Religous debates and questions [2]

  

my idea of a nightmare job would be having to network and schmooze to get on. Having to entertain, dinner parties and room full of potential clients you have to impress, that kind of thing. I would just stand in a corner munching on the canapes trying not to make a complete dick of myself. I quite envy self confident chatty people, but I wouldnt want to be one, my bullshit detector has a hair trigger. I am also quite a good judge of character due to years of bitter experience, I just couldnt fake it.

I am not a schmoozer either. I don't have to deal with clients or anything like that... meetings are nearly always internal, a few with third party vendors (technology vendors mainly).

I like to think I am self confident, I am just not an extrovert.

I'm in a position where my bosses are always making great glowing statements about what our group is doing. It drives me crazy because it's overblown and false, yet by this mummery they pull in the money that pays me, so I just have to choke it back and not say anything.

But I didn't come here to complain about my bosses. I was missing Hillbilly. Where'd he go? I was kinda hankering for a dose of his sly sense of humor.

My guess is Hillbilly is amassing a witty and thorough response to my piece on Jesus, or failing that is leading a religous revolution to give all Americans the right to a semi automatic machine gun whilst still in the womb, for national security reasons (only true Americans will be born armed).

yeah where is Hillbilly?   

Hopefully he's just busy and will come back here when he has more free time.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:But there has to be a starting point surely?
Before the universe there apparently wasnt any space or time, so presumably no space for waves to be in, and no time for them to do anything.
And now waves and particles everywhere.
So what comes first? Are they first in wave form or particle? What do you start out with when the universe began?

Bored, digging back through, found this.

I'm no expert on the beginnings of the universe, but I'm not sure it's fair to ask if something is either a particle or a wave back then. These things are both particles and waves, we just haven't completely grasped how to see both at the same time. I think when the universe was a small point there won't be as much of a distinction between the two.

I cant get my head round this. If there is nothing how can something just appear, it doesnt matter if it was wave or particle, they are both something. How can something come from nothing? If theres no time, no space, literally nothing, where did the first wave or particle come from? did it leak through from another universe? and how small is small?

Good question.    I wouldn't wait too long expecting an answer.   


The only thing we know for sure is things are flying apart now, which means they must have been closer together then. And the fact that the relative amounts of hydrogen and helium conforms to the amounts you'd expect if protons and neutrons were condensing out of a hot soup of quarks leads us to be pretty sure there was a hot soup of quarks, which means things sure as hell weren't anywhere close to the conditions we have now with happy little atoms just zooming around an bouncing off each other. We also have background radiation that when compressed down to the density needed to make a hot soup indicates the soup was properly hot.

Where this hot soup came from is not a question we can do a whole lot about - it goes beyond currently well-demonstrated physics. Right now we have people coming up with unverifiable theories that all have different explanations, but I'm sure if you google 'origins of the universe' what you'll read will make as much sense to you as to me. I may have a better sense for what's meant by quantum fluctuations and black holes, both of which you'll see in possible theories, but not a whole lot else will make sense to me.

Mrs Figg wrote:I cant get my head round this. If there is nothing how can something just appear, it doesnt matter if it was wave or particle, they are both something. How can something come from nothing? If theres no time, no space, literally nothing, where did the first wave or particle come from? did it leak through from another universe? and how small is small?

Halfy's explanation is good but I'm guessing it probably doesn't clarify much, so let me take a shot at this one.

It's not that something comes from nothing, it's that something as we know it comes from nothing we can yet imagine.  

Imagine if we were all made of water and had never in our lives seen steam or ice. That's how little we know about what we're made of, about time and space and matter and all that stuff.

I am wary of such explanations myself, they smack of "Its tortoises all the way down" syndrome.

but I think David puts it just right: we just don't know yet.

Figgy is right to be concerned that something can come from nothing, but there are many levels of nothing. You walk into an empty room and say "nothing's here", but of course that's not right at all, from the air to the radiation streaming in through the windows.

But I know that in seeming nothing there are weeny invisible molecules in the room, but before the universe began nothing had been made, maybe it was Dark Matter forever and then something from another universe found its way in and said hello Boom! big bang. maybe Dark Matter is just the Nothing left over from before the BB.
I Always thought there were unbreakable laws like the speed of light, so if there are major holes in out knowledge maybe these laws are up for grabs too.

There is no such thing as "before" the universe, because "before" is a statement of time and time does not and cannot exist without the universe (defined as the entire space-time continuum). So the universe has always existed.

but before the BB the universe didnt exist. so its before when the BB happened it started time/space, but there must have been before.

The concept of time cannot exist without the universe, so we cannot speak of there being such a thing as "before" without the universe.

Basically I'm questioning whether there had to be a cause for the Big Bang at all.  Obviously I don't know (nor does anyone else, though there are plenty of far more knowledgeable people than me on this topic). But when the entire universe is smaller than atom I think our normal conception of how things work is going to inevitably break down.

This subject is the ultimate mind-fuck. I go crazy just thinking about it   

I know that whatever was there before the BB didnt have time, but there was a moment before the universe existed, and I dont have adequate means of describing it in human Language without using the word before. Humans need stuff like before, after, up, down, without it we are in lalaland

Ringdrotten wrote:This subject is the ultimate mind-fuck. I go crazy just thinking about it   

Same here.

Mrs Figg wrote:I know that whatever was there before the BB didnt have time, but there was a moment before the universe existed

Was there?

What David is saying is our own conception of space and time may not be the most fundamental thing. It's just the fabric we can currently see and visualize; so there may very well have been something before the big bang, we just don't have the conceptual basis to to think about it.

You've got to be careful with words like "before".  If it's something we've measuring in years, days, hours, minutes and seconds, then Eldo's right. That set of measurements is totally locked into the universe as we know it.

But if we are careful to just talk about causes and effects, where causes are things that come before effects, then we can go farther back. Intuitively we see a big bang as an effect, and all our experience says there had to have been a cause that preceded it. I think that's what Mrs Figg is wrestling with: the question of what caused it all.

Back to the water analogy. Think about what it was like to watch a raindrop form from a cloud before anybody had developed a theory of water molecules. Or watching ice freeze on a puddle on a cold night.  It appeared to materialize out of nothing.
It was many thousands of years before there was chemistry and physics to explain condensation and crystalization, and I'm sure many people went crazy pondering it.  

That's where we're at with the big bang at this point in human history. We can see the raindrop,  we're really starting to get good at describing how it behaves while it's liquid.  But we've just got no clue as to where the raindrop came from or where the ice comes from.

(Personally I think it's got something to do with turtles. )

I dunno, I don't think that "the universe has never not existed and thus has no cause" is any more unbelievable than, say, "God did it".  After all, the religious explanation only forestalls the first cause problem, it doesn't solve it.

The universe has not in it's entirer history not existed.

I think I shared the song earlier, but this video might be more interesting.

"God is a concept by which we measure our pain."

It's an interesting thought.