I didn’t care for Hawking’s book. Can people cite something else more substantive than that 90-page book that was stretched into 200?
It’s like we’re arguing about European society using a Let’s Go! travel guide as the source.
What are you asking to see a cite for?
Well, for you, how about this:
[QUOTE=Diogenes]
All of those virtual particles create their own very limited spacetime. In fact, they are spacetime. Most of these particles (which can be analogized as “bubbles” in a “quantum foam” come and go in an instant (figuratively speaking) with (really as) tiny little spacetimes. Some of the bubbles blow up and expand into universes, with their own expanding spacetimes.
[/quote]
Would his paper of Populating the Landscape: A Top Down Approach from 2006 count? It seems to follow Hawking’s basic premise that given a string based framework a universe can spontaneously arise. Mind you I’ve only skimmed the paper.
I had to go look up this piece of idiocy, because I didn’t believe the quote was right.
Never read a grant proposal, have you? Never read the Future Work section of a paper? Science actually never says it knows anything. It does say here is our best guess for many things, and here is the evidence for that guess. In grant proposals it says here is what we think, and here is how we’re going to find out if we’re right - or rather, here is how we’re going to find out if we are not wrong.
BTW, coverage of M theory in The Grand Design seemed very superficial. Greene does it a lot better, but the difficulty of the writing is a lot higher.
As for space and time, consider this - how do you define space in a universe with only one particle?
And therefore unworthy of serious consideration.
Depends. Do you think there is nothing outside of a western scientific rational construct?
What does that question even mean?
Yes, there are irrational, emotional, and superstition based constructs. I prefer science.
OK. Hope that works out for you.
Hope the superstitions work out for you.
So far, yes, it makes me happy and seems the simplest explanation. Give me a call when you find that dark matter stuff, OK?
An always-existing sentient being isn’t the simplest answer.
It’s actually NOT the simplest explanation. Magic not only add superfluous complexity, it’s not even really an explanation. It just regresses the question.
Science simply takes the question back step by step. It adds layer and layer of complexity to make its sums add up. As the proposed solution of big questions gets more complex, it gets less likely. A belief in the super-natural cuts through all that.
“God.”
“Ah ha! and who created God?”
“Nobody, He exists outside of time, another of His creations.”
“But!”
Congratulations on successfully arguing against yourself.
Seeing as how I’m communicating with you almost instantaneously over thousands of miles, have been treated by doctors to cure maladies that would have killed someone a hundred years ago, and have had the opportunity to travel throughout the world at near the speed of sound on planes weighing nearly a million pounds, I’d say it’s working pretty well. Wouldn’t you?
Pfft, that’s not science. That’s just… technology.
Which is a simpler answer to the question “How does a four-stroke internal combusion engine work?”:
or
At the risk of going off on another tangent, there is something outside of Aristotelian logic - is that what you mean?
Aristotle’s framing of most things centered around something being true or not true, black or not black, an apple or not an apple, etc.
The clear problem is that it excludes the gray areas - the ‘sort ofs.’
I don’t see how that contains an argument for god or gods, though.