On Monday, January 27, 2020 at 2:05:48 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote: > > > > 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. >
*Is there any known physical process that occurs instantaneously? If not, then my speculation about processes requiring finite non-zero time durations is reasonable. What's UN-reasonable is to assume the opposite. AG * > > 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. > *Aristotle's intuition here was correct. Think vacuum energy content of "the vacuum". AG* > 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 > -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/537ca314-8af0-4d85-8712-81e6199c4882%40googlegroups.com.
