On 14 February 2015 at 07:08, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On 13 Feb 2015, at 11:41, LizR wrote: > > On 13 February 2015 at 18:20, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 2/12/2015 6:24 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: >> >> John, >> >> Calling 'empty space' 'nothing' in the philosophical sense is just a >> confusion. I can only repeat what I said before: >> >> 'My position is that the idea that you can explain the origin of "a >> universe from nothing" is absurd.' Either you have pre-existing laws and >> substrate -- which is not 'nothing' -- or the universe just "pops" >> spontaneously, and laws, etc, are just descriptions of observed >> regularities in whatever has "popped". You don't have many other options. >> >> >> The other popular option (in both religion and physics) is that the >> universe is eternal and no "popping" is needed. Some are eternal and >> infinite and others are eternal and cyclic. >> > > This is true, of course, and changes the question (slightly) - "Why does > the eternal universe, and its laws of physics, exist?" > > A conspiration made by the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 8, sqrt(2), e, pi, i, > gamma, 24 > and 808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000, > tries to make you believe so. > > (The big number is the number of elements of the Monster group, and is > related to the Moonshine conjecture; which gives light on some shortcut > between number theory and physics, and groups, and measures, ...). > > Anyway, if that is true, that has to be justified by the > self-introspecting universal machine. And that gives a piece of formalism > (S4Grz1, Z1*, X1*), so we get some light and testing abilities. > > Liz, could you please remind me which hat you put during month with "r". > > For the purposes of discussion with Mr Ross, it has to be a "primary materialist" one. I don't think he's ready to discuss other ideas (yet). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
