Skeptics "reasoning" applied to mathematics

[James Heaps-Nelson]

It's nothing too hard to imagine.

Jim,

Neither is God.

Michael

Michael, we don't know how much mass there is in the universe, but two likely scenarios are:

1. It expands forever.

2. It has enough mass to come back together

How is scenario #2 like God? It is neither arbitrary nor unlikely. All you have to do is put enough mass in a gravitational model of the universe and that is what will happen.

Jim

Edited May 4, 2007 by James Heaps-Nelson

[Dragonfly]

So? So have been other theories in the past like Newtonian physics. That doesn't make them explain things like quantum physics.

So you think science is only solid when it is infallible? Or in other words, when it is omniscience?

Is the Theory of Relativity the proper standard for proving that the universe had a beginning?

It should at least be one of the cornerstones of such a theory, the other one being quantum mechanics.

[James Heaps-Nelson]

So? So have been other theories in the past like Newtonian physics. That doesn't make them explain things like quantum physics.

So you think science is only solid when it is infallible? Or in other words, when it is omniscience?

Is the Theory of Relativity the proper standard for proving that the universe had a beginning?

It should at least be one of the cornerstones of such a theory, the other one being quantum mechanics.

Exactly as Dragonfly said. The reason for this is fairly simple. No other forces are likely operating until symmetry breaks besides gravity and quantum effects.

Jim

Edited May 4, 2007 by James Heaps-Nelson

[Rodney]

an untestable theory like superstrings.

I'm gratified to see that some patter for an entertainment I wrote in the 1980s still applies:

It’s funny[73]—new dimensions sprouted wings

When physicists came up with ... superstrings.[74]

I’ll speak of superstrings in just a minute;

Meanwhile, if there’s a pun,[75] I won’t begin it.

You fools! I’ll have you know that I’m a poet—

You don’t crack jokes while swinging on a star.

Now let’s get back to all those weird extensions

Of space-time with a host of new dimensions.

They tell us that the superstring idea[76]

Was offered as a useful panacea

For mathematic stumbling blocks that lurked[77]

Behind old thoughts that formerly had worked.[78]

They used to visualize the seeds of matter[79]

As ... much like points[80]—now strings have come to shatter[81]

The old idea—strings make much more sense.

At once again they’re making progress. Hence

The superstring, with its superior math,[82]

Is next to lead us[83]—down the garden path?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Jim and Dragonfly,

You are not going to convince me that the universe started, or even that it started from small to big, unless there is something better than what has been offered. These theories are speculation and speculation only, regardless of the complexity of calculation. They should not be used as proof of the invalidity of philosophical knowledge, especially while making the same mistakes as the worst philosophy has to offer. (btw - That has been my point all along.)

Apropos. You guys don't like my Outsucker Hypothesis? An outsucking "totality" could even be the true source of gravity in its full effect. (I would have to work on radiation, but it can be done.)

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Rodney,

That magic thing is absolutely charming. You should make a video of it. I don't know about the market, but I do know it would make one hell of a nice video.

Michael

[James Heaps-Nelson]

Jim and Dragonfly,

You are not going to convince me that the universe started, or even that it started from small to big, unless there is something better than what has been offered. These theories are speculation and speculation only, regardless of the complexity of calculation. They should not be used as proof of the invalidity of philosophical knowledge, especially while making the same mistakes as the worst philosophy has to offer. (btw - That has been my point all along.)

Apropos. You guys don't like my Outsucker Hypothesis? An outsucking "totality" could even be the true source of gravity in its full effect. (I would have to work on radiation, but it can be done.)

Michael

Michael,

I'm not trying to convince you that the universe started or that it started from small to big, I'm saying that presenting theories that such things are probable based on the available evidence is not arbitrary. Anyone is free to proffer alternative evidence-based theories and go through a scientific peer-review process. I await the publication of your Outsucker Hypothesis with bated breath :-).

Jim

Edited May 5, 2007 by James Heaps-Nelson

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I await the publication of your Outsucker Theory with bated breath :-).

Jim,

You flatter me. It is a hypothesis.

Michael

EDIT: I think our posts crossed in an Internet time warp.

[Daniel Barnes]

Michael:

>Philosophy and science overlap and complement each other.

Yes. But it may help to have a rule of thumb to roughly distinguish the two methods. You may know about Popper's demarcation criterion between philosophical (or what he called "metaphysical" ) theories and scientific ones? That is, falsifiability?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Yes. But it may help to have a rule of thumb to roughly distinguish the two methods. You may know about Popper's demarcation criterion between philosophical (or what he called "metaphysical" ) theories and scientific ones? That is, falsifiability?

Daniel,

I have to read it to be sure, but as I mentioned above, falsifiability does not seem to be a good system for basic identification of entities at mid-level awareness without instruments. We need something a bit more agile in order to survive. Falsifiability seems great for controlled environments.

Michael

[primemover]

I don't see a problem with multiple universes or string theory in regard to Objectivism. The totality of existence is the totality of existence, period. If this universe we live in is a cause from something yet to be discovered then so be it. One things is for sure, it wasn't a conscious cause.

[James Heaps-Nelson]

I don't see a problem with multiple universes or string theory in regard to Objectivism. The totality of existence is the totality of existence, period. If this universe we live in is a cause from something yet to be discovered then so be it. One things is for sure, it wasn't a conscious cause.

Multiple universes or string theory wouldn't be inconsistent with Objectivism. We would simply have to have more evidence for their cognitive status to move beyond arbitrary. Michael has argued that the Big Bang and quantum theory belong in that arbitrary category too, which I stenuously object to.

Jim

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michael has argued that the Big Bang and quantum theory belong in that arbitrary category too, which I stenuously object to.

Jim,

This is where not reading carefully results in misunderstanding.

I have stated that postulating Big Bang and string theory as fact and not as speculation is arbitrary, and that postulating that the universe had a beginning as fact and not as speculation is arbitrary. I mentioned the infinite regression in eliminating the universe from the universe in postulating a beginning and that this bears the same problem as the concept of creation by God. And I also mentioned (emphatically) the folly of trying to replace a philosophical truth (like the fundamental axioms) with such speculation, or vice-versa in trying to replace scientific knowledge with philosophical principles, in some kind of silly competition (and I gave an example from the literature of the correct approach and wrong approach).

Your understanding of my words has very little correspondence to what I actually wrote.

Michael

[Daniel Barnes]

Michael:

>I have to read it to be sure, but as I mentioned above, falsifiability does not seem to be a good system for basic identification of entities at mid-level awareness without instruments.

It's more a handy to tell a philosophic or metaphysical theory from a scientific one. Worth a look, when you have time.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Daniel,

It is on the list. There is also the problem of truth in addition to theory.

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

Now, what would happen from the resultant explosion [...]?

Initial expansion, not explosion. Big "Bang" is a misnomer (which started as a pejorative nickname -- originated by Fred Hoyle, yes?).

And, Michael, in regard to the something-from-nothing problem, I think that the material you posted in #67 presented that misleadingly. The way I usually hear it, the idea isn't that something literally comes from "nothing" but that we simply don't have any information about what state preceded the first few nanoseconds, though we can describe what's thought to have happened thereafter. By contrast, as I understand the Steady-State theory -- the major cosmological theory prior to Big Bang theory's taking center stage -- that does posit literal and continual appearance of mass ex nihilo as the means of keeping the state of the universe "steady."

Ellen

___

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ellen,

My question goes deeper. Is there anything other than speculation at the root to presume that there were a "first few nanoseconds"?

By saying you don't know what went before, you are claiming there was a "before." (You rhetorical, not you Ellen.)

Now if you include

1. Space

2. Time

3, Matter

4. Everything else

in what came from that initial singularity, do you really need to use the word "existence"?

That sounds more like semantics than concept to me. What is the essential difference between this theory and the postulation of God as the source of the universe other than a series of calculations based on a theory? The initial state is not determined by knowledge; it's very existence is presumed on faith. This holds even if you say you don't know what that state was.

Michael

[James Heaps-Nelson]

Ellen,

My question goes deeper. Is there anything other than speculation at the root to presume that there were a "first few nanoseconds"?

By saying you don't know what went before, you are claiming there was a "before." (You rhetorical, not you Ellen.)

Now if you include

1. Space

2. Time

3, Matter

4. Everything else

in what came from that initial singularity, do you really need to use the word "existence"?

That sounds more like semantics than concept to me. What is the essential difference between this theory and the postulation of God as the source of the universe other than a series of calculations based on a theory? The initial state is not determined by knowledge; it's very existence is presumed on faith. This holds even if you say you don't know what that state was.

Michael

Michael,

We have a pretty good idea. It was a high energy state with no atoms as we know it and no cosmic forces except gravity. As we get better and better with particle accelerators we can get closer and closer to knowing what that state is.

Jim

Edited May 5, 2007 by James Heaps-Nelson

[BaalChatzaf]

That sounds more like semantics than concept to me. What is the essential difference between this theory and the postulation of God as the source of the universe other than a series of calculations based on a theory? The initial state is not determined by knowledge; it's very existence is presumed on faith. This holds even if you say you don't know what that state was.

Michael

A physical theory is subject to empirical testing. That is the difference between science on the one hand and ungrounded philosophy/religion on the other. The magic word is (empirical) testability. Which implies potential falsifiability (that is where Popper comes in).

If no one had found the Cosmic Background Radiation as did Penzias and Wilson in 1965, then the Big Bang hypothesis might just be a footnote in the history of cosmology. The nearly uniform heat radiation at about 2.5 degrees Kelvin is a good indication of how the Cosmos came to be. Right now there is no other hypothesis that accounts for it. The discovery of this nearly uniform radiation from -all- directions pretty will demolished Hoyle's alternative theory of continuous creation of matter and energy.

The Big Bang hypothesis was not just an arbitrary made up story of how things came to be. It was carefully crafted based on facts observed. The first clue to the Big Bang -should have been- Einstein's general theory of Relativity which shows that spacetime filled with matter cannot be stable. It must either be expanding or contracting. Einstein "blew" that one by postulating his cosmological constant to produce a stable Cosmos. Later on Hoyle showed the Cosmos to be expanding by detecting the red-shift of light from distant galaxies. Einstein realized his error based on Hoyle's findings.

There is no God in the Big Bang. It is all physical. As far as the singularity goes, mathematically it is a compactification of a topological space. The infinities of the real number line are quite tamable. No magic, no mystery. The problem is with philosophy and philosophers. Most of them don't learn the mathematics. Some do, and they have no problem.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

My problem is with trying to derive the start of the universe from math, not understanding it as it exists. And I have a problem with using only bottom-up knowledge, i.e., deriving entities from subparticles (emergence) as the only explanation.

Is there any real reason so far believing that the universe had a start other than an epistemological conceit?

Michael

[Guyau]

Michael,

I will resume the analysis of Hume's techniques for transmuting local corrigible error into general skepticism shortly. But in the present post, I want to try tell you a little more about general relativity and present-day scientific cosmology. What James, Dragonfly, Ellen, and Ba'al have said on the science of this is correct. I think you may find the presentation I make below informative and natural. This is an excerpt from Kathleen Touchstone's 1993 Objectivity essay "Can Art Exist without Death?". This portion of the essay was written by me, which Dr. Touchstone acknowledged at the end of the essay.

Two things have changed, thanks to ever-better observations, since this representation of modern cosmology was written: The estimated age of the universe since the big bang has been lowered somewhat (and the estimate today is less uncertain than the one I reported in 1993), and in 1998, it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. That discovery may mean that we will need to revise Einstein's field equation by restoring to it a cosmological constant which he had removed (set equal to zero) when Edwin Hubble discovered the universal expansion.

I think I should tell you a little more about myself, so you may have some idea of my qualifications in this area. As you may recall, my first degree was in physics. Some years later, I attended graduate school in physics for a while at the University of Chicago. I was in the relativity group. (We had Chandra, Geroch, and Wald.) I studied general relativity for a couple of years prior to entry, and I have continued to extend my understanding of it in the years since.

Cosmology in the twentieth century grows out of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which appeared in 1915. This is our way of understanding gravitation and the cosmos.

At the end of the nineteenth century, there were known two natural forces, gravitation and electromagnetism. Interactions under these were taken to be mediated by fields, the gravitational and the electromagnetic. The fields had their sources, mass and charge.

Field variables, such as gravitational or electrical potential, are related to possible trajectories of a subject particle by equations of motion. In these equations, there will appear a coupling factor representing the physical property of the test particle that makes it susceptible to the field. The coupling factor is mass for the gravitational field and charge for the electric field.

An equation of motion will ordinarily come down to inertial mass and acceleration of the subject body on the left and some expression of the force, or field, on the right. If, as Einstein proposed [1915], a particle's gravitational-coupling mass (appears on right side) is equal to, or at least strictly proportional to, its inertial mass (appears on left side), then since they appear in the way they do on opposite sides of the equation of motion, they cancel out. (This will not work for electromagnetic fields because a body's ratio of inertial mass to charge varies; the charge the body bears could vary while its mass remained constant.)

Because of his proposed equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass, Einstein was able to "geometrize away" gravitational forces by incorporating the gravitational field variables into spacetime curvature (into the affine connection). He could then construe the trajectories of gravitationally affected particles as geodesics (minimal paths) of a nonflat connection. Freely falling bodies follow geodesics of a nonflat connection---a single connection, at a given point of spacetime, for any particle, whatever its mass. [so our theory subsumes Galileo's great corrective to Aristotle: rate of free fall is independent of the mass of the falling body.]

Light rays must follow geodesics too. They must bend when near a strong source of curvature. They must bend by a certain amount, according to general relativity, and such bending has been confirmed experimentally. It is sometimes said that the mass-energy equivalence we have from special relatitivity, combined with plain old Newtonian gravitation, is enough to imply the bending of light rays. So it is, but the predicted bending is the wrong amount. We need general relativity---a geometrical theory of gravitation---to understand the cosmos aright.

The central equation of general relativity is Einstein's field equation. This relates the source matter distribution in some spacetime to the metrical structure of that spacetime and, thence, to the curvature of that spacetime. The curvature tells us how a test particle will move; it will move along a geodesic, specified by the curvature. Looking at Einstein's field equation in the reverse way, we can say that curvature also tells us what source matter must be present. By metrical structure, we mean: the lengths of curves, the distances between points, a notion of straight line, and a notion of angle between any two intersecting straight lines.

Einstein's field equation has many mathematically correct solutions, and each describes a possible spacetime structure. The question is "Which of these solutions corresponds to the actual, physical universe?" Since about the time of Copernicus, it has seemed most natural to suppose that physical space is homogeneous and isotropic: space has no preferred locations or orientations. That is just what we find when we look over the galaxies across very large ranges (10exp8 light-years); galaxy distribution then appears homogeneous and isotropic. The assumption of homogeneity and isotropy restricts the admissible solutions of Einstein's field equations.

In particular, homogeneity and isotropy permit only solutions in which curvature is constant. There are three classes of solutions satisfying this requirement, three possible spaces of constant curvature. These are the solutions with space curvature zero, positive, or negative. If we take into account the obvious fact that the universe contains some matter---that it is not empty---then Einstein's equation still admits any of these three solutions, but it implies within each that remotely separated points (intergalactic points) are either all moving apart or all are coming together. This implies that spectral lines from distant galaxies will be systematically shifted either to the red or to the blue. Edwin Hubble observed, in 1929, that they are shifted to the red. Therefore, the universe is expanding.

The distances between galaxies are growing in the present epoch such that a volume of about 10exp5 cubic light-years of space is added every five seconds. The expansion (or contraction) implied by Einstein's equation should not be thought of as having some center. Intergalactic distances are everywhere increasing. That is all.

Given that the universe is expanding, Einstein's equation [with zero cosmological constant] implies further (again, for all three possible space curvatures) that the universe was expanding the faster the farther back in time we look. General relativity has the astonishing implication that a finite time in the past, all space and matter was just a point, a singularity of zero volume and, so, of infinite mass density.* That singularity was the Big Bang. From astronomical measurements, we compute it to have occurred roughly fifteen billion years ago.

Three caveats are in order. Firstly, the Big Bang does not represent an explosion of matter into preexisting space. There was no preexisting nonsingular space. Secondly, "since spacetime structure is itself singular at the big bang, it does not make sense, either physically or mathematically, to ask about the state of the universe 'before' the big bang; there is no natural way to extend the spacetime manifold and metric beyond the big bang singularity" (Wald 1984, 99; see also Sorabji 1983, 214-24). Thirdly, we should not expect classical general relativity to apply all the way back to an absolute singularity. To fathom the very beginning, we need, but do not yet have, a quantum theory of gravity (Wald 1984, 378-89).

The future of the universe depends on which of the three space curvatures is the true one. . . .

For full scientific references, see the original essay at Objectivity Archive. The essay is in V1N5.

*The mass (i.e., mass-energy) can have its present nonzero value all the way back to the singularity under general-relativity cosmology. The total angular momentum of the universe could also have its present value all the way back, but this value is unknown and may be zero.

Edited May 5, 2007 by Stephen Boydstun

[Brant Gaede]

My problem is with trying to derive the start of the universe from math, not understanding it as it exists. And I have a problem with using only bottom-up knowledge, i.e., deriving entities from subparticles (emergence) as the only explanation.

Is there any real reason so far believing that the universe had a start other than an epistemological conceit?

Michael

Do you understand what Bob said about background radiation? I don't understand what you are replying to. So the universe had a start. The only thing I know of that probably didn't have a start is existence itself, because non-existence only exists as a concept juxtaposed to the concept of existence. Reality has substance. Non-existence has zip. Something existed before the Big Bang or it was something out of nothing, a contradiction.

So, where in all this is math leading the reality horse? And how much more top-down can you get than with reality exists, A is A? Everything, knowledge-wise, starts with observation. After induction, deduction, but I see the temptation to let the latter run off on its own resulting in all kinds of nonsense.

--Brant

Edited May 5, 2007 by Brant Gaede

[Ellen Stuttle]

Later on Hoyle showed the Cosmos to be expanding by detecting the red-shift of light from distant galaxies. Einstein realized his error based on Hoyle's findings.

Do you mean Hubble (not Hoyle)?

Ellen

___

[Ellen Stuttle]

The expansion (or contraction) implied by Einstein's equation should not be thought of as having some center. Intergalactic distances are everywhere increasing. That is all.

[snip]

The total angular momentum of the universe could also have its present value all the way back, but this value is unknown and may be zero.

I'm not understanding how there would be a "total angular momentum" of the universe without the universe being thought of as "having some center." What would the total universe be thought of as having angular momentum in relationship to?

Ellen

___

[primemover]

My problem is with trying to derive the start of the universe from math, not understanding it as it exists. And I have a problem with using only bottom-up knowledge, i.e., deriving entities from subparticles (emergence) as the only explanation.

Is there any real reason so far believing that the universe had a start other than an epistemological conceit?

Michael

Do you understand what Bob said about background radiation? I don't understand what you are replying to. So the universe had a start. The only thing I know of that probably didn't have a start is existence itself, because non-existence only exists as a concept juxtaposed to the concept of existence. Reality has substance. Non-existence has zip. Something existed before the Big Bang or it was something out of nothing, a contradiction.

So, where in all this is math leading the reality horse? And how much more top-down can you get than with reality exists, A is A? Everything, knowledge-wise, starts with observation. After induction, deduction, but I see the temptation to let the latter run off on its own resulting in all kinds of nonsense.

--Brant

This is my position as well. Causality assumes existence and is only possible within existence. To discuss the how is to enter into science and out of philosophy.