J. B. S. Haldane
Hardly observable or reproducible since it apparently happened 13.7 billion years ago.
It exists only within mathematics.
Awesome. Thanks. 
Either theories make predictions that are consistent with observable, reproducible evidence or they are discarded. Yes, mathematics is part of that.
The language of science is mathematics. It can vaguely be translated into words, but only at the cost of almost total loss of precision and understanding. If you want to say anything - anything - about science, you must - must - use mathematics.
Most of these conceptions of universe formation stem directly from papers in journals expressing the consequences of, yes, mathematical formulations. They may or may not be shown correct in the future, but either way the responses will be written solely in the language of science, i.e. math. Words will have no effect one way or the other.
One could argue that mathematics is the only tool we have to bridge the gap to “queerer than we can think”. Most modern physics is already weirder than human brains are geared to cope with - but a solid mathematical description provides us with tools that allow us to manipulate the weirdness. Sometimes the mathematics says something outrageously weird. So outrageous that it takes some time to work out what the heck is going on, and what it means in any testable sense. Famous things like predicting the existence of the positron, or frame dragging. The former doesn’t seem a big leap now, but the latter - still almost impossible to get one’s head around what it means in a human world view. When we manipulate the weirdness with these tools, we can probe the nature of it. Even if sometimes we are closer to the blind men with an elephant.
We can currently observe the universe back to when it was within 380,000 years of the big bang at the time when the universe became transparent to photons. IOW, we can see over 99.999% of the history of the universe.
Quite. Indeed, I’ve often argued that’s what mathematics is; a toolkit of ways to “push information around”. And in the process sometimes derive non-obvious information from obvious information. But from a “God’s eye view”, no new information is created.
This is why I think it’s a red herring to talk about whether maths is discovered or invented; it’s a set of ways of augmenting our own thinking process, which works because it is self-consistent and built on the basic rules of logic, and the universe, so far, appears to be logical and self-consistent*.
- Phenomena like superposition aren’t the same thing as self-inconsistency.
</slight hijack>
Apparently, I’m wrong and blood63 is right. Since no scientists were around to see the creation, science can say nothing about it.
The adorable factor in believing the 77th version of a book full of fictional stories as absolute truth and using it to back up a claim that you desperately want to be true makes hello kitty look gangster.
I’m hardly a creationist and do not want to be dumped in which that group. That’s a bit insulting and narrow minded.
I fully appreciate and accept everything that has been written. This thread has gone off the rails and I haven’t helped keep it on track.
I should have mentioned that I accept that something happened 13.7 billion years ago. I know a bit about the science. I know that’s this number has been derived by several independent methods (how many, I don’t know).
What I am struggling with is the creation of all matter and energy from a quantum fluctuation that happened before space was created. Is it right there in the math? If so, have an infinite number of failed universes been formed? What are the chances of us answering these questions?
No, it isn’t right there in the math. That is my complaint. There is no math for this. What there is is existing math for an incomplete understanding of the current state of the universe. Although incomplete, this existing math does a very fine job of just about everything we can see or measure. So we do feel happy that it contains some very solid core ideas. But we also know that we have for all useful intents zero knowledge of the origin of the universe - or indeed if the idea itself even makes sense. But we can take those core ideas and existing math and use them to reverse back our understanding of the very early universe. And that seems to work pretty well too - and yield some surprising and yet apparently consistent results - ie inflation. So it isn’t too big a leap for someone to ask if there isn’t some way to take at least some of those core ideas - even if there is no longer any actual mathematics that works in the situation, to think about the genesis of the universe. Since quantum fluctuations are sort of one of the underpinning parts of how the universe in its current form operates, it isn’t a huge leap to wonder if this particular core idea might he used to explain the notion of a moment of genesis, and cross the boundary of time before time, existence before existence. You will see that happen for just about every idea you might read about for a theory of the universe. The brane guys mumble about intersecting branes (although arguably they are on much thinner ice - their theories are not mainstream or complete) and so on. It is all good fun. But no - this is almost hammer-nail logic, but thus far there is no actual science or real mathematics.
The chances we can answer the question is not good IMHO. Even a breakthrough insight that does cover the genesis in some manner will almost certainly simply open up a new set of even harder questions. No matter what, you end up asking the fundamental question - why is there anything?
My understanding is that that’s one possibility, but not a certainty.
True, but part of the way physics works is that people come up with possible explanations to what we can observe. Those explanations aren’t in any way true, it’s just something we made up that sounds good. But if we are specific enough about the explanation, then we might be able to come up with a way to verify if it is true via observation. Of course, many of those results will be null results, because the idea was wrong to begin with. Many explanations won’t suggest something that can be tested (or can’t be tested with today’s technology). One of them might seem to prove true and will become the accepted theory for decades or centuries until we encounter a data point that proves it all wrong. The theory was incorrect, but happened to fit the data to a tight enough tolerance to fool us for a while. Or maybe we won’t encounter a data point that throws everything into a spin. Is the idea correct? Maybe. Maybe we just haven’t happened upon data to disprove it.
Ultimately, minus an all-knowing, all-powerful god who can explain everything to us, we’ll never know. With an all-knowing, all-powerful god, we could never be certain that what he tells us is the truth, since he could always change our observations of reality to conform to his statements. So we’re pretty well out of luck on ever knowing anything for sure, whether you’re pro-science or anti-science. But, it’s more useful to have theories that conform to observations than not, for things like building starships, GPS, and computers and stuff. The better a working model of the Universe that we have, the better we can harness the materials around us.