Ever feel like you're insignificant? Well...don't look at this...

I forgot to mention that this touches on the subject of the limits of technology and I think one of the best stories that addresses that on a large scale is the novel (not the movie) Contact. The main plot is that the main character discovers an alien signal from space, and that signal is eventually determined to contain the blueprints for a machine. The machine is super-advanced and uses technologies and manufacturing industries that don't even exist yet. The world eventually decides to build it with the combined resources of most of the industrialized world. The machine turns out to be a craft capable of navigating wormholes and it brings a group of scientists to the aliens for first contact.

But there is an allegorical element to the story. The main character, Ellie Arrowway, thinks the aliens can give answers to the big questions: they are the "final word" on the universe. However, they tell her, they are much like we are, just further downstream. Just as we look in marvel at what they can do, they reveal that while they can extend the wormhole network in certain ways, they don't know how to build one themselves. Someone else built it, but there's no evidence of them in the universe anymore, which implies they somehow "left." The wormhole builders are as far advanced from them as they are from us.

And then he reveals the kicker. There are things that aren't even explainable as being just inconceivably advanced technology: compared to *them* we, they, and the wormhole builders are all essentially just children. The aliens don't exactly say where this evidence is, but they hint at it: they ask what would we think if we examined the digits of pi, and discovered that trillions of digits into pi was an encoded message from someone. That someone would have to be capable of changing *mathematics* and *reality* to be able to do that, something that is not just advanced technology, but beyond technology itself. The alien describing this to Arrowway called it the "numinous" - the closest thing they have to evidence of what we would call a divinity or God.

The relevance to the story is Arrowway is essentially an atheist, and is being presented with evidence from an advanced race that basically says there's evidence for a creator that will never be explained by Science, not even a billion years from now when we master wormholes and are performing cosmic engineering projects on galactic scales. Whether its proof of God or not is irrelevant, it will always be something beyond her ability to ever explain with Science alone.

I've always found that to be an interesting thought since first reading that story a long time ago.

that sounds rather like the time I left a game of Populous running to go off and see one of the first showings of Batman (Michael Keaton). When we got back home, my followers had conquered the world without me and I had just barely started the game.

That said, while I'm most certainly not an authority on anything scientific, I do try to keep familiar with it as a matter of course. For one thing, it is hard to create a metaphysical system with inherent consistency of operation without having at least a little bit of idea of how the real world operates.

Anyway, the more I learn about science, the more I believe in God. Everything is just so simple and complex at once that I have trouble seeing it happen by circumstance.

I also run into the question of the thermodynamics laws a lot, forget which it is off the top of my head:

"matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed"

If that's the case...then where did all our matter come from. Even assuming the Big Bang happened, the matter for the Big Bang had to come from somewhere. If you had the concept that perhaps we're not a closed system but actually an open one, then all you've done is said that the energy and matter came from outside and you still haven't answered how it got to the place where it came from. Eventually you have to bump your head around the fact that at some point matter and energy WAS created and now you have the question of whether or not it is still being created.

If matter and energy is still being created, that sort of throws entropy out the window because we're never going to get to the final stagnation if there is a constant source of new energy to stir things up.

Also, no, this doesn't make me feel insignificant, because while I am physically smaller than the vast majority of things, I am capable of comprehending their existence, which makes humanity and any sentience a lot more significant to my mind than simple space.

Have not felt this insignificant since taking differential calculus in college.

When I'm feeling like my ego needs a little deflating, or just in a mood of wonderment, I like to go to this site: Risinger's Photopic Sky Survey
The "interactive" has a bit of mapping to it, the "zoom in" is just pure beauty.
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Energy is actually created and destroyed every day. It is just done so in very small scales. I'm talking sub-atomic.

I can't remember the specifics, but the Uncertainty Principle means that particles (called virtual particles, since they cannot be detected) can appear for a very small amount of time in which it travels a very small distance before disappearing again. The mathematically calculated distance these virtual particles could travel was identical to the distance of nuclear strong force extends, so it is a theory that strong force was caused by these virtual particles.

Or was it weak force? Damn I wish I didn't have the memory of a 90 year old man...

I was hoping that this wouldn't turn into a religious debate, but as with anything dealing with cosmology that is the only course it ever takes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Durakken This is one of those things that it is pretty clear you've been listening to a group of con men that preach about things violating this or that scientific law or theory when they clearly don't have a grasp on what it is they are talking about. For example the whole "matter and energy can neither be created no destroyed" isn't exactly correct... And that is obvious to anyone that even remotely believes that the universe, as in our physical space, began. If the universe is infinite why wouldn't matter be as well? If the universe is not then whatever created the universe created matter as well. It's not a hard thing to get.

Matter and energy being indestructible is an assumption that works on topology greater than the atomic scale. It is through the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that virtual particles can appear for short amounts of time and vanish just as quickly. Since the universe obviously deals with things larger than single molecules, it is a safe to operate under the assumption that energy is conserved when dealing with any scientific discipline equal to or higher than chemistry. It is indeed considered a far stranger phenomena when energy doesn't appear to be conserved than when it does appear to be conserved.

The universe beginning doesn't suddenly necessitate that matter and energy not be conserved. The beginning of the universe is not some abstract concept that creates ideas that someone can just apply to the world willy nilly like Santa Claus. It is an area of great interest and of great difficulty in explanation simply because it requires weird implications. Those weird results are favorable to the alternative model of an infinite universe, since that produces a fundamental contradiction: If the universe is dynamic and infinite, any point or vector must have a limitless amount information to explain it's position, and a limitless sequence to have physically passed to come to it's position. This necessitates that the infinite events be countable, achieved, and capable of being surpassed by subsequent events; the infinite events must be finite. Since infinite =/= finite, the theory must be rejected on the grounds that it is ultimately nonsense.

A universe that has an infinite amount of mass and space would collapse into itself due to infinite gravitational pull of the infinite mass. There is only one way that this wouldn't happen, and that would be if mass, energy, and the space it occupies were perfectly homogeneous. Since there are no observations to confirm this, and plenty of observations against the assumption that the universe is homogeneous, that theory can be rejected.


Something I noticed a lot of people don't understand about science is that the explanations for phenomena aren't divined. What is really going on is scientists are observing phenomena which behave in a fashion that flies in the face of what they previously understood, and this leads them to scramble for an explanation for this unusual phenomena. They didn't just say "There is multiple dimensions, and therefore a single photon can cause interference with itself". Quite the opposite happened: when they saw an interference pattern in the double-slit experiment, they scratched their heads and after awhile they came up with a strange excuse for this strange phenomena. Then you get multiple camps of people with different theories who fight over it, and the body of people with the theory that dies out the slowest wins.

There is something that a coworker of mine said once, and I think it applies perfectly to the field of cosmology. Unfortunately, I can't remember who he was quoting (memory of a 90 year old man again):

"The universe is not only stranger than what we imagine, but stranger than what we can imagine".

A way in which energy can be conserved and the universe can have a beginning is if the universe transitioned from static to dynamic. An example of this would be all of the energy condensed into a small point, where "something" would alter it to form a dynamic state and thus kick into motion the rest of the events for the formation of the universe as follows. This model of the beginning of the universe, while still allowing energy to be conserved, isn't used since it requires a hypothetical abstraction be applied to the static universe. This hypothetical abstraction in particular is agency. Hence, the dilemma.

Personally I don't believe that theory, since I'm not pantheistic. Nonetheless it is a possibility. Another theory, one not implying agency, is that membranes collided and made our corner of the universe that way. In that model, the universe is actually just the conversion of energy from a misunderstood from to its currently understood form As to how the rules of the universe were sustained or if the matter of where membranes got their energy/dynamic nature, that is all up for debate.

It can still be considered a beginning since a static universe has no dimension of time that can be applied to it, and no activity to characterize it. The laws (or lack thereof) it exists under, the unknown state that energy contained within this constant is in, it is very difficult to even call it a "universe" without dynamics, different elements, or space to occupy.

If you want to say that all the requirements for a "universe" are that something exists, even in a manner contrary to all forms in which we consider something to exist, then I guess you can view it that way.