On 1/26/2020 11:17 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:
On Sunday, January 26, 2020 at 11:54:24 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote:
On 1/26/2020 8:08 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:
When I offered my theory of a hyper-spherical universe, I was
accused of being "Aristotelian". But why? My primary assumption
was IF the universe had a start or beginning, that "time" must of
been characterized by zero volume.
Exactly the sort of thing Aristotle would have taken as a logical
axiom.
*Does that mean it's wrong? Does Aristotle have an exclusive patent
on "right thought"? AG *
My reasoning is that IF had non-zero volume, it must have begun
_earlier_; hence, this situation wasn't its start or beginning.
Look at the Hawking-Hartle no-boundary model. When does it start?
*Hawking still claims the universe has a beginning. It could be right.
It's speculative, as is my model. Is Hawking an Aristotelian? AG
*
No, because they simply present a theory and don't argue that it must be
right because their "logic" (i.e. intution) demands it. They tried to
deduce some testable consequences of their theory.
*
*
From Wiki: Hartle and Hawking suggest that if we could travel
backwards in time towards the beginning of the Universe, we would note
that quite near what might otherwise have been the beginning, time
gives way to space such that at first there is only space and no time.
According to the Hartle–Hawking proposal, the Universe has no origin
as we would understand it: the Universe was a singularity
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity> in both
space and time, pre-Big Bang. However, Hawking does state "...the
universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time
itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago.",
but that the Hartle-Hawking model is not the steady state Universe
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_State_theory> of Hoyle
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle>; it simply has no initial
boundaries in time or space*
*
My prejudice, if that's what it is, is that the creation event,
if there was one, couldn't have "started" without some
time-requiring process.
Which is why I cited Hawking-Hartle. Their "process" doesn't require
time in the physical sense to "start", rather time starts beyond a
certain amount of space.
Another reliance of an Aristotlean intuition. Did "start or
beginning" turn into "creation event"? Isn't "creation" just
sneaking in the idea of a process.
*No. I think in science we try to extrapolate from observations of the
physical world. It doesn't always work, but often it does. AG *
So, if there was something, rather than nothing at the beginning,
the time-requiring process must have began _earlier_, thus
contradicting the idea of a beginning with some thing already
existing, say some volume of space. The logic here is sort-of a
proof by contradiction. Whether you agree or not, what has this
to do with Aristotle?
Because Aristotle (and other Greek philosophers) thought their
intuition could impose constraints on how nature can be, and
called it "logic".
*Like Democritus and his atomic theory of matter? AG
*
Democritus (as far as we know, because we only have references to him)
presented his atomic theory as empirical speculation. He didn't try to
"prove" it by specious logic; the way Aristotle argued that there could
be no vacuum. I'm not saying Aristotle was always wrong, just that he
put too much faith in his intuition. Almost all scientist now (Bruno
being an exception as a logician) think it is a fools errand to try to
derive even mathematics, much less physics from logic+intuition.
Brent
Brent
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