Why something instead of nothing?

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Saint, Jul 5, 2012.

  1. sigurdV Registered Senior Member

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    As I thought... Its great litterature but, alas , its no proof that the informational content of a book is zero!

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!


    And you surely wont accept that the informational content of your post#80 is zero?
    Which perhaps would be the case if what it claims is true...
    But were it true its info content would not be zero ...So it cant be true ...Ok?
     
    Last edited: Jul 9, 2012
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  3. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    If everything happens, there's no real absolute true or false information.
     
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  5. Alan McDougall Alan McDougall Registered Senior Member

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    This is true Stephen Hawking proposed in one of his theories that the universe somehow was doing the impossible and actually losing information. Later at a conference he retracted this point of view because of enormous opposition to this idea by his contemporaries.

    He then came up with the idea (as if no one else had thought of this new theory of his) that yes, information was escaping from our universe but bleeding into other alternate universes, thus in reality in the "larger picture" all information is "retained not lost", within his proposed greater reality.
     
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  7. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    Perhaps the information of everything in the singularity was in a potential form, all superimposed; whereas, as expressed by the change of form into the universe it is actual and separated, thus taking up a really lot of space in all its variations.

    Earth had enough of the right conditions in one place for life to appear, which is a rare event but it had to happen somewhere, among everywhere and everything.
     
  8. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    There's nothing like a thread about nothing to get something happening in here.
     
  9. Alan McDougall Alan McDougall Registered Senior Member

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    A bit off topic but something that really interests me!

    In my opinion due to the unimagiable enormity of the universe must be awash with life even life much more advanced than we are at present.Remember the famous Drake Equation

    Go to the interesting link below?

    http://www.fennzart.com/planetarysystems/drake_equation.html

    Use the Drake Equation Yourself

    Calculate the possible number of communicating civilizations within our own galaxy using the Drake Equation. Or extrapolate for the whole universe by some 1000 billion other galaxies
     
  10. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, relatively rare, but still awash, since life can propagate.
     
  11. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    What is the universal number? 0, 1, or diverse?

    Well, either it’s ’42’ or the following:

    — The Infernal Regions —

    Hellholes hurl thousand light-year jets of fear,
    In Centaurus, cross the galactic sphere.
    Supermassive darkling beasts devour all;
    Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.​

    Roger Penrose showed that black holes have to exist. In their ‘singularity’, time, space, matter, and light go out of existence, so to speak, back into the state they came from; so, now, as we know that a singularity can be, and this bolsters the reverse idea of a Big Bang from a singularity of symmetry, with inflation, that has other reasons going for it, too.

    The universe is as unimaginably huge, as much as the singularity was incredibly tiny, yet they are the same essence, although the form has changed.

    The unified verse of the universe, in the reverse inverse of a black hole singularity’s, as an evil twin, as Hawking’s great insight, is diverse and obverse in a way that reflects and shows the initial symmetry, one that I take to be the singularity of nonexistence, or nothingness, for that is the only candidate for a source, though we fruitlessly yearn for another completion to the verse.

    Perhaps the information of everything in the singularity was in a potential form, as all superimposed; whereas, as expressed by the change of form into the universe it became actual and separated, thus necessarily taking up a lot of room, for all its variations constituting everything.

    Earth had enough of the right conditions in one place for life to appear, which is a relatively rare event, but it had to happen somewhere, among everywhere and everything.

    Existence is information. The information content of everything and nothing is the same: zero. Pure symmetry has all information as equal. The singularity changed form, into a universe, still containing everything—and that is why it had to be so large.

    Since the prime mover has no causes going into it, it has no inputs of direction to say that it should have a specific, certain, limited outcome, and so then it is that it has all possible symmetric outcomes, which is everything, as all variations thereof, within the initial symmetry that had to be, causing the polar results of opposites.

    Time, distance, space, spatial expansion, gravitational attraction, position, momentum, relativistic effects, quantum physics, forces, etc., are all related, complimenting each other. For example, it takes a spatial distance to measure an interval of time (more properly, a spacetime distance), and an interval of time to measure a spatial distance (of spaces, really). Each allows the standard by which the other is gauged and as with position and momentum, for when you focus on one, the other becomes increasingly uncertain.

    Either the slight breaks in symmetry were inherent, and magnified, or they became since the perfect equilibrium could not be maintained during inflation’s rush, and, so, now, there are 10 billions photons for every matter particle, since one matter particle was left over for every 10 billion matter/anti-matter annihilations. All that then went on is due to those extra matter particles, without which there would only be light, and no ‘us’.

    All good things must come to and end, though, as time must march on…

    — Finale —

    Beyond the pale, aft the last perfect day,
    The Earth’s atmosphere incinerates away,
    Mercury and Venus within the sun,
    For the Crimson Giant is on his way.​

    So, the universe had a beginning, and the essence is still here, in another form, and we are quite within it, not beyond it, for there is nothing else inputting into it. Diverse? Yes, but only as much as it could be, within the symmetry.

    So, the ‘1’ became like 1/2 and 1/2, but that is still ‘1’ overall, or, as in my extended view, ‘0’ became ‘1’ and ‘-1’, which is still ‘0’, or nonexistence, making that existence is not from ‘0’, but just another expression of it.

    To find the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of existence, one would have to derive the absolute, default conditions that force the symmetric necessity.
     
  12. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    3,028
    Nothing is Negligible
    Why There is Something Rather than Nothing

    by Michael Shermer

    Why is there something rather than nothing? The question is usually posed by Christian apologists as a rhetorical argument meant to pose as the drop-dead killer case for God that no scientist can possibly answer. Those days are over. Even though scientists are not in agreement on a final answer to the now non-rhetorical question, they are edging closer to providing logical and even potentially empirically testable hypotheses to account for the universe. Here are a dozen possible answers to the question

    The Definitive Dozen

    1 GOD. The theist’s answer to the question is that God existed before the universe and subsequently brought it into existence out of nothing (ex nihilo) in a single creation moment as described in Genesis. But the very conception of a creator existing before the universe and then creating it implies a time sequence. In both the Judeo-Christian tradition (along with the Babylonian pre-Judeo-Christian cosmogony) and the scientific worldview, time began when the universe came into existence, either through divine creation or the Big Bang. God, therefore, would have to exist outside of space and time, which means that as natural beings delimited by living in a finite universe, we cannot possibly know anything about such a supernatural entity. The theist’s answer is an untestable hypothesis and thus amounts to nothing more than a god-of-the-gaps argument.
    The Fallacy of Fune-Tuning (book cover)


    2 WRONG QUESTION. Asking why there is something rather than nothing presumes “nothing” is the natural state of things out of which “something” needs an explanation. Maybe “something” is the natural state of things and “nothing” would be the mystery to be solved. As the physicist Victor Stenger notes in his book, The Fallacy of Fine Tuning: “Current cosmology suggests that no laws of physics were violated in bringing the universe into existence. The laws of physics themselves are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing. There is something rather than nothing because something is more stable.”
    From Eternity to Here (book cover)


    3 GRAND UNIFIED THEORY. In order to answer the question, we need a comprehensive theory of physics that connects the subatomic world described by quantum mechanics to the cosmic world described by general relativity. As the Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll notes in his book From Eternity to Here: “Possibly general relativity is not the correct theory of gravity, at least in the context of the extremely early universe. Most physicists suspect that a quantum theory of gravity, reconciling the framework of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s ideas about curved spacetime, will ultimately be required to make sense of what happens at the very earliest times. So if someone asks you what really happened at the moment of the purported Big Bang, the only honest answer would be: ‘I don’t know.’” That grand unified theory of everything will itself need an explanation, but it may be explicable by some other theory we have yet to comprehend out of our sheer ignorance at this moment in history.


    4 BOOM-AND-BUST CYCLES. Sean Carroll also suggests that our universe may be just one in a series of boom-and-bust cycles of expansion and contractions of the universe, with our universe just one “episode” of the bubble’s eventual collapse and re-expansion in an eternal cycle, and therefore “there is no such thing as an initial state, because time is eternal. In this case, we are imagining that the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the entire universe, although it’s obviously an important event in the history of our local region.”

    5 DARWINIAN MULTIVERSE. According to the cosmologist Lee Smolin, in his book The Life of the Cosmos, our universe is just one of many bubble universes with varying sets of laws of nature. Those universes with laws of nature similar to ours will generate matter, which coalesces into stars, some of which collapse into black holes and a singularity, the same entity out of which our universe may have sprung. Thus, universes like ours give birth to baby universes with those same laws of nature, some of which develop intelligent life smart enough to discover this Darwinian process of cosmic evolution.
    The Inflationary Universe (book cover)


    6 INFLATIONARY COSMOLOGY. In his 1997 book The Inflationary Universe, the cosmologist Alan Guth proposes that our universe sprang into existence from a bubble nucleation of spacetime. If this process of universe creation is natural, then there may be multiple bubble nucleations that give rise to many universes that expand but remain separate from one another without any causal contact between them.


    7 MANY-WORLDS MULTIVERSE. According to the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are an infinite number of universes in which every possible outcome of every possible choice that has ever been available, or will be available, has happened in one of those universes. This many-worlds multiverse is grounded in the bizarre findings of the famous “double-slit” experiment, in which light is passed through two slits and forms an interference pattern of waves on a back surface (like throwing two stones in a pond and watching the concentric wave patterns interact, with crests and troughs adding and subtracting from one another). The spooky part comes when you send single photons of light one at a time through the two slits—they still form an interference wave pattern even though they are not interacting with other photons. How can this be? One answer is that the photons are interacting with photons in other universes! In this type of multiverse you could meet your doppelgänger, and depending on which universe you entered, your parallel self would be fairly similar or dissimilar to you, a theme that has become a staple of science fiction (see, for example, Michael Crichton’s Timeline).


    8 BRANE UNIVERSES. A multi-dimensional universe may come about when three-dimensional “branes” (a membrane-like structure on which our universe exists) moves through higher-dimensional space and collides with another brane, the result of which is the energized creation of another universe.


    9 STRING UNIVERSES. A related multiverse is derived through string theory, which by at least one calculation allows for 10500 possible worlds, all with different self-consistent laws and constants. That’s a 1 followed by 500 zeroes possible universes (12 zeroes is a trillion!). In his book The Unconscious Quantum, Victor Stenger published the results of a computer model that analyzes what just 100 different universes would be like under constants different from our own, ranging from five orders of magnitude above to five orders of magnitude below their values in our universe. Stenger found that long-lived stars of at least 1 billion years—necessary for the production of life-giving heavy elements—would emerge within a wide range of parameters in at least half of the universes in his model.
    The Nature of Space and Time (book cover)


    10 QUANTUM FOAM MULTIVERSE. In this model, universes are created out of nothing, but in the scientific version of ex nihilo the nothing of the vacuum of space actually contains the theoretical spacetime mishmash called quantum foam, which may fluctuate to create baby universes. In this configuration, any quantum object in any quantum state may generate a new universe, each one of which represents every possible state of every possible object. This is Stephen Hawking’s explanation for the fine-tuning problem that he himself famously presented in his 1996 book (co-authored with Roger Penrose) The Nature of Space and Time: “Quantum fluctuations lead to the spontaneous creation of tiny universes, out of nothing. Most of the universes collapse to nothing, but a few that reach a critical size, will expand in an inflationary manner, and will form galaxies and stars, and maybe beings like us.”


    11 M-THEORY GRAND DESIGN. Stephen Hawking has continued working on this question, and this month, he and the Caltech mathematician Leonard Mlodinow present their answer in a book entitled The Grand Design. They approach the problem from what they call “model-dependent realism,” based on the assumption that our brains form models of the world from sensory input, that we use the model most successful at explaining events, and that when more than one model makes accurate predictions “we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.” Employing this method, they write, “it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation.” The dual wave/particle models of light are an example of model-dependent realism, where each one agrees with certain observations but neither one is sufficient to explain all observations. To model the entire universe, Hawking and Mlodinow employ “M-Theory,” an extension of string theory that includes 11 dimensions and incorporates all five current string theory models. “M-theory is the most general supersymmetric theory of gravity,” Hawking and Mlodinow explain. “For these reasons M-theory is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe. If it is finite—and this has yet to be proved—it will be a model of a universe that creates itself.” Although they admit that the theory has yet to be confirmed by observation, if it is, then no creator explanation is necessary because the universe creates itself. I call this auto-ex-nihilo.
    A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (book cover)


    12 NOTHING IS UNSTABLE, SOMETHING IS NATURAL In his 2012 book, A Universe From Nothing, the cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss attempts to link quantum physics to Einstein’s gravitational theory of general relativity to explain the origin of something (including a universe) from nothing: “In quantum gravity, universes can, and indeed always will, spontaneously appear from nothing. Such universes need not be empty, but can have matter and [electromagnetic] radiation in them, as long as the total energy, including the negative energy associated with gravity [balancing the positive energy of matter], is zero.” And: “In order for the closed universes that might be created through such mechanisms to last for longer than infinitesimal times, something like inflation is necessary.” Observations have revealed that, in fact, the universe is flat (there is just enough matter to eventually halt its expansion), its energy is zero, and it underwent rapid inflation, or expansion, shortly after the Big Bang as described by inflationary cosmology. Thus, Krauss concludes, “quantum gravity not only appears to allow universes to be created from nothing—meaning…the absence of space and time—it may require them. ‘Nothing’—in this case no space, no time, no anything!—is unstable.”


    Putting Something to the Test

    Many of these dozen explanations are testable. The theory that new universes can emerge from collapsing black holes may be illuminated through additional knowledge about the properties of black holes. Other bubble universes might be detected in the subtle temperature variations of the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang of our own universe. NASA recently launched a spacecraft constructed to study this radiation. Another way to test these theories might be through the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) that is designed to detect exceptionally faint gravitational waves. If there are other universes, perhaps ripples in gravitational waves will signal their presence. Maybe gravity is such a relatively weak force (compared to electromagnetism and the nuclear forces) because some of it “leaks” out to other universes. Maybe.

    After a column I wrote in Scientific American on this topic (“Much Ado About Nothing,” May, 2012), I received an email from the Columbia University theoretical physicist Peter Woit cautioning me not to put too much emphasis on any one of these hypotheses/answers to the question of why there is something rather than nothing, noting that even these proposed tests probably themselves lack validity, if they could ever be conducted in reality. He explained that his skepticism came not out of religious conviction: “I’m as much of an atheist as anyone, and I’m really disturbed to see arguments being made that are going to end up discrediting skepticism and atheism.” He then posted a blog commentary on my Scientific American column, noting that my “authority here is the Hawking/Mlodinow popular book, but he’s also convinced that WMAP and LIGO are somehow going to provide evidence for multiverses, something that even the most far-out theorists in this field aren’t claiming.” Regarding my comment that perhaps gravity “leaks” out to other universes Woit responds: “Nobody seems to have told Shermer that this is not an idea taken seriously by a significant number of theorists, or that LHC data has shot down the hopes of the one or two such theorists.” Woit was prescient in that the prominent Intelligent Design creationist William Dembski did highlight Woit’s skepticism at his blog Uncommon Descent (“Serving the Intelligent Design Community”), quoting Woit and commenting: “Don’t nobody tell Shermer. It’s more fun this way.”

    Given the fact that I appreciated Peter Woit’s skeptical book on string theory (Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law), I queried my sources. Physicist Victor Stenger responded: “The multiverse is not nonsense. It is based on good theory, but only theory. It is, in principle, detectable by measuring an anisotropy in the cosmic background radiation. That’s why I did not rely on it in The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning. I agree with Woit on M-theory, though.” Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow said he doubts that either he or Woit knows what “most physicists” think about the multiverse, and then opined that “most cosmologists certainly believe it,” recalling that Brian Greene “outlined the general thinking (as opposed to, say, Hawking’s particular views) very well in his book on it” (The Hidden Reality). Finally, Caltech physicist and cosmologist Sean Carroll noted: “You are completely correct, the multiverse is an idea that pops out of inflation (and string theory), not one that is put in out of desperation. Here is a column of my own making exactly this point. Carroll then cautioned: “Obviously the entire set of ideas is controversial and speculative, and should be presented as such, but it’s taken very seriously by a large number of extremely smart and respectable people.” For example: Leonard Susskind, Alex Vilenkin and Alan Guth (on the pro-multiverse side) and David Gross, Paul Steinhardt, and Edward Farhi (skeptical of the multiverse side).
    God, Science, and the Great Unknown

    In the meantime, while scientists sort out the science to answer the question Why is there something instead of nothing?, in addition to reviewing these dozen answers it is also okay to say “I don’t know” and keep searching. There is no need to turn to supernatural answers just to fulfill an emotional need for explanation. Like nature, the mind abhors a vacuum, but sometimes it is better to admit ignorance than feign certainty about which one knows not. If there is one lesson that the history of science has taught us it is that it is arrogant to think that we now know enough to know that we cannot know. Science is young. Let us have the courage to admit our ignorance and to keep searching for answers to these deepest questions.
     
  13. Alan McDougall Alan McDougall Registered Senior Member

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    http://www.everystudent.com/journeys/who2.html

    Something that existed at the very beginning must have the ability to produce something other than Itself. For, if It could not, then that Something would be all that exists today. But Something Else exists today. You, for example.

    To produce Something Else -- out of nothing -- requires an incredible amount of power. So the Something must have great power at its disposal. If it takes us miles and miles of corridor in a super collider and the most energy we can harness, just to produce the tiniest particle, how much power would it take to produce the all the matter and energyin the universe?

    The Something at the very beginning will always be greater than the Something Else it produces. The Something exists on its own. Something Else, however, needs Something to exist. Therefore, Something Else has needs. It is therefore inferior to the original Something, and will always be so, for the Eternal Something has no need of another.

    The Something might be able to produce Something Else that is like It in some ways, but -- no matter what -- Something Else will always be unlike It in other ways.

    The Eternal Something will always be greater with respect to time and power. Thus, the Eternal Something cannot produce an exact equal to Itself. It alone has always existed. It alone can exist eternally independent of another.

    It needs nothing else in order to exist. And It cannot produce an exact equal or another who is greater. Anything that is produced is not eternal.

    Therefore, the Eternal Something cannot produce another Eternal Something. It will always be greater than anything else that exists.

    The Eternal Something is all there is, period. Therefore, the only thing in existence that can change the Eternal Something's aloneness is the Eternal Something Itself. There can be no force outside the Eternal Something because the Eternal Something is all there is.

    Something Else cannot overpower the Eternal Something. In fact, at this stage, Chance does not even exist.

    If Chance is something outside the Eternal Something, then it does not exist unless produced by the Eternal Something. But even if Chance were produced by the Eternal Something, Chance, since it is Something Else, would always be inferior to the Eternal Something.

    So, if Something Else is produced, it is by the power and WILL of the Eternal Something. Something Else can be produced by Chance only if Chance is produced before that Something Else. But Chance itself cannot be produced by chance. It would have to be produced by the will of the Eternal Something.

    The Eternal Something has existed alone eternally. There must be a reason, therefore, within the Eternal Something, for that to change. If Something Else exists, it exists because of the Eternal Something, because the Eternal Something has chosen to end its aloneness.

    If the reason for the Something Else is not within the Eternal Something, then Something Else will never exist. For the Eternal Something, at some point, was all that existed.

    But we know that Something Else exists. Therefore, the Eternal Something must have the ability to decide to use Its power. It must have the ability to choose to produce Something Else outside of Itself. Since it has a will1, the Eternal Something is personal. This means that the Eternal Something is actually an Eternal Someone.

    This Eternal Someone is not controlled by instinct for survival, for It has no needs and cannot cease to exist anyway. Also, the Eternal Someone does not produce by Chance, unless It first produces Chance. Chance is a force that must be produced by the Eternal Something, or it does not exist. Finally, the Eternal Someone is not a machine. There is no other, outside of Itself, to force It or program It to do anything.

    The Eternal Something has no beginning and no end, has no needs that It Itself cannot meet, can do whatever is possible that can be done, and will always be superior to anything It produces.

    The Eternal Something is not a machine, controlled or programmed by any force outside Itself. And the Eternal Something will not produce out of necessity, since It has no needs. Therefore, if It produces Something Else, It must decide to do so. That means that the Eternal Something has a will; thus, and might be personal

    Since the Eternal Someone has no needs that He cannot fulfil on Its own, It can exist without need of any kind of environment, for It existed when there was nothing else but It.

    Its likely then that the Eternal Someone is transcendent. Meaning, He can exist outside of time and space, since He is bound by neither one. He existed eternally, thus being outside of time. And He exists without need of an environment, thus being outside of space and time...

    Recall that anything the Eternal Someone produces will be inferior with regard to time and space. That cannot be avoided in any way. So, even if the

    Someone Else were to the Eternal Someone can exist without any kind of environment. The Someone Else will need an environment to exist in, but what? Think of space like time. The Someone Else exists within the Eternal Someone's timeline. In a similar way, the Someone Else will exist within the Eternal Someone's "space time"

    Therefore, the Eternal Someone must transcend space and time. Thus, just as He is everywhere in time, He can be everywhere in space. So, when the Someone Else is produced, he will exist within the Eternal Someone's time and space.

    So now we've got the Eternal Someone and the Someone Else, but there's a problem. The Someone Else cannot see the Eternal Someone, for the Eternal Someone transcends space. He does not take up a part of space.
    Remember, the Someone Else is produced. Thus, the Someone Else is bound by time and space. Whatever his makeup (nature) is, it will be detectable in time and space. Therefore, all the Eternal Someone has to do is assume whatever form He gives the Someone Else. That is one way to make Himself detectable.
     
  14. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    A lot of slippery language is in the above and in the whole thing. The stuff does what it has to do, such as inflation and having forms of elementary particles able to be stable in that widened space, all that being a change in form, and not really something else, apart, as the essence was already there. The writer wishes to make it a being who has a will.
     
  15. sigurdV Registered Senior Member

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    352
    I admit I did not read everything in the whole out of which I selected the parts above.
    Im sympathetic to the general argument but I object to the idea that something may come out of nothing.
    It just is not logically possible! It was proved several thousand years ago. And has never been refuted.

    Parmenides proof:

    Suppose nothing is,
    then it is so that nothing is,
    but if something is so,
    then nothing is not.

    Alan McDougall says:
    Something that existed at the very beginning must have the ability to produce something other than Itself. For, if It could not, then that Something would be all that exists today. But Something Else exists today. You, for example.

    MrP would object: No! Nothing comes out of nothing! So to produce something (else) out of something then the produced something must be a part of the original something.

    Alan McDougall says:
    To produce Something Else -- out of nothing -- requires an incredible amount of power. So the Something must have great power at its disposal. If it takes us miles and miles of corridor in a super collider and the most energy we can harness, just to produce the tiniest particle, how much power would it take to produce the all the matter and energy in the universe?

    MrP would object:
    All energy there is must have been there from the beginning.
    (Actually he is the discoverer of the first law of thermodynamics!)

    I will not go on examining violations of the first law of thermodynamics...
    I just wish people could stop writing page after page filled with nonsense

    First law of thermodynamics: The change in internal energy of a closed system is equal to sum the heat supplied to the system and the work done on it: ΔU = Q + ΔW
    The first law of thermodynamics asserts the existence of a state variable for a system, the internal energy, and tells how it changes in thermodynamic processes. The law allows a given internal energy of a system to be reached by any combination of heat and work. It is important that internal energy is a variable of state of the system (see Thermodynamic state) whereas heat and work are variables that describe processes or changes of the state of systems.
    The first law observes that the internal energy of an isolated system obeys the principle of conservation of energy,
    which states that energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but cannot be created or destroyed.

    (He was the pioneer so he didnt get the part of "change" correct!)

    Ill let you in on a serious question: It is said that Scientific laws and principles cannot be strictly proven since they rest on the principle of induction...Well then what about the principle of conservation? Did MrP prove it or not!?
     
    Last edited: Jul 14, 2012
  16. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    We are faced with the two paradoxes, From Nothing vs Stuff Forever, one of which has to be correct, so we look deeper into each one. A lack of anything is conceivable, by taking everything away, so we wonder what would be entailed in that situation, while a certain, exact amount of base existent(s) forever has us perplexed, as well, as to it amount and form, plus a past-complete eternity. We'd wouldn't bother to keep on wondering but for the localization that one of them has to give, as the ultimate answer of all, no less, but still the one remaining would still seem a paradox, which means for sure that we are missing something, and it is probably something simple, as complexity builds later on.
     
  17. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    It's time to try to resolve the 'problems' with Stuff Forever, as I will be switching to the favoring of that 'paradox' in order to fully get into it with impetus, but which direction will, as always, be held accountable to logic, reason, and science. The notion begs for more completion. If, as it seems, 'nothing' cannot be productive, or even 'there', so far, in any way that we know, we can provisionally declare that Stuff Forever is true, but we'd like to go beyond that to get into the why and how of it, overcoming any supposed problems. I'll be sleeping on it.

    Any ideas?
     
  18. universaldistress Extravagantly Introverted ... Valued Senior Member

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    1,468
    As far as I can tell there is no conclusive evidence to doubt that our plane is infinite. I recognise that there is room for debate on zoom-in infinity and zoom-out infinity, but still no solid conclusions. Do we doubt that time is infinite?

    We think we believe that life (as in genetic material) doesn't spiral infinitely backwards through time (though we don't know: hint). Though I would suggest that which constitutes the physical most likely has an infinite past of varying or similar states of existence. I would say that it is possible for genetic life on earth to extend its existence forward into the future, any future for itself, infinitely. As in my girlfriend's bump, our second born, has the chance to extend some part of itself into making the foundations of said future.

    I see the children of humen never ceasing to exert their intellect upon matter and life, spiralling into the future, beyond any visible universe or imagination.

    I am working on my paper; it shall be unleashed upon the world soonish.
     
  19. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    For time, which is an interval or a duration, I would use the word ‘eternal’ instead of ‘infinite’, for ‘infinite’ is of the extent of stuff, not how long it has been around.

    I’m convinced about the infinity of stuff not being able to be attained as an actual, since there can always be more, but I need more study into ‘eternity’ to see if that can be so, since it appears that time is more of a secondary thing, maybe. For example, spacetime is said to have been created in the Big Bang. Note that spacetime does not cover stuff.

    I’m in an eternal state of mind and will be tying to prove the Stuff Forever idea here.

    Put the draft here and we can help to complete it or make it better. The credit will still be yours as the originator.
     
  20. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    Indeed. A concrete collection, condition, or process/series that is complete is finite. It doesn't matter if it is vastly larger than googolplex in terms of measurement or membership count. If it is concluded, bounded, limited, fixed, immutable -- in terms of magnitude, spatial or temporal extent -- then that is finite. Infinite as meaning "immeasurable" by humans either because of a constant or intermittent increasing, or because of an unspecified immense size, or referring to an asymptotic-like state of affairs, avoids this contradictory use of people sometimes ascribing "infinite" to what they really believed or intended to be a static value (complete or completed situation).

    When it comes to the nomenclatures of various systems and disciplinary fields... any term, of course, could be purloined from another field, or from ordinary language, and assigned a meaning quite different from the original intent of the source. In those cases, the context of which field of study, branch of knowledge, or "language game" is involved becomes central, potentially changing the above. "Infinity is a recently discovered planet orbiting the star BottaBee-BottaBah." "Infinite refers to the nature of a new class of dynamically evolving, nested patterns of iteration, emerging from a unique set of algorithms developed in 2065." (etc)

    Gauss: "I protest against the use of infinite magnitude as something completed [...] Infinity is merely a way of speaking, the true meaning being a limit which certain ratios approach indefinitely close, while others are permitted to increase without restriction."
     
  21. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    3,028
    Pull up a chair, light up a smoke, get some drinks and snacks or whatever, for this is not a short post, although I may divide it in two or three…

    OK, Stuff Forever… which we might as well call Something Forever, for, if ‘stuff’ is sometimes taken to be formed substance, and that’s not what is meant to have been forever, as substance comes from fields, which may be energy or unstructured substance (if energy is only a measure of work).

    So, at any rate, fields are still something, and we want to see if the something has always been, all on its own, and not because ‘nothing’ cannot be, which may still be a hint, but ‘nothing’ would still have no primacy since it isn’t there, and ‘it’ is a negative, for it is only existence that defines what is there. It would be OK to say that there isn’t anything outside existence, since existence is all there is. It is also conceivable to know that a lack of anything would mean no existence, but that didn’t happen, so we must still look only to existence and how it had to be, which is necessarily ‘forever’ in that it had to have always been the case, as nothing becomes of nothing, causing that notion to be thrown out.


    The universe would seem to be a bubble within nothing, expanding into nothing, but, again, ‘nothing’ is not there, so the universe grows within itself. The universe is still that which changed into its expanded form, and ever reflects its properties, such a symmetry, if that is its necessary nature. Things do not escape from the universe. If I reach my arm out through the edge of the universe, I just create more spacetime by my emanations.

    If the universe came from something else, we’d just have to go on to that, so let us say that we are already discussing the basic something. To avoid creating something out of nothing, it is then a necessity that the basic something has always existed, that is, it is timeless, or eternal in time, and it is the same as the universe, as it only changed its form, although we wonder why and how.

     
  22. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    3,028
    Since the universe is expanding, it cannot be infinite, nor can anything, so it is finite, although unbounded, which is both by its expansion and because spacetime is curved. Technically, it expands into itself, but it is still not surrounded by anything. The universe’s size and location is relative to nothing, whatever than means and implies.

    Only in the expression as the universe from the All of the Something Forever do we have space, time, and the rather enduring amount of finite substance that may even be still growing, as is space, to be classified as finite or infinite (imagine how crowded that would be), but the All is still the All, which means there isn’t any more, so in that respect it is the mostest.


    We live in the finite but unbounded closed universe that constantly changes but is itself eternal, as it is only a change, even if in a dispersed form, and it is all of itself, contained to itself, and not really contained by not having anything outside it, for that is a ‘nothing’ which is not there, although this is still called nonexistence, and it ever cannot do anything, so who cares. Remember, if necessary, we have skipped onwards to that something which is the basis of the universe, in case there were further somethings in-between, such as maybe what gave rise to fields.

    So, so far, for sure, we have the current expression of the basic Something Forever as a finite, 4D spacetime universe, with ‘c’, the finite speed of light, that seems to disallow everything from happening at once; so, we conclude that there must have been a kind of all-at-onceness to the singularity, when in that form, or at least really crowded, but if space came later, wrapped into spacetime, then it’s more than crowded—everything being on top of everything, taking us back to superposition, which is also said to be of the quantum realm.

     
  23. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    3,028
    We’ve identified why the universe must be finite, but we must go on to say why it has that amount of extent, which at first guess I’d say that it was dictated by the point of symmetry breaking, which we’d then have to go to explain, and, also, of course, how existence has to be a necessity, and, as such, eternal.

    The expansion of the universe increases, and even is accelerating, but is this at the expense of energy density getting lower or is the actual extent of stuff increasing its amount? Does anyone know? If stuff is increasing, then ‘creation’ (a change in form) is still ongoing. Whatever the case it’s still one heck of a fuel.


    The prime cause, whatever it is, couldn’t have come from anything, for it is all there is, and must do as it must, heaving no input to direct it, even if ‘what it must do’ is anything and everything possible, within any necessary defaults as to how it it, such as symmetry, perhaps. That it is causeless makes it ‘eternal’ in the sense of always having been there, as it didn’t come from anything else. So, while it is already made, it never had to be made, and was never made. Thus, I wouldn’t expect it to have any certain form picked out of any available varieties, for it could only be the way it is. It had no choice.

    The Something Forever changed, into its expression as the universe, in a very large fashion, causing time to appear, for change is time and time is change. Is it because real somethings cannot remain timeless, balanced, and of perfect symmetry, to the nth degrees, as unlike platonic forms that can? Any ideas?

    Space appeared, too, for there became room for it, or it is that the room is space, its lone physical (if not material) quantity being volume. Or is it that particles and their fields or fields and their particles make up all that we call ‘space’? Any ideas?

     

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