I was going to go for solipsism, then I realised that I made this discussion up.
Well, aren’t you assuming that “nothing” was there “first”? Why?
My opinion? Finally a question that I can answer! (I’m pretty sure I can, at least.)
No, no intelligent being created the universe.
Why? It seems like a convenient solution at first, but it doesn’t hold up. It just seems too far-fetched to imagine a disembodied intelligence with unlimited power to affect the material universe and the ability to break all the laws of physics.
Could I be wrong? Of course I could; I kind of hope that I am.
I’ll go with “concealed premise”… you say “potato”…
Well, Ok, but you also seemed to be assuming that all things are either “natural” or “supernatural”, in which case “natural things cannot be uncreated” is equivalent to “only supernatural things can be uncreated”. If there is a third category, could you give it a name, please? At any rate, you still haven’t said why you think natural things cannot be uncreated.
My assertion was that it is not logically impossible for the universe to be uncreated. I did not assert that there was experimental evidence that supported that possibility. So experimental evidence is not needed to support my assertion. You, OTOH, seem to be asserting that it is logically impossible for the universe to be uncreated. The onus is on you to support that assertion (or tell us that’s not what you were asserting).
Repetition has not made the question any less fuzzy, however. If you aren’t talking about decrease of entropy, what are you talking about? Why do you think it is necessary to establish that “the availability of energy is always steady” in order to establish that an eternal universe is logically possible? You seem to be confusing what is logically possible with what is true.
Let me get this straight: are you saying that a universe arising out of a quantum fluctuation is a supernatural process? What exactly is your definition of “supernatural”?
The answer is NO, because… there is no evidence for it.
Because there is still nothing. Nothing of consequence, anyway. That’s the short version. If you care for more, just ask. But it isn’t anything that you and I haven’t covered before.
[…stunned stare…]
You will recall that the assertion was that they can, an assertion that I challenged by asking for the experimental evidence. I cannot recall any precedent in a debate wherein the person who makes an assertion may defend it by asking his challenger to prove the validity of his skepticism.
Then if you have made an assertion, you must prove it. I’m not going to do your homework for you. You don’t have to start from scratch if you don’t want to. If you buy, say, Quentin Smith’s argument, just let me know, and I will challenge.
Because diminishing availability of energy implies changes in state and is therefore definitively temporal.
Of course. If you analogize the universe to an electron, and declare that it came to be through a quantum tunnel out of nothing (c.f. Vilenkin et al), then you must account for the analogy to the electron’s spontaneous acquisition of energy. From where did the singularity acquire additional energy for its fluctuation?
Of or relating to existence outside the natural world.
[sigh]
OK, let’s play that game, then.
Is this an assertion? In your own words:
Now, about
“Temporal” does not imply “not eternal”. Or do you think that it does? If so, you must prove it. I’m not going to do your homework for you.
Finally
There are so many concealed premises here it’s hard to know where to start. How do you know the singularity acquired additional energy? Why couldn’t it acquire it (if necessary) from a natural process? Is the law of conservation of energy an absolute? If you think so, you must prove it (etc.) (BTW, energy is not conserved in General Relativity, so there is no particular reason it should be conserved at the BB.)
I don’t understand. Why must there be nothing, and then there is something, rather than something always being? I can see no good reason besides our own assumptions. Indeed, if one accepts that “matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed” as a natural law, that argues for the eternal existence of “something”.
Addendum: I guess you are arguing that matter is meaningless vapor, therefore its “coming into being” is still of no matter. But, I beleive in this discussion we are arguing about the origin of this “meaningless” matter.
I’m not sure why you think either the true “something” or the “meaningless matter” must be created by a being, rather than eternal.
It is an axiomatic assertion derived from the definitions of natural and supernatural. Axiomatic assertions need not be proved. When you say that a tone is middle C because the string producing it vibrates 440 times per second, you need not prove that the tone is middle C. It is middle C by definition.
I’m not sure you understand the nature of logical proof. Again, we’re talking definitions here. From dictionary.com, definitions 1 and 3 of “temporal”: “of, relating to, or limited by time” and “lasting only for a time; not eternal”.
It is your assertion that there was a quantum fluctuation. In known fluctuations, an electron spontaneously acquires the additional energy for the short period of time required for it to tunnel through some barrier. There is no reason to believe that this energy comes from “outside the universe”, which in fact is a phrase that is nonsense in physics. And now you maintain that the first state of the universe itself was a state of tunneling. Unless the process was remarkably different from the process of ordinary tunneling, you must offer at least a plausible source of energy. But not one that is supernatural. And if it was different somehow, then you must explain the mechanics of how it worked.
Because it is a singularity. It is an infinitely dense point, line, or plane, and there is nothing outside it to acquire energy from. All that is natural and potentially natural is contained within it.
That depends on what you mean by conservation (and I cannot imagine what that might be), and whether you use a pseudo-tensor in your equation. I presume you’re talking about the inability to extend the integral form of the Special Relativity equation into the curved space of General Relativity. But the fact that the differential form of the equation extends between the two ought to be a clue. Please see the paper by Michael Weiss and John Baez at the University of California’s physics FAQ, where a sufficient proof is available.
Oh, I see, Gaudere. You and I have discussed my views on the triviality of the universe[sup]1[/sup] so many times that I just wrongly assumed that that was where you were going.
Please see my discussion with FriendRob for details about the problems inherent in any spontaneous formation of the universe from a singularity. The basic problem with respect to your specific question is that if the universe were eternal, there is no natural reason that it would not still be a singularity, unless FriendRob can point us to a source of energy for its fluctuation.
As to the business about a “being”, I have not introduced that notion into this discussion. Once it has been determined that a mechanism of origin cannot be found either logically or experimentally within the confines of its own framework, we move then into the realm of much broader philosophy than just science.
[sup]1[/sup] Just making sure that we recall that, while the material — the atoms and whatnot — itself is trivial, the moral context that it supplies is not.
This discussion seems to be hijacking the OP, so I have started a thread to continue it
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=110608
I would like to add here that any discussion of the “creation” of the universe implies a process, a before when there was nothing, followed by and after when there was something. But this notion implies a time dimension in which this process is occurring. We know that time is a characteristic of our universe, so any discussion about “before the Big Bang” is meaningless unless one can talk about atemporal causation (or atemporal physics).
But (so far as we can tell) uncaused events happen all the time at the quantum level. It seems more reasonable than not to assume that one would happen at some point.
But those “uncaused” events happen within — within — the universe, and are uncaused simply because they are probabilistically nondeterminable, or as Q. Smith puts it, “in principle unpredictable”. What is on the table is a request for the assertor to supply even just a reasonable natural source of energy that might have been acquired by the singularity when it tunneled into existence.
Again quoting Smith:
Emphasis mine.
I am challenging the assertion simply by asking where the additional — additional — energy came from when the singularity tunneled into its first state at 10^-43 seconds. But now the whole line of questioning appears to have tunneled into another thread.
So? We have evidence that uncaused events happen, so why assume they can’t happen to a singularity? And I don’t think that “uncaused” simply means “in principle unpredictable”, except in that they cannot be predicted because they have no cause.
Your quote says that electrons spontaneously acquire additional energy, but it doesn’t make it clear that the energy must be coming “from” somewhere; if that is what you think they are saying, can you find a quote that says it explicitely? Electrons also emit photons with no apparent cause; even if tunnelling cannot happen without an outside source of energy to boost the electron, do you have evidence that this emmission cannot happen without the influx of energy from somewhere? I have not heard that it is neccesary.
In researching your questions, I came across a reference to your much earlier question about vacuum. From The California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics Questions and Answers:
I’ve spent several hours now on research. It is difficult to find anything worded in such a way that, were I you, I would sit back and say, “Okay, I agree with you now.”
However, I did find some things of interest that I believe do imply that the energy does in fact “come from” somewhere. One of them is in this text from the Physical World, The Restless universe, where the authors say
The definition of “transfer” as a noun is the “conveyance or removal of something from one place, person, or thing to another”. But I do realize that, particularly given your renowned and ingenious creativity, there is considerable room there to wiggle.
It is possible that the energy in fact comes from the ZPF (Zero Point Field), which makes for fascinating reading if you wish to peruse some of the articles at the CIPA. But this certainly does not help FriendRob’s case, since the ZPF is not outside the universe.
One thing that I learned over the past several hours is that there is much disagreement among physicists, not just about cosmology, but about quantum mechanics and whether the ZPF is in fact “real” energy. The most popular interpretation of QM is called Copenhagen, but it is by no means the only one. And in fact, many scientists object now to the whole notion of the universe originating from a singularity.
According to an article at New Scientist, Strings and Singularities:
I would like to make it clear that I am not arguing a “first cause” origin of the universe, which is why I don’t appreciate the debate being turned around as though I were. I believe that I have asked reasonable questions, along the lines of questions that you yourself ask when people make assertions. I think it is only fair that FriendRob defend his.
Because I believe that the universe is created by God, I cannot be required to offer a materialist mechanism by which it occured. He does not enjoy that sanctuary. Unfortunate, perhaps, but that is just the nature of the thing. A simple “I don’t know” would suffice. But I cannot abide that I am some sort of heretic for questioning how the singularity (or its fuzzy quantum cousin) acquired the additional energy necessary for its alleged fluctuation.
I wanted to be sure that I didn’t leave you with any misunderstanding. I don’t think you’re being unfair with your questions, either, Gaudere. What took so long to respond, and the reason that I had to research so much, was not there were sources corroborating your opinion, leaving me to keep on searching for sources that corroborated mine. I believe it’s just that the concept of acquisition so inherently implies transfer that nobody hardly ever brings it up. In other words, were I to turn it around to you and ask for a source that says it explicitly doesn’t come from anywhere, you’d be searching for a while yourself unless you have a handy link. In all my searching, I found absolutely nothing that said it doesn’t come from anywhere.
I thought this discussion moved to the other thread. Is nobody reading that one? I typed all that crap for nothing? 
Anyway, the short answer I think is that Lib is asking for details that no one has the answer for at present. You can’t assume that all the laws that apply on a macro scale are the same at the quantum level. Quantum uncertainty and “fuzziness” is not simply a gap in our understanding; it is a world where probability is not just some statistical approximation, but in fact the way the quantum world works. Scientsists can derive an infinite number of quantum theories and no one knows which one is correct.
That jibes with my research, Rsa. But if nothing else, it is good to see philosophy’s bastard child becoming robust once again. There are lots of good papers and discussions out there on this stuff.
Fascinating stuff, isn’t it?
Omnibus ex nihil ducendis sufficit unum.
(For producing everything out of nothing one principle is enough.)