On 1/24/2012 8:27 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
Hi Brent,
On 1/24/2012 9:47 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 1/24/2012 6:08 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
Hi John,
1. I see the Big Bang theory as a theory, an explanatory model that attempts to
weave together all of the relevant observational facts together into a scheme that is
both predictive and explanatory. It has built into it certain ontological and
epistemological premises that I have some doubts about.
Such as?
Let us start with the heavily camouflaged idea that we can get something, a
universe!, out of Nothing.
It is not at all camouflaged; Lawrence Krause just wrote a book called "A Universe From
Nothing". That the universe came from nothing is suggested by calculations of the total
energy of the universe. Theories of the origin of the universe have been developed by
Alexander Vilenkin, Stephen Hawking and James Hartle. Of course the other view is that
there cannot have been Nothing and Something is the default.
2. Dark energy is nothing more than a conjectured-to-exist entity until we have a
better explanation for the effects that it was conjectured to explain. We have never
actually detected it. What we have detected is that certain super-novae seem to have
light that appears to indicate that the super-novae are accelerating away from us.
This was an unexpected observation that was not predicted by the Big Bang theory so
the BBT was amended to include a new entity. So be it. But my line of questions is: At
what point are we going to keep adding entities to BBT before we start wondering if
there is something fundamentally wrong with it?
I think what you refer to as the Big Bang Theory is called the concordance theory in
the literature. It includes the hot Big Bang, inflation, and vacuum energy. The
reason Dark Energy (so called in parallel with Dark Matter) was so readily accepted is
that it was already in General Relativity in the form of the cosmological constant. It
didn't have to be amended; just accept that a parameter wasn't exactly zero.
A "constant" that Einstein himself called the "greatest mistake of his life".
Only because it caused him to miss predicting the expansion of the universe - or maybe you
don't believe the universe is expanding.
The problem is that one can add an arbitrary number of such scalar field terms to one's
field equations. Frankly IMHO, it is more "something from nothing" nonsense.
But you can't add any others that are simpler than the curvature terms, which are second
order, except the constant CC term.
It is not possible to prove that something exists in an absolute sense, for who is the
ultimate arbiter of that question?
There is no ultimate arbiter. What is thought to exist is model dependent and it
changes as theories change to explain new data.
WOW! We been informed that we can now make things pop in and out of existence merely
by shifting our belief systems. Who might have imagined such a wondrous possibility!
Umm, NO. Existence is not subject to our perceptions, theories of whatever.
Read more carefully. I wrote "What is *thought* to exist..."; which is obviously true. We
thought atoms existed long before they could be imaged. We think quarks exist based on a
theory that says they can't be observed.
Brent
"The most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by
nothing, and for nothing."
--- Quentin Smith
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