Thread: God??.....Particle?

^sad little man!

Originally Posted by Norton

Originally Posted by Begbie

Nortons wishful thinking I'm afraid.

Which bit is wishful thinking?

Originally Posted by Begbie

Humans or at least this human are too thick to understand this type of science.

This human too. I certainly don't understand the physics behind the movement of planets but accept it most likely the earth orbits the sun rather than the once common knowledge the earth was the center of the universe.

Pretty ignorant regarding the science of evolution as well but unlike the creationist that stick with the idea man was created in a day and woman with one of his ribs, somehow the idea humans evolved over millions of years seems more plausible.

Agreed but then there is still that little 'chicken versus the egg' conundrum.. There still had to be some 'creative power' at work that first sparked the entire process yes? I don't know? I'm not particularly religious but these are questions that are inexplicable at the moment and I'm not willing just to take them on faith..

Especially given that as we evolve so does our education and understanding of our universe and how it evolved and I think these are the points that are going to be the most contentious for the more extreme followers of all religions to accept..Just as more people swing towards evolutionary theory and away from creationism..

Originally Posted by Driventowin

Agreed but then there is still that little 'chicken versus the egg' conundrum.. There still had to be some 'creative power' at work that first sparked the entire process yes?

And this is the crux of the argument for the "faithful". No matter how great the collective knowledge, the believers always have the option of stating the "effect" was "caused" by god.

Originally Posted by Driventowin

most contentious for the more extreme followers of all religions to accept

The extremist have always existed even in the face of all logical knowledge. Extremists even today represent a small minority of mainstream religious believers and other than their ability to garner a lot of media attention, their beliefs are rejected by the vast majority of adherents to a particular religion. Hence they a labeled cults or sects by the mainstream.

What Happened Before the Big Bang?
Paul Davies

Well, what did happen before the big bang?
Few schoolchildren have failed to frustrate their parents with questions of this sort. It often starts with puzzlement over whether space "goes on forever," or where humans came from, or how the planet Earth formed. In the end, the line of questioning always seems to get back to the ultimate origin of things: the big bang. "But what caused that?"


Children grow up with an intuitive sense of cause and effect. Events in the physical world aren't supposed to "just happen." Something makes them happen. Even when the rabbit appears convincingly from the hat, trickery is suspected. So could the entire universe simply pop into existence, magically, for no actual reason at all?

This simple, schoolchild query has exercised the intellects of generations of philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Many have avoided it as an impenetrable mystery. Others have tried to define it away. Most have got themselves into an awful tangle just thinking about it.
The problem, at rock bottom, is this: If nothing happens without a cause, then something must have caused the universe to appear. But then we are faced with the inevitable question of what caused that something. And so on in an infinite regress. Some people simply proclaim that God created the universe, but children always want to know who created God, and that line of questioning gets uncomfortably difficult.

One evasive tactic is to claim that the universe didn't have a beginning, that it has existed for all eternity. Unfortunately, there are many scientific reasons why this obvious idea is unsound. For starters, given an infinite amount of time, anything that can happen will already have happened, for if a physical process is likely to occur with a certain nonzero probability-however small-then given an infinite amount of time the process must occur, with probability one. By now, the universe should have reached some sort of final state in which all possible physical processes have run their course. Furthermore, you don't explain the existence of the universe by asserting that it has always existed. That is rather like saying that nobody wrote the Bible: it was. just copied from earlier versions. Quite apart from all this, there is very good evidence that the universe did come into existence in a big bang, about fifteen billion years ago. The effects of that primeval explosion are clearly detectable today-in the fact that the universe is still expanding, and is filled with an afterglow of radiant heat.

So we are faced with the problem of what happened beforehand to trigger the big bang. Journalists love to taunt scientists with this question when they complain about the money being spent on science. Actually, the answer (in my opinion) was spotted a long time ago, by one Augustine of Hippo, a Christian saint who lived in the fifth century. In those days before science, cosmology was a branch of theology, and the taunt came not from journalists, but from pagans: "What was God doing before he made the universe?" they asked. "Busy creating Hell for the likes of you!" was the standard reply.

But Augustine was more subtle. The world, he claimed, was made "not in time, but simultaneously with time." In other words, the origin of the universe-what we now call the big bang-was not simply the sudden appearance of matter in an eternally preexisting void, but the coming into being of time itself. Time began with the cosmic origin. There was no "before," no endless ocean of time for a god, or a physical process, to wear itself out in infinite preparation.

Remarkably, modern science has arrived at more or less the same conclusion as Augustine, based on what we now know about the nature of space, time, and gravitation. It was Albert Einstein who taught us that time and space are not merely an immutable arena in which the great cosmic drama is acted out, but are part of the cast-part of the physical universe. As physical entities, time and space can change- suffer distortions-as a result of gravitational processes. Gravitational theory predicts that under the extreme conditions that prevailed in the early universe, space and time may have been so distorted that there existed a boundary, or "singularity," at which the distortion of space-time was infinite, and therefore through which space and time cannot have continued. Thus, physics predicts that time was indeed bounded in the past as Augustine claimed. It did not stretch back for all eternity.

If the big bang was the beginning of time itself, then any discussion about what happened before the big bang, or what caused it-in the usual sense of physical causation-is simply meaningless. Unfortunately, many children, and adults, too, regard this answer as disingenuous. There must be more to it than that, they object.

Indeed there is. After all, why should time suddenly "switch on"? What explanation can be given for such a singular event? Until recently, it seemed that any explanation of the initial "singularity" that marked the origin of time would have to lie beyond the scope of science. However, it all depends on what is meant by "explanation." As I remarked, all children have a good idea of the notion of cause and effect, and usually an explanation of an event entails finding something that caused it. It turns out, however, that there are physical events which do not have well-defined causes in the manner of the everyday world. These events belong to a weird branch of scientific inquiry called quantum physics.

Mostly, quantum events occur at the atomic level; we don't experience them in daily life. On the scale of atoms and molecules, the usual commonsense rules of cause and effect are suspended. The rule of law is replaced by a sort of anarchy or chaos, and things happen spontaneously-for no particular reason. Particles of matter may simply pop into existence without warning, and then equally abruptly disappear again. Or a particle in one place may suddenly materialize in another place, or reverse its direction of motion. Again, these are real effects occurring on an atomic scale, and they can be demonstrated experimentally.

A typical quantum process is the decay of a radioactive nucleus. If you ask why a given nucleus decayed at one particular moment rather than some other, there is no answer. The event "just happened" at that moment, that's all. You cannot predict these occurrences. All you can do is give the probability-there is a fifty-fifty chance that a given nucleus will decay in, say, one hour. This uncertainty is not simply a result of our ignorance of all the little forces and influences that try to make the nucleus decay; it is inherent in nature itself, a basic part of quantum reality.

The lesson of quantum physics is this: Something that "just happens" need not actually violate the laws of physics. The abrupt and uncaused appearance of something can occur within the scope of scientific law, once quantum laws have been taken into account. Nature apparently has the capacity for genuine spontaneity.
It is, of course, a big step from the spontaneous and uncaused appearance of a subatomic particle-something that is routinely observed in particle accelerators-to the spontaneous and uncaused appearance of the universe. But the loophole is there. If, as astronomers believe, the primeval universe was compressed to a very small size, then quantum effects must have once been important on a cosmic scale. Even if we don't have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific. In short, it need not have been a supernatural event.

Inevitably, scientists will not be content to leave it at that. We would like to flesh out the details of this profound concept. There is even a subject devoted to it, called quantum cosmology. Two famous quantum cosmologists, James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, came up with a clever idea that goes back to Einstein. Einstein not only found that space and time are part of the physical universe; he also found that they are linked in a very intimate way. In fact, space on its own and time on its own are no longer properly valid concepts. Instead, we must deal with a unified "space-time" continuum. Space has three dimensions, and time has one, so space-time is a four-dimensional continuum.

In spite of the space-time linkage, however, space is space and time is time under almost all circumstances. Whatever space-time distortions gravitation may produce, they never turn space into time or time into space. An exception arises, though, when quantum effects are taken into account. That all-important intrinsic uncertainty that afflicts quantum systems can be applied to space-time, too. In this case, the uncertainty can, under special circumstances, affect the identities of space and time. For a very, very brief duration, it is possible for time and space to merge in identity, for time to become, so to speak, spacelike-just another dimension of space.

The spatialization of time is not something abrupt; it is a continuous process. Viewed in reverse as the temporalization of (one dimension of) space, it implies that time can emerge out of space in a continuous process. (By continuous, I mean that the timelike quality of a dimension, as opposed to its spacelike quality, is not an all-or-nothing affair; there are shades in between. This vague statement can be made quite precise mathematically.)

The essence of the Hartle-Hawking idea is that the big bang was not the abrupt switching on of time at some singular first moment, but the emergence of time from space in an ultrarapid but nevertheless continuous manner. On a human time scale, the big bang was very much a sudden, explosive origin of space, time, and matter. But look very, very closely at that first tiny fraction of a second and you find that there was no precise and sudden beginning at all. So here we have a theory of the origin of the universe that seems to say two contradictory things: First, time did not always exist; and second, there was no first moment of time. Such are the oddities of quantum physics.

Even with these further details thrown in, many people feel cheated. They want to ask why these weird things happened, why there is a universe, and why this universe. Perhaps science cannot answer such questions. Science is good at telling us how, but not so good on the why. Maybe there isn't a why. To wonder why is very human, but perhaps there is no answer in human terms to such deep questions of existence. Or perhaps there is, but we are looking at the problem in the wrong way.

Well, I didn't promise to provide the answers to life, the universe, and everything, but I have at least given a plausible answer to the question I started out with: What happened before the big bang?
The answer is: Nothing.

PAUL DAVIES is a theoretical physicist and professor of natural philosophy at the University of Adelaide. He has published over one hundred research papers in the fields of cosmology, gravitation, and quantum field theory, with particular emphasis on black holes and the origin of the universe. He is also interested in the nature of time, high-energy particle physics, the foundations of quantum mechanics, and the theory of complex systems. He runs a research group in quantum gravity which is currently investigating superstrings, cosmic strings, higher-dimensional black holes, and quantum cosmology. Davies is well known as an author, broadcaster, and public lecturer. He has written over twenty books, ranging from specialist textbooks to popular books for the general public. Among his better-known works are God and the New Physics; Superforce; The Cosmic Blueprint; and The Mind God. His most recent books are The Last Three Minutes and It's About Time. He was described by the Washington Times as "the best science writer on either side of the Atlantic." He likes to focus on the deep questions of existence, such as how the universe came into existence and how it will end, the nature of human consciousness, the possibility of time travel, the relationship between physics and biology, the status of the laws of physics, and the interface of science and religion.
What Happened Before the Big Bang? : Paul Davies

Originally Posted by DrB0b

What happened before the big bang? The answer is: Nothing.

Sounds like the Buddhists are onto some greater truth.

Originally Posted by Norton

Originally Posted by DrB0b

What happened before the big bang? The answer is: Nothing.

Sounds like the Buddhists are onto some greater truth.

Possibly. I've certainly got a lot more respect for them than I have for the crew who believe the whole thing comes down to a bearded guy in a white dress

Originally Posted by Driventowin

Are you religious Stroller?? Have you any religious enlightenment to call upon??

Yes, why?

Originally Posted by Driventowin

You seem to be very naive as you only mention 2 very small religions that have completely diverse views from many 'mainstream' religions as if they determine the course of mankind's history..

You must be lacking basic comprehension as well as reasoning skills to assume I only know of 2 religions, just because I happen to mention them as examples in one of my posts - both major world religions, btw.

Originally Posted by Driventowin

Everyone here realizes that most religions prophesied for the end of days eventually?? Right? Is it then beyond the realm of possibility to consider that this might be the catalyst for the predicted rapture?

"Most religions" - "Rapture"??? And everybody here realises this?
And an experiment concerning a force which lends mass, i.e. gravity to particles may bring this about here and now?

Have a rest and a rethink, you're getting carried away.

I've been trying to read "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene for the last year, just made it to the chapter on string theory. My brain isn't large enough so I have certain admiration and envy of Dr Bob, who he seems to have a much better understanding of these theories.

Actually the Christians love this Higgs field thing because it appears to show a break down of cause and effect. Therefore they can come in with there creator thing. If you google for it there are lots of quasi scientific sites banging on (pun intended) about this being science finally proving the existence of a creator and therefore the hand of god.

For a Buddhist all things ultimately are mere illusions in the void even cause and effect.

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Do you think he'll accept illusory money?

The money needs to be real. The huge penis is illusionary. Also, be careful what you ask for. Wish for a penis that drags on the ground and you may end up with 2 inch legs.

Originally Posted by Norton

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Do you think he'll accept illusory money?

The huge penis is illusionary.

Isn't it always

two-inch legs ...

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Isn't it always

not with mine, with bargirls always complaining that I am too big

Originally Posted by Butterfly

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Isn't it always

not with mine, with bargirls always complaining that I am too big

I didn't know you went with girls, learn something new every day

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Originally Posted by Jardine

For a Buddhist all things ultimately are mere illusions in the void even cause and effect.

Can you give me a lucky number for next month's lottery? Also as a good Buddhist I gave 20,000 Baht to the Por Luang at my local temple to make my penis bigger, however it's still miniscule, he says I've been cursed by a witch and need to give him 100,000 baht for a Guman Thong. Do you think he'll accept illusory money?

I'll do it for 50,000 although I won't use a thong they chafe too much.
Illusory money is acceptable pm me for my bank details.

Nothing to see here.... carry on....