Quick: how many Morgans does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: None.
The light bulb was working just fine. Problem is: Danny keeps changing a perfectly good light bulb. Every time I screw it back in, he unscrews it.
Take the following gem:
At 9:20 AM, May 10, 2006, Daniel Morgan said...
“I'm going to post something on cosmology soon. People seem to think that all the energy/matter in the universe had to be created, especially ex nihilo, when the Law of Conservation states the contrary, as does "something from nothing" logic. Of course, Christians have no problem assigning eternity to their God, but don't realize that time itself is a feature of the Big Bang, but that the energy/mass/matter of the Big Bang existed prior to the expansion (matter as we know it today resulted from the cooling, but the singularity was emphatically NOT mass/energy-less).
Oh, dear, where do we begin?
i) Let’s spell it out one more time for Danny, and let’s go real slow.
Creation ex nihilo does not contradict the law of conservation, for creation ex nihilo assumes that there was nothing in existence (excepting God) prior to creation. That’s what makes it creation ex nihilo, Danny.
If nothing except for God existed before he made the world, then there would be no law of conservation, since there would be no nature, no natural forces, no natural laws, nothing for a law of conservation to work with.
Now Danny denies the operating premise. He thinks there was something around before the big bang. He apparently believes in some sort of oscillating universe.
That, however, doesn’t mean that creation ex nihilo contradicts the law of conservation. Rather, it means that Danny has one operating assumption, and creation ex nihilo has another.
Poor Danny can never wrap his furry little brain around the opposing thesis. He constantly blends his own position with the opposing position by imputing an assumption to the opposing position which the opposing position denies, then accuses the opposing position of inconsistency between the conclusion and the premise, even though the premise is his own premise, and not the contrary premise of the opposing position.
Given preexistent mass/energy, then, by definition, creation ex nihilo is false, but in that event, what creation ex nihilo contradicts is not the law of conservation, but the given.
When a disputant is this incurably dense, there’s nothing you can say to make him see the light, but you can point out his error for the benefit of other readers.
ii) Incidentally, creation ex nihilo doesn’t mean that something comes from nothing, as if it just pops into being all by itself. There was already an existent or Being: God.
This is something else that Danny continually misses.
iii) The idea that time began with the origin of the world has been around since the days of Augustine. The problem is not with what Christians understand, but with Danny’s perennial ignorance of historical theology.
iv) In the same vein, Danny doesn’t know what is meant by assigning eternality to God. It doesn’t mean assigning endless duration to God. Rather, it means that God is timeless. Hence, there was never a time when God did not exist.
As usual, Danny is utterly clueless about the opposing thesis. Ever single step he takes is a misstep, piling one faulty assumption atop another.
v) But there are even more problems. He says that “that time itself is a feature of the Big Bang,” but he goes on to say “that the energy/mass/matter of the Big Bang existed prior to the expansion.”
But if time began with the big bang, then there’s no timeline which he can retroject into the singularity; hence, his appeal to temporal priority is nonsense.
So much for his oscillating universe, which assumes a relative timeframe of expansion and contraction.
vi) How does Danny happen to know what the laws of physics were before the big bang? Wouldn’t’ the big bang erase any trace evidence of the “preexisting” universe?
vii) Likewise, why assume an alternative universe must be governed by the same laws and constants of nature?
vii) Needless to say, the oscillating universe is not the only cosmological theory on the market. It’s just the theory du jour.
I suppose Loftus will complain that I’m being disrespectful. He’s right. Respect is earned. If and when Danny can cobble together an intellectually respectable argument, I’ll treat it with respect.
The dim bulb replied to the tune of casting more pearls here.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of dim bulbs, anybody at Triablogue want to write a note regarding this post?
ReplyDeletehttp://socrates58.blogspot.com/2006/05/biblical-evidence-for-priests.html
But there are even more problems. He says that “that time itself is a feature of the Big Bang,” but he goes on to say “that the energy/mass/matter of the Big Bang existed prior to the expansion.”
ReplyDeleteBut if time began with the big bang, then there’s no timeline which he can retroject into the singularity; hence, his appeal to temporal priority is nonsense.
So much for his oscillating universe, which assumes a relative timeframe of expansion and contraction.
If only you could get off so easily:
just published article on calculating a "bounce" rather than a singularity from the GR equations --
Quantum Nature of the Big Bang
Perhaps I should clarify my point with a simple reference -- the Naked Singularity provides a way to give people an understanding of how event A can be causal to effect B without being prior temporally within B's spatio-temporal framework. If indeed every black hole is a naked singularity, we cannot deny that the space-time fabric no longer applies there. Let our universe be A and the new singularity B.
-The events that gave rise to B happened within the spatio-temporal framework of A.
-The fate of B is sealed: nothing within A can "undo" the singularity
-What occurs within B is completely unknown and unknowable from outside the event horizon, but there is no reason to suppose that B cannot undergo a transformation (independent of further causation from A) in which B expands again and produces its own, A-independent space-time.
-If anything happens within B, observers in B cannot "see" A, and can only go back to their own origin : the singularity itself. Is it proper, though, for an observer inside of B to deny the existence of a causal A? Yes and no. They cannot "see" A, yet it is clear that something did not come from nothing.
This is at the heart of the new oscillating universe modeling, and is quite mathematically and philosophically robust, compared to erstwhile models: check out the layman's guide to the new cyclic universe via Steinhardt
He even has an FAQ page over on the right. It's a rather exciting field in its philosophical consequences, although the math is painful and quantum gravity may still be a decade or more away. THey just put up the space instrument a couple of years ago to detect gravitons, 40 years after its initial planning began. We'll wait and see, but I'll put my money on science to produce a GUT before the end of my life. The uncertainty of science doesn't bother me. Unlike yourself, I need no [quasi] claims to absolutism to sustain me. I love data, and interpretations of data change, and new data comes in all the time.
How does Danny happen to know what the laws of physics were before the big bang? Wouldn’t’ the big bang erase any trace evidence of the “preexisting” universe?
We don't know. In fact, that is why it is called a "singularity". The better question to ask is -- can the laws of physics we have now have originated in an event which itself canno be described by the laws of physics? If the answer is "yes", then we're done with science if the singularity is factual and historically correct. We can't go back any further. However, most people have no reason to suppose the answer is "yes", and, using mathematics and findings unavailable in Einstein's day, have seen the distinct possibility that the "singularity" may be an artefact of inadequate modeling. GR equations are insufficient, IOW. We have to have quantum gravity.
Until then, we have to use the known physics from this universe to extrapolate to how the universe arose. From there, speculating about the physics of other universes is indeed abstract and unscientific, which leads to your next point:
vii) Likewise, why assume an alternative universe must be governed by the same laws and constants of nature?
Great question! In fact, there is no reason to suppose that at all! Which, nicely, slices the Anthropic principle to pieces. If one single configuration of the constants gives rise to a universe which itself harbors life, and there are a huge number of other universes produced which do not harbor life, some of which capable of producing more black holes and singularities and "seeded universes", or not, the AP is defeated.
Of course, erstwhile models supposed a huge number of cycles of this one universe, something still unable to be scientifically disproven for the very reason you bring up -- the 2LoT, often invoked to falsify "steady state" universes, is "reset" with each singularity -- we cannot know what happens to "state functions" like the laws of thermodynamics through a singularity, and there is no reason to suppose they carry their net value through, versus becoming "0" again on the other side. The other observation intended to quash the steady-state is that our universe is expanding. A question is -- are the distant galaxies accelerating towards black holes which are, themselves, the seeds of new universes?
Either way, multiverse or single universe, with a cycle, with constants that do or do not change, then the whole anthropic principle is defeated.
This field is quite interesting on a variety of levels. Some are scientific, some "just" philosophical, but all give us pause for thought to consider the nearly endless possibilities of the origin and fate of our universe (and others). That's why I have wonder and awe of nature, while refusing to inject "God" into my own ignorance of what happened, as "God" explains nothing and gives me no more understanding or knowledge. "Poof" doesn't tell me a darn thing.
Excuse me, I should make it clear:
ReplyDelete"naked singularities" do NOT have an event horizon, thus the term "naked"
Sorry about that. The logic applies to generalized gravitational singularities, though whether they produce an event horizon or not, and Hawking quite recently talked about much of the uncertainty regarding whether or not information inside a black hole was "lost forever" (if B could still communicate with A via radiation):
" My work with Hartle showed the radiation could be thought of as tunnelling out from inside the black hole. It was therefore not unreasonable to suppose that it could carry information out of the black hole. This explains how a black hole can form, and then give out the information about what is inside it, while remaining topologically trivial. There is no baby universe branching off, as I once thought. The information remains firmly in our universe. I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass-energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognisable state.
There is a problem describing what happens, because strictly speaking the only observables in quantum gravity are the values of the field at infinity. One cannot define the field at some point in the middle, because there is quantum uncertainty in where the measurement is done."
Keep in mind, though, that Hawking only recently solved this problem, and it is by no means a settled issue, particularly the idea that B will either exist eternally as a classical black hole or whether it is a "baby universe", as he said.
Sci-fi, almost, indeed. But the holes are real, we can observe their effects, and current quantum gravity work will probably do a complete overhaul of everything people have done thus far (modifying it for the better, of course). Maybe your God will pop out of the new GR equations ;) Maybe God is quantum uncertainty...If so, I'll be a reconvert when we break through the Planck lenght :)