[quote=“wysinwyg, post:45, topic:31833”]
Inoring the fact that there isn’t just once theory called “the Multiverse” (there’s several different theories which involve a multiverse) I’m pretty sure none of those are actually mutually exclusive to the big bang theory.[/quote]
The funny thing about the multiverse theories: they (as far as I know) have no real theoretical or mathematical basis, and are pretty much untestable. I know that Brian Greene wrote a book about this subject, and from what I recall, the theories were all of the type “well, it might work like this” or “look at it this way.” Nothing in relativity or quantum mechanics predicts or requires multiple universes (except maybe the anthropic principle, which seems iffy to me anyways).
So, what separates multiverse theories from creationism? You have to take both on faith. Both attempt to explain why we are here and how everything came to be, and both are just about as testable.
Just because you can ask a question doesn’t mean it has a meaningful answer. In the case of the universe, the fact that you can ask “What existed before the universe?” doesn’t mean that the question has an answer or means anything. Why is a cup of tea?
In Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” one of the possibilities discussed is that spacetime is a closed N-dimensional surface — analogous to that circle, but with more dimensions. (About 11 in total, if string theory/M-theory turns out to be right.)
Astronomers occasionally speak of magnetic fields, but only in goofy terms not used in any other discipline, such as “magnetic reconnection”, “frozen fields”, and other nonsense. They flatly deny that electricity or magnetism have any effects except in equipment specifically designed to use them. Even when forced to admit to electric effects, such as the northern lights, they speak of a “wind” instead of an electric current.
Davies has his whole career tied up in the block universe view that time did not exist prior to the Big Bang, so no surprise here that he fails to mention Lee Smolin’s views at all.
No such thing as space + no such thing as time != “coming into being from nothing”.
The key problem with the phrase “coming into being from nothing” is the word “from”. Beyond that, looking at what we know of the data means we don’t really have a good idea of what the point of beginning was like, precisely, much less have a way of putting it into verbal words instead of mathematical description.
The religious “perspective” is completely irrelevant to the problem, as usual, because any religious objection levied, so far, to scientific conceptions of the Big Bang can be turned on the origin event of any creator god. And most defenses of an eternal god outside the universe can be restated in scientific terms to defend a non-deist origin. The multiverse is one instance.
“Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, “I’d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream.” The waitress replies, "I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?”
Since, in order to have an effect there must be a cause, or for there to be an event, there must be a precipitating event. And it’s just common sense to think of the Big Bang as some kind of an event. So my thought is that what we are calling “The Universe” is actually a more local phenonemon. Then, what is needed is an outside frame of reference. Therefore the universe is SO BIG that big bangs are common events within it, spread apart from each other by billions of years, and they give rise to a local collection of trillions of galaxies that eventually impinge on other localverses, causing new big bangs.
Seriously, I don’t know where you learned about astronomy from – though comments like “wind” being something opposed to a “current”* suggest one very unreliable source – but it hasn’t given you a good picture. Even the most cursory search of literature shows magneticfieldsdiscussedalot, with far more importance allowed than you credit.
* For those who wonder about this, ask yourself: Do you know off the top of your head whether the flow from the sun is a net positive or negative current? Do you know whether it’s a net positive or negative flow of mass? So which feature was the obvious one to name it after?
Quantum mechanics, though, does require a universe which is either multiple or non-deterministic. There isn’t any observable reason to prefer one or the other, only philosophical ones, but each option is as untestable as the other.
Thanks for the in depth explanation. Every time I think I’m starting to get my head around it, something like this comes up and mocks me for my foolishness.
I’m surprised that no version of a Simulated Reality hypothesis has been mentioned yet in this thread. What if our reality is a “simulation” of sorts, with its own laws of physics, but was created or came into being within another universe, with it’s own set of physical laws – laws which may be very different than our own universe’s. It strikes me that universes coming into being within other universes is a possible way of explaining how the universe could have come from nothing. It’s like booting up a computer.
Now, as to why there is something rather than nothing, in the “first place?” Perhaps for no better reason than it is not logically possible for no thing to exist…
Doesn’t bother me much, frankly – I’m pretty much a believer in panpsychism/hylopathism, and that my mind, and yours, and all consciousness, is really THE consciousness, and that the universe/multiverse is actually a product of consciousness, and not the other way around.
I know, right? I was trying and trying to remember that guy’s name, and all I could come up with was Anders Brievik. I know, I’m a sick bastard. Where the hell is he?
Does infinite regression really work logically? It sounds a lot like the way the Terminator movies account for the invention of the T800 technology. ie not very well
Did you not read the article, or not understand the article?
I’m being a bit snippy because Davies explains his answer to “what came before the Big Bang” several times, from different angles, and really makes it quite clear. Certainly you may not agree with his answer, but I genuinely don’t see how anyone above, say, a 6th-grade reading level could fail to understand it, and it’s pretty depressing that your completely vacuous misinterpretation has somehow gotten five likes already.
For years I’ve struggled with the idea of no time before the Big Bang, insisted to myself and even here on BB (and elsewhere) that there must be some sort of meta-time that goes to infinity backwards, but that’s equally offensive. Truly I wanna grasp the concept from as many approaches as possible.
Chewing the cud and tweaking the phrasing like this helps. So does this from the article, I’ll paraphrase instead of copy-pasting,
If you go to the North Pole, you run out of North, there is no more North to point to.
But wait! There’s more!
…there were no events to connect.
There was no space for events to take place? Am I getting the hang of it?
This isn’t a criticism of the theory, but it is incredibly hard to wrap my brain around a lot of this. A lot of the explanations like the expanding balloon seem almost misleading because the dots on a balloon are expanding in three dimensions - it’s only if you were thinking in fewer dimensions that you would be confused. This is the way I’d always thought about God too (when I believed in him): talking about him in terms of time and space (how old is God? What caused him? Where is he?) is like an ant walking along a clothes line asking what point a person is located on that line. The question doesn’t make any sense because the ant is moving in one dimension and the human in three. Like the balloon, we are basically thinking in too few dimensions to understand how God works.
When it comes to the universe, it’s incredibly difficult for me to comprehend the idea that there was nothing before the universe, nothing caused it and it’s expanding into nothing. Not even dimensional space, but literally nothing. In that sense, as someone commented earlier, my mind can accept quantum fluctuations now, but not ‘before’ the universe when there was nothing to fluctuate and no time to do it in. You can’t stand ‘outside the balloon’ and see that it is a small part of reality, because that’s all there is (unless you go for some kind of multiverse). I do recognize that I am limited by basically just thinking in terms of the dimensions that I have access to, but it doesn’t seem to help so much with the ‘something from nothing’ problem in my own mind.
