And you accept that there is physical evidence for it occurring ...?

Seems to me you are playing artful dodger with mealie ism words...logic has nought to do with evidence...

It's not a theory only posit like string where currently there is no evidence .....

Macdoc wrote:And you accept that there is physical evidence for it occurring ...?

Seems to me you are playing artful dodger with mealie ism words...logic has nought to do with evidence...

It's not a theory only posit like string where currently there is no evidence .....

We're talking past each other. Truelgbt is wittering about Scientific Truth™. I am asserting that there are only scientific models based on observation, extrapolation and inference thereof (a stance I am in good company about, by the way).

Hmm...

hackenslash wrote:Hmm...

NOTHING to see here. Move along.

Well, nothing beyond tilting at windmills.

You may have been high, but you've never been fighting a windmill because you think it's an evil giant high.

u been watchin too many movies

The_Metatron wrote:

hackenslash wrote:Hmm...

NOTHING to see here. Move along.

Well, nothing beyond tilting at windmills.

Well, Dulcinea awaits, and I'm feeling particularly quixotic today. It's a lovely day in Toronto, though, and I have some errands to run. Also, having been absent for some time in other venues, I'd forgotten just what a time commitment a truly thorough fisk can be, and I'm only about halfway through the OP, but it is coming.

laklak wrote:You may have been high, but you've never been fighting a windmill because you think it's an evil giant high.

I have...

hackenslash wrote:

The_Metatron wrote:

hackenslash wrote:Hmm...

NOTHING to see here. Move along.

Well, nothing beyond tilting at windmills.

Well, Dulcinea awaits, and I'm feeling particularly quixotic today. It's a lovely day in Toronto, though, and I have some errands to run. Also, having been absent for some time in other venues, I'd forgotten just what a time commitment a truly thorough fisk can be, and I'm only about halfway through the OP, but it is coming.

You have an audience. Do a good job.


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truelgbt wrote:This subject easily makes my Top 3 Pet Peeves List. Maybe even my Top 1.

Mine too, but for entirely different reasons.

The cosmologists below (who call themselves 'scientists') actually believe that all planets, stars, galaxies - literally megatons of rock, dirt, gas, etc. came out of thin air - a big bang. Everything out of thin air!

No they don't. This is so far off the mark it's almost difficult to see how you could have gotten it so horribly wrong. First of all, 'thin air' is something, not nothing, so you've already rephrased what it is you think they're saying, and this rephrasing is even further from what they've actually said than the silly thread title.

Has anybody seen megatons of material come out of thin air?

Has anybody seen a fallacy of personal incredulity?

Regardless of the fact that no cosmologist I'm aware of actually thinks what you think they do, your question is of exactly the same intellectual level as the asinine 'if we all came from apes, why are there still apes?'

This violates basic principles of common sense

Common sense? Seriously? If you think that common sense is any sort of useful guide to reality, I have a timeshare apartment in Aleppo that you might be interested in.

It's common sense that time runs the same for every observer except that, if this were actually true, satellite navigation would be a pipe dream. It's common sense that something can't be in two places at once except, if that were true, the technology I'm employing to share my prattlings with you today wouldn't even rise to the level of fantasy. It's common sense that I can't walk through a wall - and indeed I've never managed it yet- except that, if this were actually true, we couldn't exist, because fusion in stars wouldn't occur, meaning that elements heavier than beryllium couldn't be synthesised.

and physics (Conservation of Matter: matter is neither created nor destroyed)

Except that matter isn't a conserved quantity. Mass is a conserved quantity, because energy is a conserved quantity, and energy and mass are essentially the same thing. Matter, however, is clearly not a conserved quantity, because the energy content of matter depends on its bound state. If matter were really a conserved quantity, mass/energy couldn't be, and it is.

and has never been demonstrated.

Nor posited in any serious sense. It was taken as a consequence of standard BB cosmology under a model that's been pretty comprehensively falsified, but isn't a feature of any contemporary cosmology. The notions that time and space began at Planck-10-43 are not well-regarded by anybody who has much grasp of the relevant material. That aside, there are many, many things that haven't been demonstrated, yet we accept them as being in accord with the data. The notion of the universe coming from nothing isn't one of them, however. Why? Because 'nothing' isn't actually possible, at least in any persistent state. I'll come to this.

No study, no experiment, no fortuitous unique event has ever demonstrated such an occurrence. EVER. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Kinda makes you wonder what they do with their unconfirmed and undemonstrated 'theories' to make a living or how such nonsense even benefits our daily lives in any way.

Marvellous. The materialist sceptic has erected the 'just a theory' bollocks in pretty spectacular fashion. Perhaps you should learn just what these terms mean before erecting stock creationist canards like this, especially when accompanied with a load of quote-mines that look an awful lot like the eructations of Bananaman.

A theory is, broadly speaking, an integrated explanatory framework encompassing all the facts, laws, observations and hypotheses pertaining to a specific area of interest.

Now, before anybody flames me, ask yourself: leaving behind theories, formulas, calculations, background radiation, virtual particles, etc. - have you ever heard of anybody anywhere at anytime actually demonstrating any significant amount of material coming out of nothing (even a paltry 100 pounds will do) ? I don't think so.

No, but I've seen a few instances of scientifically illiterate bullshit being promulgated in forum posts and on social media that fail to ask the most basic of questions namely, in this case, "what is it that the world's physicists and cosmologists are seeing that I'm missing (other than the obvious failure to correctly parse what they're saying in my collection of quotes; I'm coming to this)?"

As a skeptic I am a materialist, not a theorist.

Fuck, but this is an even more comprehensive failure of thought than the thread itself.

The logic content of this is that scepticism entails materialism, and that materialism stands opposed to theory. This is, of course, complete bullshit on every count. See, I'm a sceptic, and yet I'm not a materialist. As for the rest, most of the people you quote would, I'm sure, describe themselves as materialists, yet the content of their work is entirely rooted in theory.

Anything I believe must be demonstrated.

If it can be demonstrated, belief is superfluous.

I'm not a 'paper science' person.

You're not any kind of a science person. It's perfectly clear from this post alone that you haven't the foggiest idea of how science actually operates. I can help you with that, as can many of my esteemed colleagues hereabouts. I see that newolder has posted in this thread. You could do a lot worse than to pay attention, as he actually understands this schizz.

Many on this forum are undoubtedly theorist skeptics who believe just based on fancy, convincing theories alone, even undemonstrated theories.

Lovely bit of well-poisoning there. You're really racking up the fallacies at a rate of knots here.

Not me. I'm a 'show me' person.

Well, I could show you that you've suffered from the fatal problem of philosophy, namely failure to properly identify presupposition failure.

PhD's don't necessarily mean they are right about everything. PhDs forget where they put their car keys like the rest of us. PhDs forget what their wives cooked for dinner last night. PhDs come into this world wearing diapers and leave wearing diapers just like the rest of us. Don't just tell me your telescope was able to take you back in time to show you what happened 14 billion years ago, ok? Just because outer space is the last frontier and your lapel is titled "PhD" doesn't mean shoddy claims are to be automatically believed and accepted.

Is that really how you think this works? There are quite a few people hereabouts with a doctorate, yet their posts undergo exactly the same scrutiny as do the posts of somebody with only a RCM Grade 3 Trumpet certificate to offer as the total of their academic qualifications. More well-poisoning.

1----2----3----4----5----6----7----8----9----10
gullible------------average-----------------skeptic


Where are you on this scale

10, which would put you somewhere at about a 6.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from NOTHING...Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist." "Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe." https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11161493

Now you can point to the claim that everything came from literally nothing.

Hawking's position for the last several decades was rooted in a model called the 'no boundary' proposal, in which the past boundary condition of the universe is that it had no boundary. In this scenario, time emerges from what was previously* a space-like dimension. The details are complex (literally) and are rooted in modelling the past conditions of the universe in imaginary time (which is not what you think it is). Hawking once thought that the universe began in a singularity (indeed, it's his theorem written jointly with Roger Penrose that gives us the popular notion of the singularity, a theorem that neither man thinks describes the universe we inhabit).

"The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of LITERALLY NOTHING is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice." (Richard Dawkins)
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/rich ... ins_363339

Dawkins is not a cosmologist.

"It is rather fantastic to realize that the laws of physics can describe how everything was created in a random quantum fluctuation out of NOTHING, and how over the course of 15 billion years, matter could organize in such complex ways that we have human beings sitting here, talking, doing things intentionally." (Alan Harvey Guth)
http://discovermagazine.com/2002/apr/cover

Oh, dear. You're aware, are you not, that Guth is the formulator of one of the front-running cosmological models currently on the table, right? There's a big clue in the name of his cosmology; eternal inflation. He's also the person who proposed the model that superseded standard BB cosmology.

Also, this is a quote from a popsci magazine, not his work in physics. If you want another quote, I have one from a discussion with another cosmologist.

So far, it's been made to sound, I think for the purposes of simplifying things, that until the cyclic model, all scientists had believed that the big bang was the origin of time itself. That idea is certainly part of the classic theory of the big bang, but it's an idea which I think most cosmologists have not taken seriously in quite a while. That is, the idea that there's something that happened before what we call the big bang has been around for quite a number of years... In what I would regard as the conventional version of the inflationary theory, the Big Bang was also not in that theory the origin of everything but rather one had a very long period of this exponential expansion of the universe, which is what inflation means, and, at different points, different pieces of this inflating universe had stopped inflating and become what I sometimes call pocket universes."

He goes on to say:

What we call the Big Bang was almost certainly not the actual origin of time in either of the theories that we’re talking about. … The main difference I think [between the inflationary theory and Neil and Paul's theory] is the answer to the question of what is it that made the universe large and smooth everything out. … The inflationary version of cosmology is not cyclic. … It goes on literally forever with new universes being created in other places. The inflationary prediction is that our region of the universe would become ultimately empty and void but meanwhile other universes would sprout out in other places in this multiverse.

Note the bit about a multiverse.

"But what's truly been amazing, and what the book's about is the revolutionary developments in both cosmology and particle physics over the past 30 or 40 years that have not only changed completely the way we think about the universe but made it clear that there's a plausible case for understanding precisely how a universe full of stuff, like the universe we live in, could result literally from NOTHING by natural processes." (Lawrence Krauss)
https://www.npr.org/2012/01/13/14517526 ... om-nothing

Not seeing the claim that everything came from nothing, only a statement about how the laws of physics can easily account for such an event. If you actually read the book, he spends an awful lot of time explaining that the persistence of nothing is actually impossible, and that what we've traditionally thought of as nothing is actually something.

I wrote a kind of review of this book some time ago, and it's a pretty good précis of the material. The piece has also been reviewed by Krauss and is included in his wakelet profile.

The Certainty of Uncertainty

When you understand how quantum theory treats fields, you might be able to grasp why this is so. It would also help if you understood what energy is.

Even if we don't have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from NOTHING need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific." (Joseph Miller quoting Paul Davies in his book: The Emergence and Nature of Human History).

Yet again, even with Davies, who's not above a little woo at times, we see no claim that everything came from nothing, only that such an event doesn't violate any physical laws we currently have, which is a factually correct statement.

I should also point out that no beginning of any description has ever been demonstrated. None of our robust theories have any kind of beginning in them, nor can they have, because to get anywhere near a beginning we need a quantum theory of gravity, and we have none. We know that neither quantum theory nor general relativity can get to a beginning, because they both break long before we get close. When we try to marry them, it gets even worse, because they return infinite probabilities, which is a bit of a problem, since probabilities can only fall between 0 and 1.

"Some physicists believe our universe was created by colliding with another, but Kaku says it also may have sprung from NOTHING . . . " (Alison Snyder, Scienceline)
https://scienceline.org/2006/08/ask-snyder-bang/

May have. Not seeing your thread title in there.

"Maybe the universe itself sprang into existence out of NOTHINGNESS - a gigantic vacuum fluctuation which we know today as the big bang. Remarkably, the laws of modern physics allow for this possibility." (Heinz Pagels in his book: The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics As The Language of Nature).

Again, the claim isn't there, just a factually correct statement about such an event being completely commensurate with existing physical laws.

"We also say that space and time both started at the Big Bang and therefore there was NOTHING before it." (Ask an Astronomer, Cornell University Dept. of Astronomy)
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about- ... e-beginner

We say this, but our cosmologies do not.

"Discoveries in astronomy and physics have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that our universe did in fact have a beginning. Prior to that moment there was NOTHING; during and after that moment there was something: our universe." (All About Science.org)
https://www.big-bang-theory.com/

This looks like something William Lane Craig penned for the Institute for Cretinous Regurgitation. Which cosmologist said this?

"Assuming the universe came from NOTHING, it is empty to begin with...only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of NOTHINGNESS be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God." (Victor Stenger)
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/587191

You should read the whole book, wherein this quote is contextualised correctly. This is not a claim that everything came from nothing, it's talking about the logical consequence of that assumption in the context of the god hypothesis. The title of the book is a big clue. Stenger actually details in that book the robust work by Frank Wilczek showing that, as a simple result of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the probability of something arising from literally nothing is about 60%.

"Is it NOTHING that was caused by NOTHING for no reason at all? Extreme Big Accident Cosmology answers affirmatively." (R.B.Edwards in his book: What Caused the Big Bang?)

Not a cosmologist. His book title is a cracking bit of question-begging. On what basis should we assume that the BB had or required a cause? That's correct; Aristotle.

The problem is, of course, that this Aristotelian notion of causation upon which this question is predicated is comprehensively falsified by Special Relativity. It's rooted in the idea of an absolute standard of rest, which is what all prime movers require. SR tells this bollocks to take a hike, because it tells us categorically that there is and can be NO absolute standard of rest. That's what the 'relative' in relativity refers to.

So, we have a collection of quotes, mostly from popsci sources, of cosmologists almost entirely NOT saying what you said they said, and a couple of people who aren't cosmologists who may or may not (but mostly not) saying what you said they said.

Are we going to get to the list of cosmologists who actually claim what you say they've claimed?

Some light reading, should you feel so inclined.

Cosmology:
It Wasn't Big, and it Didn't Bang
You Must Be Off Your Brane

How science really works, as opposed to your caricature of it:
http://www.hackenslash.co.uk/2016/04/de ... n-and.html

If you have questions, I have a little leisure.

Kaboom, from out of nowhere.

RS

Poor OP

I was thinking something like this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE_H43cfCVM&[/youtube]


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Nothing isn't nothing anymore. As a pair of virtual particles would infer, the premise of the OP is annihilated. Game over, man, game over.

laklak wrote:No, mainstream physics doesn't describe it. What you're not getting is the initial singularity can't be defined by anything even resembling physics as we know it. None of the rules apply, that's what "singularity" means.

You might as well say nothing you know of in the field of science, that is, 'establishment' science, describes it. In fact, you can't even come up with anything tangible except to say that you read about it, saw a show about it, and decided to 'accept' it.

I guess that's what everybody else does, right?

Half-ass.

theropod wrote:Kaboom, from out of nowhere.

Gee, that sounds good to me. I guess I'll 'accept' it.

Right.

truelgbt wrote:

hackenslash wrote:

truelgbt wrote:Has anybody seen megatons of material come out of thin air?

Has anybody seen a fallacy of personal incredulity?

Answering a question with a question, lol. The one question which nobody wants to answer.

You are literally making excuses for all of those cosmologists/physicists using a standard word like 'nothing' or 'nothingness' which has a specific meaning and turning that 'nothing' and nothingness' into something, somehow. Amazing.

Do you always talk yourself into 'accepting' something which doesn't make sense? Nothing means Something. Ok.

The one word which shows up often in your articles is the word 'theory'. Nothing wrong with theories but they do nothing for a materialist. BTW, did you know that most people who 'accept' theories also accept them as fact?

Macdoc wrote:

there you go ...matter destroyed

You are joking, right?

Matter is NOT destroyed, EVER.