What is containing the universe?

Great Debates
101

Since it’s your basic premise, it’s a pretty fatal fault.

Quantum events can occur randomly, without specific cause for the individual event. The nuclei of radioactive elements decay randomly in the sense that, while it can predicted that a certain number of nuclei will decay within a fixed period of time, there is absolutely no way to determine when any individual nucleus will decay - it could be in the next microsecond, it could be in a million years. There is no characteristic of an individual nucleus that “causes” it to decay at one time, rather than another. With respect to the individual nucleus, there is no cause.

An enormous number of observations and experiments over the past 70 years have shown that events at the quantum level do not follow conventional notions of causality.

As I said previously, if we are using different systems of epistemology to determine the truth of propositions, then there is little point in us having a debate about them. If I rely on observations of reality the way it actually is, and you rely on ideas about the way it should be, we’re not going to reach a common ground.

I’m not sure what you mean by “reason.” Quantum fluctuations are a consequence of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Quantum theory (as I understand it) says that quantum fluctuations are random. There is not necessarily any difference between a location that experiences a fluctuation, and one that does not.
[html]This article](http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mark_vuletic/vacuum.) gives some useful references.

102

This article gives some useful references.

Link fixed.

103

This may possibly be a stupid question, but… ultimately, if there is no space and no time (i.e. “before the big bang”) why do people believe that there is nevertheless quantum mechanics? That is, what reason would I have to believe that there was such a thing as the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle when there was no space or time in which things could be uncertain, and in fact no a priori reason to even assume quantum mechanics?

104

As I said before, it’s not really feasible to debate someone with a different system of epistemology. You just end up talking past one another. If you actually have system at all, it would be completely impossible. Since you state here that you are an atheist, while making statements elsewhere in this post that imply you are not, my guess is that you’ll be pretty difficult to pin down.

Don’t misquote me to make a point.

Again you misquote me. What I said was: "Once you guys are able to demonstrate the existence of “god” [not “first cause”] based on physical evidence and mathematical analysis to the same degree of rigor that physicists have used to characterize conditions near the time of the Big Bang . . . "

I didn’t ask you to proove a first cause. You are the one equating first cause with god. If you wish to demonstrate the existence of “god” the same way at any time after the Big Bang, that would be fine too.

I, personally, don’t “automatically” reject this. However, I am a Scientist (and again we are dealing with the problem of different epistemological systems here). This proposition is untestable, and hence not susceptible to scientific examination. My own opinion is that this is inconsistent with Occam’s Razor. But Occam’s Razor, as I’ve said before, is a guideline, not a proof of anything.

105

Make that “If you actually have no system at all,”

106

Nice try, Lib, but no go. Here you are quoting my partial rephrasing of my own original statement, rather than the original statement itself. Admittedly it was careless of me not to include every significant phrase of the original statement in my restatement. But such are the perils of GD.

I quote my original statement here:

Bolding mine.

Note I originally said “physical evidence and mathematical analysis” (and should have included the same phrase in my restatement - my error). Does your “proof” happen to be based on some physical data?

Your “proof” merely demonstrates that logical rules can be used to “prove” almost anything, if you use arbitrary definitions to start with. As far as I can see, your “proof” can equally well be used to demonstrate the existence of the Perfect Glass of Beer.

107

Here’s one way to look at it:

Let’s define ‘the universe’ to mean everything that can interact with us and everything that we interact with.

If something is ‘outside’ the universe, we can conclude that we can’t interact with it at all.

It follows that there is no difference between that something ‘existing’ or ‘not existing’: there are never any consequences implied by the first case that aren’t implied by the second, and vice versa, from our point of view.

Whatever lies beyond the universe isn’t real to us in any way.

108

And isn’t this the stumbling block of all “what causes it” answers?

That is to say, infinite regress. If someone comes up with an answer as to what “causes gravity” the next question is, “Well, what causes that?” and so on. That is where many people come up with God which is just an unsupported, arbitrary assertion that is no better, although it might be more comforting to some, than any other such assertion.

As another poster earlier said, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

I guess I’m with David Hume that in order for a “cause” to be meaningful to me, explanations somehow have to be tied to something that is demonstrable by experience. Not necessarily my direct experience, but somebody’s.

109

Yes, of course. I merely wish to point out that science is no freer of this issue than religion (and arguably is worse, since religions doesn’t really rely on causality, and science does).

110

I wouldn’t say that science is “worse off” than religions because the two subjects have different ends. Science, I think, is the study of how the universe works while religion is attempt to explain why the universe works the way it does.

Scientists are satisfied if a theory answers the “how” question, allows prediction of future events based on the theory, and is fruitful of further investigation. Those who insist on a “why” answer for their personal comfort aren’t satisfied with that.

111

Though this is really a hijack, postulating “God” as a first cause doesn’t really help. What “caused” “God?” It is no more difficult to imagine that the universe has “always” existed than it is to imagine that “God.” has.

112

Ok, I’ve given Google a hammering with searches on ‘what causes quantum fluctuations’ and incredibly, I found none that address it directly, and give it adequate attention.

So I have searched and browsed through almost a dozen websites on quantum fluctuations in general, including the one you linked to, and either they refuse to address ‘why’ they occur, or implied theories (based on a lot of guesswork) as to why they might occur. None of them actually flat out said that there is no cause to their occurence.

So, I’m going to throw the onus over to you, to show me some credible cites claiming there is genuinely absolutely no cause to a quantum fluctuation. Not no known cause, but no cause at all.

113

Please respect Truth and the others by taking your argument to the other thread as I have done. I’ll address your comment there.

114

Quantum mechanics is a tricky subject.

According to some interpretations of quantum mechanics, quantum events are truly ‘random’ in the sense that there is no reason why anyk particular outcome occurs. The laws of chance give the probabilities of an event, nothing more.

This interpretation is hotly debated, and there are rival interpretations.

If we choose to use this viewpoint, then there is no cause of quantum fluctuations at all. They simply occur.

115

That is, you would like me to prove a negative? Heck, I can’t prove there is no Santa Claus, either.

All I can say is that physicists have tried intensively to identify some cause for such fluctuations, and other probabilistic quantum phenomena such as radioactive decay, for many decades without the least success. The reason you can’t find information on “What causes quantum fluctuations?” is because nobody knows - and many feel that it may not be possible ever to know. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says, in essence, that it is impossible even theoretically to obtain complete information about events at the quantum level.

Einstein himself hated the thought that the Universe, at its most basic level, was probabilistic rather than deterministic. But despite his best efforts, he could never demonstrate that this was true. (Einstein famously remarked with regard to this, “God does not play dice with the Universe!” To which Neils Bohr is supposed to have replied, “Who are you to tell God what to do?”)

I think humans in general are much more comfortable believing in a deterministic world, and physicists are no different. I think they would very much prefer to find some determinism beyond quantum theory - the old Newtonian cause-and-effect was much easier to deal with. But quantum theory, bizarre and illogical as it is to the human mind, has been enormously effective in explaining observations at the sub-atomic level.

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of the players, (ie everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
– “Good Omens” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

116

Yes, of course. All very true. I suppose my point was as usual inadequately explained. What I mean is that religion doesn’t really ask “how,” (so doesn’t require an explanation) any more than science requires an explanation of why; both questions are outside the purview of the respective systems. But “why” questions are far easier to deal with because you can’t tell if your answer is right or not. Fundamentally, religion can accept “God was always there” because it needn’t even admit the “how” question of how God was created (instead, it has “why was God always there,” which of course is much easier to answer). Science can’t accept “what caused the Big Bang, or its cause, or its cause’s cause” as readily, even though it at least sounds like a scientific question, simply because “how” questions inherently have some assumption of cause and effect implicit in them. In my opinion, science can’t address the issue of first cause at all; religion can, but of course can’t do so in what most people would call a satisfactory manner.

117

Wow, there’s a lot of ignorance floating around in this thread. I myself have a lot of ignorance to share, I think. Part of the reason I got interested in astrophysics in the first place was because I thought in terms of these cosmic quandries. I swear, every third grader thinks he or she is a big shot because she or he asked the question
“why?” enough to come to the eventual flustered, “just because, now eat your vegetables!” comment by some authority figure.

Let’s talk about what we do know.

[0] Okay, you get a prequel. This is a fact I thought to add after I had made my list. The observable universe is the set of all things that are observable. This does not mean that other things do not exist. They are basically “elsewhere”… akin to the “elsewhere” that surrounds our past and future light cones, but more profound in that they are observably elsewhere and not causally elsewhere. This begs the perennial question, if the tree falls in the forest… indeed, it has not yet been satisfied in my mind.

[1] the observable universe is expanding

[2] yesterday the observable universe was smaller than it is today

[3] it appears that tomorrow the universe will be even larger.

[4] it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way

[5] but we look at space and we see it to be that way

[6] in the past the universe was also expanding

[7] in fact, it appears that the universe was actually expanding more slowly in the past than it is today. For some reason, the expansion of the universe is on an accelerating trend.

[8] we can look back in time by looking out into space

[9] we find a ubiquitous and nearly uniform background of highly red-shifted photons that is not pigeon droppings (those of you who have read enough will know what I’m talking about)

[10] this background indicates that there was a time the entire universe was became transparent and was oddly uniform. This is weird because if you hold your arms out and up at the sky you are pointing to two places that back then were out of causal contact with each other, thus the uniformity seems beguiling until…

[11] Guth came up with inflation and others refined it, which implies

[12] at some point the universe expanded ridiculously quickly allowing for all but a small, causally-in-contact part to be thrown past our own event horizon to provide for the uniformity of the CMB

[13] before this period we really have little knowledge of what went on.

[14] this is what accelerators are used to probe since the universe was more compact and therefore of higher energy density. (support your local acclerator!)

[15] but even so, we extrapolate back to a singularity

[16] which is not an atom

[17] but may be called the cosmic egg

[18] as it not only contained all space but also all time

[19] and when I say all time I mean all time

[20] because you could start on a journey from that singularity on the Monday when God created the heavens and the Earth,(that’s the anthropomorphic God, the mystical and physical heavens, and the metaphorical Earth) and by the end of the week, when the Old Man got tired of working so hard, end up at one of two places: an event horizon to cross, or within an empty heat-death universe devoid of all things except for thyself.

[21] so really that is what we have to go on.

Those are my 21 thoughts of cosmological profundity. They are actually rather dull things. Speculation is really all that’s left. The best answer for the question “what caused the Big Bang” is “we don’t know.” Scientific types tend to get their underwear all tied-up in knots over some maverick unscientific “fool” who dares to question, “but what happened before?” when they really shouldn’t. Yes, they are a silly fool to not realize that time had its inception at the point of origin for the Big Bang, but we are a fool if we feign to think we have grasped what that concept really means. To have an origin for time is certainly a provocative solution to the Field Equations, but it is not very descriptive of the primal state of the universe. When the sum total of everything observable is at the same place in time and space, there is no way to truly explain how things can be that way or how they got to be that way. Just because we can theorize the state of the universe at t=0 does not mean we have any sort of authority on being able to speak about the causal form of said state. After all, our laws of physics break down not much before inflation (well, really AT inflation), and we ourselves can’t say very well how time behaves before that epoch. In order to do so, right now it appears we’ve got to get a marriage of GR and QM, two people pretty much unattracted to each other as pop-diva Madonna and the pope. Nevertheless, cosmologists, string theorists, and particle physicists will continue their attempts to force them into bed at the same time.

So, why not let these third graders ask their “whys”? You are certainly entitled to give them your “because”. The real answer to the question is, after all, “we don’t know, but someday might have a better idea.” If you’d have told somebody in the 19th century my 21 points, they’d have nearly laughed you out of the room. Nevertheless, we continue to probe, to look, to observe, and to the best of our accumulated knowledge on this puny, puny planet we call Earth, we have described the way the universe is.

A popular spokesperson for the astronomical community was talking to me in April about a call-in talk show he was on with a fellow spokesperson, and they were asked the inevitable biggee that this thread is all about. “We don’t know…” he dutifully replied, “Blah, blah, time began, blah, blah, primal cause, blah, blah, support your local cosmologist and maybe one day we’ll have a better answer.” The other astronomer in retort said, “I don’t know why we just can’t say that God caused it.”

Immediately “fring-flags” went up for my friend, the more orthodox of the two spokespersons, about the other guy with the faith in the God-cause. Why? Well, because whenever God is invoked, astronomers think about Galileo. In the back of every scientist’s mind is the thought that maybe tomorrow it will all be figured out, and we’ll have a primal cause that will be theoretically satisfying. The last thing that we need, then, is some reactionary religion breathing down our necks telling us that our theory is hogwash because, well, because it doesn’t take into account God. I will be frank because this is Great Debates. God is not in science because God is not quantifiable. All phenomena attributed to God are phenomena we cannot measure, otherwise we’d have demonstrated scientifically the existence of God. God is an aesthetic appeal, not a scientific one. To put God in control of the primal cause is just as presumptuous as putting the anthropic principle in charge of the primal cause. They are both appealing to our minds, but they are just ring-around-the-rosy for intellects and nothing of substance. The real substance is in the statement that, “we just don’t know.” Okay, end of sermonizing on God.

When you get your wacko cosmologist aside and ask them about these origin questions, they are likely to thrash about like a cornered animal. Some of them will roll over and play dead. The more adverturesome, though, will eventually be tamed and may begin to speculate. If you are ever fortunate enough to get into such an exercise, I think you’ll find that it’s somewhat akin to mutual masturbation. Both of you will think its great, but you won’t be making any miracles.

I have gotten into these conversations (sometimes against my will), and to be honest, there’s plenty of nutty speculation that could very well be true. We could be in an infinite spread of universae (or however you want to pluralize this truly singular world) that simply expand themselves out of causal contact, experience wierd GR-QM fluctuations that end up sprouting Big Bangs who eventually sprout, by the anthropic principle, a place that can exist long enough to gain consciousness. Eh, that’s too wishy-washy for others. Maybe the universe was self-created in a time loop that curved back around on itself. In effect, it acts as a worm-hole of negative mass (yes, you need negative masses for worm holes) that meets itself in causal contact with its origin. Spinning around back on itself, it eventually meets an assymptote where it can suddenly expand out of the broken record phase into a more productive being that’s ultimately. A productive being it seems that is ironically doomed by the cosmological constant dark energy. Maybe Schopenhauer was on the ball. Perhaps our universe should have remained in the tight loop and never ventured out to try to gain consciousness.

Then another cosmologist will take me aside and explain all this nonsense is just that, nonsense, and that turtles all the way down is just as good a reason, as far as he or she is concerned, that what we need to do is push ever on-wards, but we’ve found so many bizarre things in science, what makes us think we could ever imagine what we might discover?

In short, “just because! Now eat your vegetables!”

118

Did you ever notice how perfectly everything fills up the space it would leave if it weren’t there?

119

It seems to me like you are reiterating that the reality is we don’t know what causes quantum fluctuations, where as earlier you seemed to be implying (as per my interpretation) that there was no cause. While we will all agree that we don’t know what causes them, are we also going to agree that there is still an unknown cause?

120

**
Hah! The “nearly” is where all the fun is right now. As so often happens in science, you think you have a nice neat little theory that explains everything. There are a couple of numbers that are a tiny bit off, but that’s probably just a measurement error. . . . except it’s not! As measurements get more sensitive, the “minor inconsistency” eventually grows into an insurmountable mountain which completely crushes your theory and sends you back to the drawing board.

I’m willing to bet that fifty years from now, our understanding of the universe and its origins will be dramatically different than what they are today.

BTW, I’ve been waiting for someone to ask about the constant turtle references. Is this joke really that famous?