. But in motion my experience of time may not be your time. Th at is what the article says. No one fully understands the quantum level of reality, but it makes sense to me is that is where God is.

dhw: Most of our experiences are unlikely to be identical, since they are filtered by our subjectivity, but I guess I’m still fighting the case against “How our brains make time”, as if time didn’t exist outside humanity. As for the “quantum level of reality”, for me it’s just an expression – like “dark matter” and “God” – for something we don’t know. I can accept, though, that something we don’t know may be the home of something we don’t know. There has to be a solution to all the mysteries!

The bolded concepts are names we give the concepts, real or otherwise.

From “Far out cosmology”:
QUOTE: "All of our currently held scientific truths, from the Standard Model of elementary particles to the Big Bang to dark matter and dark energy to cosmic inflation and beyond, are only provisional. They describe the Universe extremely accurately, succeeding in regimes where all prior frameworks have failed. Yet they all have limitations to how far we can take their implications before we arrive at a place where their predictions are no longer sensible, or no longer describe reality. They are not absolute truths, but approximate, provisional ones.”

dhw: Ties in with what I have just written above, except for the statement that our currently held scientific truths...describe the Universe extremely accurately. We don't know if they are “truths”, and since nobody knows the whole “truth” about the universe, we cannot say the description is accurate, let alone extremely accurate.

The standard model is accurate enough it allows for predictions that are the proven: Higgs!