dmb said: Yea, the "first cause" is more or less the God of the philosophers, the God of the Deists. The Big Bang theory, however, is entirely natural. That's exactly why religious people dislike it so much. The only unknown, the only area about which there is no overwhelming consensus, is what happened in the first fraction of a second, a tiny fraction.
Ham replied: Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln? Inasmuch as everything in existence has to start somwhere, this "fraction of a second" that is "the only unknown" becomes critical to all other theories about the universe. Certainly it has been the cardinal issue in metaphysics throughout history. ...But, as you can clearly see, DMB and Krimel are not about to be seduced by the "supernaturalism" of metaphysics. For them, the "real world" of experience is inviolable, and all knowledge must be empirical -- based on what Science says. I find it ironic that such closed minds remain on this forum to interpret Pirsig's thesis for us. ... dmb says: The big bang theory is a matter of physics, not metaphysics. And the difficulty with determining what must have happened in the first fraction of a second can hardly be compared to getting shot in the head. In fact, the theory itself helps to explain why the very beginning is so elusive. As I understand it, prior to the "explosion" all the constituent elements of the universe (time, space, matter, energy, etc) existed in a kind of symmetry so that they were an as yet undifferentiated unity. Stephen Hawking calls it a "singularity". (A black hole is a small, local version of this singularity.) The expansion of the universe is basically the process of unfolding and differentiation. This can be calculated in terms of interactions between the constituent elements and, by way of math and such, they can trace those interactions backward. But only to a certain point because in the first fraction of a second the "laws" that govern the interactions break down and no longer make sense simply because there are no constituents elements that can interact or be governed by laws. I mean, how can we ask when it happened or how much time it took when we are talking about something that occurred before there was such a thing as time. The mystery here stems from our inability to conceptualize the universe prior to matter, space and time itself. And what we DON'T know, or maybe CAN'T know, is what broke the symmetry of that singularity and thereby lit the fuse. Bang! Metaphysical speculations could leap into the lurch at this point and try to make claims about how that happened or why that happened, but this would not be science. I can't speak for Krimel on this point because I generally disagree with his scientistic, reductionistic stance. The MOQ (and I) take the empiricism of science to be too narrow. It is based on what we might call "sensory empiricism" and this usually means they're operating with the assumptions of SOM. The MOQ's radical empiricism rejects those assumptions and expands the notion of "experience" beyond what can be known through the five senses. It insists that all experience counts as real and rejects as unreal anything that can't be known in experience. The how and the why of the first moment of the big bang would certainly be outside of any kind of experience that I know of. Traditional sensory empiricism excluded too much and we can criticize it on those grounds. We can discuss the limits and flaws in science. We can have a conversation about the philosophy of science but, again, to go around mocking today's working scientific theories only makes a guy look like an ignorant religious fanatic. And rightly so. The church of reason certainly has its problems, but unlike "metaphysical speculations" it is at least based on experience. The method is grounded experience. That's what makes it work. I once heard the physicist Michio Kaku speculate about that first split second. The interviewer invited him to speculate and Kaku went out his way to insist it was just his own personal guess. "So how or why was the symmetry broken?", he was asked. He answered, with a shrug, "God got bored". In his book, HYPERSPACE, he says, "Aquinas thought he solved the problem of what came before God by defining him as the First Mover. Today we are still struggling with the question of what happened before the Big Bang. Unfortunately, Einstein's equations break down at the enormously small distances and large energies found at the origin of the universe. At distances on the order of 10 to the negative 33rd power centimeter, quantum effects take over from Einstein's theory" (195). But he also points out that, "every year, we find more experimental evidence that the Big Bang occurred roughly 15 to 20 billion years ago" and he lists many pages worth of evidence. He says one can find articles in places like the New York Times saying that the Big Bang theory is in trouble, but he insists that it just ain't so. On the contrary, the super colliders that are being built and used today are meant to conduct experiments that will shed light on that unknown area. I mean, the state of the art is such that this question continues to be perhaps the most exciting and interesting area of inquiry in the entire field. But I've always been way more into the humanities and I couldn't make it all the way through Hawking or Kaku. But you could ask a nerd to tell you all about it. Thanks, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Introducing Live Search cashback . It's search that pays you back! http://search.live.com/cashback/?&pkw=form=MIJAAF/publ=HMTGL/crea=introsrchcashback Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
