Does time exist as we understand it? Is the "Big Bang" hypothesis wrong? James Webb Telescope is upsetting many held beliefs.

[autism-and-autotune]

But, only experiencing it as sentience beings makes it a reality.

I like thinking about this. In university, my last essay ever was one on Zeno's Arrow, where gave notions that time only 'exists' to us because we know how to keep track of it. Granted, does time still actually exist anyways even if we aren't there to count the seconds?

 

[tazz]

For me the world was made by God, because it does not make sense that rocks and dust start one day to assemble themselves and end up as organisms and later art intelligence consciousness etc

Sure it makes sense. You just have to study hard and become an expert in physics first. It makes sense to the experts, not to amateurs like me.

 

[tazz]

very simple physics tells me that you can't get a big bang out of nothing

Ah, but what does the more complicated physics tell us...

Lawrence Krauss Explains How You Get ‘A Universe From Nothing’

In 2009, Richard Dawkins invited Lawrence Krauss, an internationally-known theoretical physicist and author of The Physics of Star Trek, to talk about some big enchilada questions. What is our current picture of the universe? When did the universe begin? What came before it?

www.openculture.com

At around 38 minutes he explains the way some people much smarter than myself measured the shape of the universe and concluded:

"The universe ... has zero total energy and it could have begun from nothing."

"Why is there something rather than nothing? The answer is: because there had to be. If you have nothing in quantum mechanics you'll always get something."

 

[Wolfnox]

I like thinking about this. In university, my last essay ever was one on Zeno's Arrow, where gave notions that time only 'exists' to us because we know how to keep track of it. Granted, does time still actually exist anyways even if we aren't there to count the seconds?

Not to “us” .

 

[Boogs]

The problem with Krauss's idea is that it seems based on the idea of 'empty' space constantly spawning and destroying particle's, I believe. But we have no conception of what the universe came from, so we can't know that what ever it is would support the same physics that our universe runs on?

 

[tazz]

If that's the only problem with Krauss idea then he's not doing too bad...

But seriously, I think he's putting that forward as an idea that might explain where the universe came from. Quantum physics suggests this might be a useful area to explore further.

If it turns out that there's some other state before our physics came into being, then I guess all bets are off and we start re-thinking a lot of things. But so far there's nothing to suggest that we need anything other than the physics we already know about.

 

[Boogs]

This is pretty tough stuff to make much of without the maths to go along with it (to differentiate what may be interesting, entertaining, maybe even correct! and/or almost certainly fantasy) which I have little ability or aptitude to do, but for me, once you try to go to that crucial step before (in this case) the big bang, you can make absolutely no assumptions whatsoever with any hope of being able to actually judge their relevancy and usefulness. I recall someone in the thread saying something along the lines that we indeed have plenty of evidence to be able to say we can be certain of some things, but every one of those 'facts' rests on top of an assumption. To make the assumption that an assumption can be treated as empirical evidence is misleading in my opinion. What we've had to do is assume that until the weight of current evidence in favour of something is proven wrong, we have no choice but to work on the basis it could be correct (correct in the scope of it's properties as related to the inspection of the matter in hand), and the longer that evidence grows and continues to agree with previous cases, the more we treat it as 'fact', but to not continue to always be wary, and question, and never forget the difference, will lead to mistakes as it's human nature to stop considering possibilities when we decide (rightly or wrongly) we 'know' what we are dealing with, but science is the based around the disproving of things to further itself, not the proving of things - a fundamental, and sometimes subtle difference?
I in fact enjoyed listening to Krauss and found the material interesting, entertaining and thought provoking, but this attempt to explain the unknown on the basis of something else that 'seems' like it should be the same, but actually has no known frame of reference we can apply in any way at all other than in our varied imaginations, and ultimately it's an anthropic view, based on our evolved perceptions, and the environment and scale that we operate in - reality sadly gets little look in here!
like using the supernatural to explain anything otherwise unknown, it's a unproductive explanation, because it only raises the question of what/where/how did that supernatural entity come about to be able to effect the actions being examined and questioned?

 

[tazz]

It kinda works both ways. We shouldn't mistake assumptions as fact. But we also shouldn't underestimate the mountain of knowledge that we have built.

Experiments at the LHC for example, have given us a pretty good understanding of what kind of physics was in play something like a trillionth of a second after the big bang. That still doesn't mean we can know what happened before that. But maybe it's not such a big leap to start building models based on that understanding. Only those at the forefront of this research can really make that judgement - not some very interested but largely clueless amateur such as myself.

 

[Boogs]

Regards big bang stuff, I think the issue with trying to go that extra step back to just before it happened, is that, as with a black holes event horizon, a barrier beyond which we can only conjecture, but never have the confidence that the large collection of current evolved knowledge gives us with our own universe. It would seem only reasonable to assume that our known rules of physics could very well be emergent property of only our universe, and have little or no relation to what ever it came from (if it's even relevant to say it did "come from" something (in any way we could understand or intuit)).

But, that said, to avoid thinking about it because of this would be not only a real shame (and frankly, boring), but also to admit defeat when we know nothing of whether we will ever find out, plus, human brains (actually many types of brains) are evolved for curiosity, because they are simulation/prediction engines that work better the more relevant data they have to work on (think AI learning systems?), and hence the one's that have worked best (in survival terms) are those that have had the strongest impetus to collect data to make knowledge and extend the quality of pattern matching. Until the data has been assimilated to some degree, it's worth can't always be ascertained, so a brain that's driven to search out as much as it can find is likely to have some advantages over others.

And as for "very interested but largely clueless amateur", being a "very interested and partially clueless amateur" myself, I think it's a fine interest to have (for me it started at around 4 y.o. as trying to learn what this world around me was about, since people weren't any help, and I discovered my first "junior minor" science book), but I also think, that the very specialised scientists who work in these fields, have had to acquire a great deal of prior accumulated knowledge, and maybe at least for some, this can sometimes have a blinkering effect, too much wood to see the tree's? And sometimes it's a wild thought, not based on math and science, but some spark inside that comes from a unique mind with special abilities, but often not the traditional one's the typical world knows and values. Think about Albert for example, and his thought experiment on seeing the window cleaner, and imagining him falling from high up the building, and considering his frame of reference in a way no-one else had up to then (that we (or I) know of). From that (ok, I'm fantasizing a bit here, but ...) he managed to put these thoughts into an ordered idea and was able to put the maths together to start to change it from a thought experiment to a (mathematical) proof. At least that's how I envisioned it happened, but right or wrong, it must have been along those lines. So why should your ideas not also have the potential to be right, just because you may not be able to, for example, run the math required to prove it?

Of course, it's the testability that is the making of a theory, I imagine, but that's got to come from somewhere. Why should your acorns not have at least some small chance to be oak tree's? And in the end, science has always progressed the most by disproving old incorrect ideas, allowing new ones to appear that tend to be closer and closer to what seems to be the reality of our universe. So this must mean lots of very clever very respected scientists and engineers et al have made huge mistakes (from our hindsight), yet these have lead to some fundamental steps forward, with the proof of the pudding being what we've been able to do with science (for better and worse).