What is containing the universe?

Great Debates
121

The “nearly” is where all the fun is, but if it were not “nearly” then the universe as we know it would exist as it does. This near uniformity acutually is absolutely VITAL to inflationary theory.

In short, the minor inconsistency is not that there are imperfections in the black body spectrum of the CDMB, its more surprising that the imperfections were so ridiculously small. Inflationary theory does an excellent job of explaining the scale of the imperfections and current measurements that are underway in trying to get a handle on the one part in 10^5 anisotropy are proving fundamental to our understanding of inflation.

122

I’m sorry, replace the “would” in the first sentence of my previous post with “would not”.

The point being that the large-scale structure we see (galaxy clusters, etc.) are resultant from these tiny fluctuations in the CMB

123

My, oh my. Cause this and cause that. The problem here is a deeply rooted bias against spontaneity. Apparently QM has not put even the slightest dent into the popular consciousness! The most of you are so deeply deterministic in your world views that free will or anything of that kind most seem like an abomination. Do you even realize what a problematic term “cause” is even without infinite regression? Ever heard of the problem of super-luminal signaling? Why does it seem so bizarre? Because Hume and fellows convinced us that proximity most certainly is required in speaking about cause, a refined form of “post hoc ergo propter hoc”. Well, let’s for a moment consider Aristotle’s 4th force in his theory of causation: Final Cause.

Final Cause is the idea that things strive towards a desired end state, causing them to behave in certain ways. For example, the Final Cause of a nut would be the state of being an oak. Many of you may dismiss this as a ridiculous form of animism. Certainly trees don’t have desires! After all, it’s all programmed purely by genetics, making sure that some future event can’t be the force behind some present event. Teleological world views belong in the formaldehyde of dark museum halls.

Aright, but what about humans? Surely, you deliberate time and again what you should do because you crave to achieve some given end state, no? When you make a decision, what causes it? Is it really everything that has happened to you up to that point? What if there are two possible solutions and even when deliberating, you can’t make up your mind? Is it still not up to you? You could argue that it isn’t. But, honestly, are you really absolutely convinced that you are just some extremely elaborate form of kookoo’s clock? If you are, good for you and have fun cogging away. I say, it’s absurd. How do I know? Because I should be working now but against all common sense I’m writing this instead.

Also, this nonsense about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal causing something is deeply flawed. The Uncertainty Principal is a theory not a cause! And this is very important because you need to realize that science attempts to modal what it sees in nature. It’s a descriptive discipline. Very formal perhaps, but nonetheless descriptive. And like all descriptions it’s forever doomed to be slightly less rich than the Universe that it attempts to describe and is indeed contained within itself. So science must strike a balance between perfection and efficiency. What do I mean? The more 1 to 1 a map is, the more perfect it is. Yet, a U.S. map with a scale of 1 to 1, how impractical would that be? Try unfolding it, for starters. Or, viewed in another way, if it takes 100,000 years to describe what will happen in the next 10 minutes, what’s the point of describing it? We might just as well wait around another 10 minutes and see for ourselves.

Let’s rename “desired states” to some thing a little less pungent for you people out there who have a distaste for hopeful, angry or objecting flowers. Let’s use the word “potential” instead. The world is full of potentials. I might go to the grocery store next or I might go down to Coney Island. Who knows? Well, since I need groceries, I’m probably more likely to fulfill my shopping potential. The Universe might start existing or it might not. 50/50. Why? Why not? Fundamentally, something will either exist or not exist. If nothing ever came to exist, you certainly never would know about it. Obviously, it did 'cause here I am writing away! Yeah, but why? No why, it just did. Just like I decided to go to Coney island instead. My feeling about Big Bang? Well, something was bound to happen sooner or later, whatever that means in a state where time is non-existent. The same goes for collapse of the wave function. It’s futile to ask why. It’s just part of the very nature of the Universe. Shit happens for no good reason.

Science should distance itself from “why”. It should simply strive to achieve the most efficient modals that help us describe the world we live in. And the most efficient modals are those that include concepts for “potentials”. And that goes for sociology as well as QM.

124

Maybe this is a [hijack]. If so, slap me on my wrists for typing this.

I’ve read the whole thread and some parts I actually understood, my level of ignorance might be a little higher if someone could answer some related stuff for me.

  1. Where are we in the Universe. The Earth, Solar system and Milky Way has a three dimensional coordinate, no? If you allow me to imagine the universe as a sphere, about where are we? I know up and down don’t mean a lot in space but are we halfway between the edge and the center? Two thirds out?

  2. I imagine a center from where the universe is expanding. In what idrection is it? Due south?

  3. I’ve always pictured Big Bang as an ‘explosion’ with galaxies, stars planets and everything as ‘debris’. I know space is not ampty, there are molecules in the vacuum, even though it’s pretty thin stuff. However, for simplicity, let me think of space as pure and empty. Where did the emptiness come from? Is the universe thinning out, as more and more molecules from the primeval soup adhere and form stuff? Did the Big Band create the ‘emptiness’ in which the universe can expand?

  4. Obviously, we looked in the direction of that Big Bang. I think we must have looked the other way too. Again with my sphere: Big Bang is center, the opposite direction is edge. The Universe should be pretty thin there, the way our galaxy is. What do we see there? Or can’t we look in the other direction, because that would be seeng the future and everything is expanding around us, everywhere?

I’m confused and my head hurts from trying to picture all of this as a ILM CGI. COme on - fight ignorance and start with me.

125

Sorry Gaspode but you have made several assumptions that don’t hold up.

  1. All points can be thought of as the center of the universe.

  2. All points are recedeing from all other points. There is no one center.

  3. Space was created by the BB. New space is being created in between all points in the universe.

  4. Everything is expanding around us, everywhere. The Big Band didn’t happen in one place, it happened everywhere. There is no point that things are expanding out from.

Don’t think in terms of a normal explosion, the Big Bang is very different.

126
  1. To define the observable universe we define the points which we can observe. That means we basically sit at the center of the universe and look out. That does not mean we are at the center of the universe in the same sense that the sun is at the center of the galaxy, it’s just that we have defined the observable universe to be everything we can see and we are limited by the speed of light to how far away that is. In this way we always remain at the center of the observable universe.

2)The universe expands everywhere in all directions. To use a famous example, think of making raisin bread. You start out with all the raisins close together and then put the bread in the oven. The bread expands in all directions. The raisins have more space in between them. That’s similar to how the universe expands. There is no “center” of expansion in our raisin bread because there is no “edge” to speak of other than the edge defined by our observing limit, and that’s an edge in time AND space.

3)Do not think of the Big Bang as a merely an explosion. Please. If you do that, you’ll end up asking, “what’s it expanding into” which is pretty much a meaningless question. The Big Bang is far different than any explosion you’ve ever witnessed. You can, if you want, consider the Big Bang to still be happening today. That’s why things are receding from us on cosmological scales. The “emptyness” itself comes and grows from the Big Bang. The rest of the stuff in the universe is fairly incidental and disperse. Naively, we can say that it traces the space and time that was/is created by the Big Bang. The universe is indeed thinning out, at an ever accelerating rate! This is because there is a limit to the amount of stuff in the universe, but more and more space keeps getting put into the mix. The density of the universe is ever decreasing and will continue to decreases as our new dark energy epoch is upon us.

  1. I think the previous three answers pretty much makese this question moot. There is no preferred direction as far as the creation of the universe is concerned. It was created here, over there, oh yes, and over there too.

Hope this helps.

127

Thank you for trying to educate me.
But then, I wrote in #4 that maybe everything is expanding everywhere, so maybe I have grasped som of this.

Sorry to keep asking questions, but my idea about the BB comes from cheesy animations on TV shows dealing with science and they all show it so be like an explosion with what we have today as debris. Hence my questions.

However - I’ve always heard that it all started out as a point. I suppose this is oversimplifying that a bit, but the bread in the oven started out as a smaller lump of dough. So the Universe didn’t start out in one place and expanded from that, with the emptiness and all? It started everywhere? But why is it getting bigger?

confused on a higher plane

128

Beastal, I think one of the problems here is that you don’t understand the scientific method very clearly.

In order to test the validity of a particular hypothesis (that there is a difference between two cases, for example), one must compare it to the results expected from an appropriate null hypothesis (there is no difference). If adequate information can’t be provided to support the proposed hypothesis, then the null hypothesis must be accepted. The null hypothesis is the default result. From a scientific perspective, since no evidence has been found of a cause for quantum fluctuations, despite intense investigation, one must assume one doesn’t exist. (This is the scientific version of “innocent until proven guilty”).

Beyond this, as I’ve mentioned several times, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle suggests that there is no cause. The Principle says that a certain irreducible level of uncertainty is intrinsic to the structure of the Universe.

Beastal, on what basis do you think there must be a cause? You need to examine the possiblity (in fact, strong likelihood) that you are simply biased towards that result on the basis of everyday experience. In the macroscopic world, governed by deterministic Newtonian mechanics, cause-and-effect seem fundamental. (Of course, on the basis of everyday experience, the Earth appears flat and the sun appears to rise and set.) If you believe there is a cause merely because that seems intuitive to you, then you, like Einstein, are trying to “tell God what to do.”

(Ironically, when determinism became the prevailing scientific view in the 18th century due to acceptance of Newtonian mechanics, it was condemned by some religionists because it seemed to somehow limit God’s control over the Universe.)

129

The idea that the world seems deterministic on the level of human perception is wrong and based on a bizare Humian legend. It’s some kind of myopia resulting from looking at the stars and simple falling bodies too much. I addressed this in my previous post Colibri, so I won’t hash it out too much again. Suffice to say that I see little determinism in the behaviour of most mammals.

130

Colibri

When I say ‘cause’, I mean any cause. Not necessarily one that can be picked using current scientific methods, but any cause.

For example, lets say a quantum fluctuation occurs 3 light years away from earth, roughly in the same direction that Jupiter will be from earth at 3:43am on the morning of Novemember 21st, 2003. Let’s also say that a quantum fluctuation doesn’t occur 4.5 light years away from earth, roughy in the same direction as Mars will be from earth on the evening of December 1st, 2002 at 5:45pm. Which do you believe, is correct:

  • There is absolutely no difference in the causes, or non-causes that are effecting the location, time, and legth of the above mentioned quantum fluctuation and non-quantum fluctuation .

  • There are differences in the causes, or non-causes, that are effecting the location, time, and legth of the above mentioned quantum fluctuation, and non-quantum fluctuation.

Out of the above two, I’m asking which do you, personally, believe?

131

Beastel, you’ve lost me entirely. You seem to be quite unfamiliar with the term “cause” and how its a problematic concept.

The OED defines it thus:
That which produces an effect or consequence; an antecedent or antecedents followed by a certain phenomenon.

In science, we observe the world we live in and describe it as effectively as possible. Usually, the more rich and accurate we try to be with our descriptions, the more confused we get. First we observe that this and this and this condition invariably leads to this. Then we suddenly discover a flaw in our description since sometimes this and this and this is affected by something else, leading to a totally different result. And sometimes even, this and this and this at times leads to result A, at time to result B.

What realy causes something is beyond the descriptive discipline of science. For all we know, Libertarian is right and it’s God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

*Colibri has been trying to explain to you that QM postulates an inherent uncertainity in the very construct of the Universe. In terms of certain QM phenomena, you can’t speak of “antecedents” and “consequent”, making cause a usless term. It’s like saying “The red is cow in the afternoon”…

132

Beastal, you are just not getting it here. (And I have no idea what you are trying to get at by using a term such as “non-cause.”)

From a scientific point of view, there is no such thing as belief per se, there are only hypotheses supported by evidence, and those that are not. Science is quite capable of leaving certain phenomena in the “unknown” file, when there is no evidence either way. One may speculate, but until evidence can be obtained, they just remain in that limbo. However, scientists may think one hypothesis is more plausible than another, even if definitive evidence is absent, simply becasue it invokes known principles, rather that unknown ones.

This said, my response would (1) there is no way at present to decide between these alternatives absolutely definitively - especially as the first one requires disproving a negative; (2) because the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (which implies there is no difference) has been exhaustively tested and found to explain behavior at the quantum level to a very high level of accuracy; because no evidence has been found of any difference despite intensive searching for many decades; and because, AFAIK, there is not even any well-regarded alternative hypothesis that proposes a difference; I would conclude that, at the present time, the most plausible alternative is that there is no difference.

In any case, my personal belief on the issue is immaterial to the discussion (as is yours, I might add, at least if we are discussing this from a scientific perspective).

Beastal, the question of the origin and extent of the Universe is a rather ambitious one to tackle. With all due respect, I think you need to refine your knowledge of both Science and logic before you can hope to make much progress on this question.

133

Beastal, you might find this thread interesting reading. The discussion expands on the point Collibir has been making about the nature of science.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=122879

134

We don’t know quite why the universe is expanding. It simply is. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t observe it expanding. The “started out as a point” idea is really just an extrapolation and an approximation of the consequences of the expanding universe. In reality, we can only go back so far back before our laws of physics start breaking down. A “point” is a physical impossibility in today’s universe (it is merely a mathematical postulate), but it best approximates the idea that astronomers are trying to get across when in trying to explain the big bang. However, there is no possible outside observer of said point that exists in today’s universe, so sometimes the phrase “singularity” or “cosmic egg” is used to prevent people from asking the question, “What is the universe expanding into?” Since time and space are extant and created everywhere, the universe functions as a coherent unit no matter what size it is. As to the reason it was created, well, welcome to the thread.

135

?

So are there any theories out there explaining how something can effect without a cause?

136

That’s the best koan I’ve read in years, Beastal. :wink:

On the serious note, Beastal, when there is no cause, there is nothing effecting. There is no antecedent to the event. The event occurs for no apparent reason!

There is no real theory behind such an occurrence because a theory would require that we could somehow describe what lead to the event. And this would imply some form of causality. Simply put, we can’t say things like “it happens because…” or “it happens since…”. Or even “it happens when…”.

Spontaneous events can’t be explained.

137

Well, I’m not buying for a second that nothing causes quantum fluctuations, I’m off to find some cites that back this theory.

138

From here:

http://www.totse.com/en/fringe/gravity_anti_gravity/161724.html

Is it really that silly of me to dismiss the idea that something can not happen without a cause?

139

You’re joking, right? This site, which closely resembles either a put-on or a looney bin, merely moves the question of causation to “what causes anti-graviton space?”

140

This post concerns the logical status of two points of belief:
(1) that every fact must be the effect of some cause;
(2) that every space must either be infinitely extended, or bounded by something else.

  1. But no one, no how, knows how causation “works” in a general sense. We observe only one fact linked very closely in time and space to another, in similar sequences. I flip a switch> the light goes on; electrons flow> the light goes on; microelectrical fields fluctuate> the light goes on. Etc. The links become smaller and smaller, but “causation” is no more explained than before. Yet “one thing, and then another” without a “compelling why” is magic, not science.

So if we can’t even begin to account for causation-in-general, there’s neither shame nor surprise in our inability to grasp the cause of the whole show, either in the sense of an original First Cause, or in the sense of an immanent Ongoing Cause. (Note that the continuing lawfulness of the universe is as inexplicable as its existence.)

There is also a “zero assumption” involved: that prior to, or apart from, “the universe,” there must have been a nothingness, an utter void. Why make that assumption? We might profitably define the universe as a collection of matter/energy forms embedded in a spatiotemporal frame. What lies before or elsewhere need not be a void, but some unorganized base state, a boiling sea of random possibilities coming and going without consequence. Shouldn’t we say that nothingness can not exist by definition?

  1. Without too much effort, one can find meaning in the concept of a space that is finite-but-unbounded. There is only so much to it, but no matter how far you go, you never hit a wall; you just end up re-entering parts you have already travelled through–even though you seem to have been going in a straight line.

On the other hand–is it really fair to the inquiry to say that a space that is “unbounded” is thereby “uncontained”? Leibniz asked whether it would make sense to wonder why the whole universe was exactly HERE and not one foot over: whatever the extent of the universe, it might have been bigger (and so on, out to infinity). In that sense, whatever gives the universe its general form, its curvature, is in effect its container. Furthermore, one can speak of what lies outside the universe: namely endlessly layered possible universes (i.e., larger in size) that are not now actualized. And that’s my own view.