35 ms·

We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

• RappingBoomer 4y ago
  or when it will end, despite university profs trying to justify their high salaries by confidently predicting exactly what will happen to the universe...no one knows, despite lying university blowhards telling us that they know everything
• ryaneckh 4y ago
  We may have a better understanding someday though. Roger Penrose's Cyclic Universe theory is quite intriguing to me, but unfortunately still doesn't answer the question if there was an initial created universe or an infinite amount of prior universes (aeons).
• LadyCailin 4y ago
  I really love when science goes so deep, it loops back around into philosophy. When I took intro philosophy in college, I really was pleased how deeply it is ingrained in everything else. There’s a reason people like Descartes are well known in both math and philosophy.
• jacquesm 4y ago
  "The issue is that physicists can’t accept the scientifically honest answer: We don’t know, and leave it at that." This sentence jumped out for me. Is there some kind of crusade going on that I have missed the beginning of? This feels like a strange sentence in this piece and feels like a (misguided) attack.
  • dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Sabine H. That’s her horse.
    • Victerius 4y ago
      She's fantastic. She doesn't hesitate to call out the physics community on its idiosyncrasies. She is a necessary check and balance on the mainstream body of researchers.
      • mhh__ 4y ago
        She’s basically a check and balance on public perception of research, she isn’t a particularly influential physicist
      • XorNot 4y ago
        I'm increasingly sceptical. She's not in research anymore but has found success running an "I know what I'm talking about" contrarian blog. If she was a software developer we'd rightly start to wonder about grand pronouncements coming from someone no longer practicing in the field. When your market doesn't exist if you actually agree with anyone, the incentives start to be questionable.
        • jahnu 4y ago
          > She's not in research anymore What are you talking about? She is still publishing proper research papers as recently as this month! https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=author&query=Hossenfelder%2C+S https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=author&query=Hossenfeld... Some people pick up weird ideas about her and I really wonder why.
          • XorNot 4y ago
            So you're right - Research Fellow at Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Science [1] However her broad ranging commentary which tends to take the tone of "this field should listen to me but doesn't" as is the case with this article (and a few others she's done such as about the LHC[2] or black-hole information loss[3]) leaves a sour taste in my mouth. [1] https://www.fias.science/en/fellows/detail/hossenfelder-sabine/ https://www.fias.science/en/fellows/detail/hossenfelder-sabi... [2] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/10/particle-physicists-continue-to-make.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/10/particle-physicists... [3] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/i-stopped-working-on-black-hole.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/i-stopped-working-o...
  • willis936 4y ago
    Yes but you missed the beginning because the origin is almost as old as the age of enlightenment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
  • elevaet 4y ago
    The purpose of science is to try to understand the world. Even if we never can answer how the universe began, I hope we never give up trying.
    • brightball 4y ago
      Agreed completely.
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      The job of science is to tackle answerable questions. There are lots of these not started on yet. Maybe save the unanswerable questions for after.
  • neffy 4y ago
    Early pixel blob analysis (I don't know a better way to put this, check Figure 5 in the paper) from the James Webb: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09428.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09428.pdf Suggests that the universe may be older than the Big Bang theory predicts. There are a lot of qualifiers on both sides of this, so I would suggest sitting back with some popcorn and enjoying the spectacle of a lot of primate descended life forms earnestly debating something that in many cases they couldn't even be bothered to read up on.
    • consp 4y ago
      Haven't read the article but I remember some mentioning these analysis are quite useless without spectra. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can explain this.
    • ben_w 4y ago
      I can't open that link right now. If that's what I'm expecting it to be, the abstract begins "Panic!" as part of a disco pun? If so: https://youtu.be/I7lxzS6K9PU https://youtu.be/I7lxzS6K9PU and: https://youtube.com/shorts/1S2CxPUZDOY?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/1S2CxPUZDOY?feature=share
  • pygy_ 4y ago
    Yea, the intractable mystery is the existence of spacetime. Whether time has an origin, and whether we can measure how distant it is from us are questions that could be answered.
  • Ygg2 4y ago
    It's the honest answer. Our best cosmological theory applied backwards results in singularity. That's bad. See her droplet example. According to maximally projected Penrose diagrams in singularity time and space evert into the multiverse. You move in time and space flows around you. https://youtu.be/4v9A9hQUcBQ https://youtu.be/4v9A9hQUcBQ And according to our other most successful theory, space-time is divided into chunks. And boiling. Opposite of infinitely divisible, smooth relativistic space-time. Not to mention if we go with current astronomy theory, we end up with unexplained dark matter and dark energy, that give different answers depending on the methodology.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    I think she justifies the "attack" towards the end of the piece, where she talks about the many theories that purport to explain how the universe began. Her point is that you can always create a coherent mathematical model that "explains" this, but since it is logically impossible to check it, you're not proposing a scientific theory.
    • deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
      I don’t often go looking in Astronomy or cosmology journals, but I’d be surprised if either scientists were trying to publish articles like that — or if they were, that they could pass peer review. On the other hand, if you are working on theories that can extend into the early universe, it’s not unimportant to try and figure out where the model breaks down. Maybe t=0 isn’t possible, but t=1s? 1ns? 1ps? How much can we feasibly describe? I’d argue that not exploring the limits of models is also bad science. Knowing the limits is a fundamental part of communicating a model.
      • tsimionescu 4y ago
        > I’d be surprised if either scientists were trying to publish articles like that — or if they were, that they could pass peer review. The article we're discussing itself even links to one such paper [0]. All of the others she mentions are also published works - Penrose's CCC [1], the ekpyrotic universe [2], Hawking's no-boundary state [3] etc. > On the other hand, if you are working on theories that can extend into the early universe, it’s not unimportant to try and figure out where the model breaks down. Maybe t=0 isn’t possible, but t=1s? 1ns? 1ps? How much can we feasibly describe? Sure, but this is a different thing. Many of these are adding elements to the existing theories, and then predict a new initial state given the modified evolution laws. [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10714-021-02790-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10714-021-02790-7 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.01740?context=astro-ph https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.01740?context=astro-ph [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0103239 https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0103239 [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07702 https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07702
        • 4y ago
  • nfRfqX5n 4y ago
    from what i've read, physicists gladly accept what they don't know and make a point to admit that
• erlend_sh 4y ago
  What we do know is that the universe didn’t begin from nothing. It’s impossible for something to arise out of nothing, so there has always been something. Nothingness is the space that holds everything. From there it can be argued that the universe began with the adjacent possible of nothing.
  • speedbird 4y ago
    Do we? Please enlighten …
    • dijerido 4y ago
      This argument goes back to Parmenides.
    • Amezarak 4y ago
      I think most statements like this have an underlying conceptual problem in that they assume the existence of causality. Since the Big Bang is the beginning of space and time, it doesn’t make sense to say it “came from” anything - not nothing, anything. Nothing could have “caused” it because causality depends on there being a before in which the cause could take place. Causality breaks down with the beginning of time and that causes us a lot of conceptual confusion.
  • philipov 4y ago
    It's not impossible for something to arise out of nothing. Well, what I really should say is, it's not impossible for two somethings to arise out of nothing, as long as they have opposite charge and annihilate when they come into contact. I like to imagine there's an anti-universe moving backwards in time from the start of the universe, and that's where all the unexplained missing baryonic antimatter ended up.
    • tadfisher 4y ago
      So the universe is a crazy huge Feynman diagram that got split at the edge of a black hole? Cool.
    • 4y ago
• Ninjinka 4y ago
  God
  • webmobdev 4y ago
    Which one? The Hindu / Buddhist / Sufi Islamist philosophy of everyone being connected and being reborn / recycled comes pretty close to the scientific postulation that "energy is constant and can neither be created nor destroyed but only converted from one form to another". So when we die, our energy conserved in our body becomes something else. The caveat of the first law of thermodynamic is that all this happens only "in a closed system". So is God within this system, a part of the system and part of the energy in this system (which would mean that when we attain Moksha / Nirvana and escape the cycle of rebirth / reconversion, we become a part of God)?. Or is God outside this system?
  • gwd 4y ago
    The conclusion of her article: "So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics. It’s not wrong, but it isn’t scientific either. The Big Bang is the simplest explanation we know, and that is probably wrong, and that’s it. That’s all that science can tell us."
    • indigodaddy 4y ago
      “That’s all that science can tell us.” Currently perhaps. There’s a ton of big brains out there and even more yet to be born.
  • tuyiown 4y ago
    … or anything else
  • MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    Right. And since we created God, we're The Masters of the Universe. Cue He-Man music.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• draw_down 4y ago
• GrigoriyMikh 4y ago
  I enjoyed the video. But clickbaity title with "we will never know" disgusts me.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    But that is the whole point. It's a question outside what science can ever know, even in principle.
• suction 4y ago
• adaisadais 4y ago
  Is there infinite? Tough for finite things to try and understand much less comprehend such a simple and complex quandary. What happens if there really is infinite no beginning and no end. Or what if there is an Alpha and Omega - such a beautiful thing to not understand.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I think that this is the TL;DR of the whole piece: > So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics.
  • kevinventullo 4y ago
    The key difference from religion being the word “could”.
    • cwalv 4y ago
      We sometimes also rule out other ways it "could" have happened, because they're further from our current paradigm, or just harder (or maybe impossible) to verify. In this sense, it may not be a "religion", but there is an element of "faith"
      • paulryanrogers 4y ago
        Faith is believing without objective evidence. Yet if there is evidence of a possibility then there is no faith involved.
        • cwalv 4y ago
          I wouldn't say that faith is believing without objective evidence. It's believing without certainty
          • deleted 4y ago
            [deleted]
          • paulryanrogers 4y ago
            The Christian bible (Hebrews 11:1) and Merriam Webster appear to disagree [0]. [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faith https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faith
• revskill 4y ago
  Thinking in microservice, the universe began as a monothlic, and for scalability reason, it starts split into multiple galaxies. In software engineering, we do have black holes, it's where the code is a mess, untestable. So, in conclusion, the universe were born as a dense mess, from a "strange" matter , from there all basic physic atoms were born.
• 734129837261 4y ago
  "We don't know how fire comes to life, and we will never know." "We don't know how to defend ourselves against beasts, and we'll never know." "We don't know how disease spreads, let's just hug it out, we'll never know." "We don't know how to fly like a bird, we'll never know." "We don't know how to land the booster of a rocket, we'll never know." "We don't know how to cure that form of cancer, and we'll never know." What a ridiculous defeatist attitude. History has proven that, so far, we've been very reliable at figuring out things that were deemed impossible. I'd say we already know. It would be infinitely arrogant of us to think we're the originals. We're likely inside an inescapable but observable simulation, inside a simulation, repeat for any unknown number of times. That's probably how "the universe" (our universe) began. Our parent universes probably have far more complexities to them that have been stripped from ours, for the sake of computational simplicity. Perhaps the actual originals, or any of our parent simulators, know exactly how the universe came to be. We might figure it out, too.
  • TaupeRanger 4y ago
    None of those things are impossible based on known physics. Traveling backwards in time to observe the beginning of the universe, and/or somehow existing outside the universe in order to do the observation, is impossible. Could we learn new physics that make it possible? Yes, but it is still a totally different class of problems than the ones you listed. Those were ONLY a question of knowledge. The problem at hand is a question of both knowledge AND the laws of physics actually allowing for that knowledge to be had. There was never any reason to assume that we would be unable to cure a certain type of cancer with the right knowledge alone.
  • kretaceous 4y ago
    I agree that the title is kind of defeatist and I'm not against scientific research on finding the source of universe, heck I optimistically hope humans find it within my lifetime. That said, all your examples are really miniscule and dare I say, easy, as compared to the scale of understanding the universe. You present an interesting semi-fictional point on simulation.
  • pilaf 4y ago
    > We're likely inside an inescapable but observable simulation, inside a simulation, repeat for any unknown number of times. That's probably how "the universe" (our universe) began. That's just deferring the question. If we're a simulation inside a larger universe, then how did that universe begin? Although I'd argue if we're in a simulation then we're still a part of the host universe, even if kept in isolation, and it's that host universe we should ultimately care about when asking the big questions.
• ThinkBeat 4y ago
  I dont think we can get there. First, we would need to solve time. I am not sure if we are able to grasp it. Then we must figure out what happened at T-1 or T-2, which I think will be simple once we understand time. The theory creates a start and then explains the progress from there. but not what caused it. In theory of the cylinder than the universe travels to that is good but it does not explain how everything came to be. We have a simple to state problem. There was nothing, then there was something. Much like in Genesis ""And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."" Instead: Science says there was a big bang and from that everything was created. and we have figured out a model to explain (most) of the evolution since the big bang. Which means we can say no god did it. But the way the story begins is in my opinion quite similar. In one version god is used to explain what created us. Which then leads to the question of who created god and to answer that we need to figure out time. (I am aware that there are equations that explain what was at t-1 or explain that there was nothing and even asking the question of what was at t-1 is crazy. I do not have the background that could allow me to understand the equations, but every which way you do it you end up with a question of what started it, or what was before what was the trigger to get it going. Perhaps you can say that the universe has always been there, forever, sometimes it shrinks sometimes it expands, and we have a nice perpetuum mobile.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    Why does there have to be time before The Big Bang? IIUC, the hypothesis is that everything was packed into one super-dense black hole. Wouldn't there not be any time?
    • flatiron 4y ago
      The way we currently view time there was no time before the Big Bang. No space = no time
    • ThinkBeat 4y ago
      However, you play around with words the same question always remains what was before. Where did this super dense black hole come from? What caused it to be? What was it before it was a black hole? Our current theories for the origin of black holes as far as I know does not include the spontaneous appearance of a black hole for no reaosn.
• nyc111 4y ago
  I'm happy for physics that finally someone from their ranks is trying, at least trying, to say that cosmology is a hoax. I've been writing this for ages. Here's one article I dug: https://notlar3.blogspot.com/search/label/Big%20Bang https://notlar3.blogspot.com/search/label/Big%20Bang
• ISL 4y ago
  Never is a strong word.
• kevinventullo 4y ago
  Maybe it stops being science and starts being math, but I don’t think that means we should discourage people from doing it. That said, I am sympathetic to an argument that we may not need to fund such inquiries. “We will never know” sounds overly pessimistic to me; I could imagine someone from the 10th century claiming we will never know the trillionth prime number.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    I think that the evolution of physics has actually been a series of discoveries of new things that are impossible. We used to think that many things were possible if only we knew the right spell, or invoked the right god, or just worked hard enough. Then as people studied nature more thoroughly and systematically, they started observing laws that simply can't be crossed - conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, the increase of entropy , the limited speed of causality, the uncertainty principle - to name some of the bigger ones. All of these have put limits on something we used to think of as unlimited. There are many more non-existence proofs in math as well - so even in pure math, you can't escape this accumulation (probably the most famous such problem, one long attempted that ultimately proved impossible, is "squaring the circle", or in modern terms, the fact that pi^n is irrational for any rational n).
  • danwee 4y ago
    > “We will never know” sounds overly pessimistic to me; I could imagine someone from the 10th century claiming we will never know the trillionth prime number. There are tons of stuff we as human beings we'll discover and be pretty confident about it. There are other things we'll never know. I think that's part of being human, to know our limits.
• papito 4y ago
  Just say "unlikely to". Leave some room for success, bruh.
• gibsonf1 4y ago
  What if it never began and has simply always existed? That is the likely scenario, as the moment you think about it beginning, you again face beginning from what? What was that called before the universe other than the universe?
  • blooalien 4y ago
    > "What was that called before the universe other than the universe?" If it was "before the universe" then it wasn't called anything, because there was nobody here to give it the name "universe"?
  • pixl97 4y ago
    Then we have a lot of explanation needed as to why entropy was low and smooth between 13 and 14 billion years ago.
  • danwee 4y ago
    Our human brains cannot grasp the idea of "it simply always existed". Imagine a non-human being (e.g., "god", "beings from another dimension", "beings from an advanced civilization", etc.) telling us the theory of everything (with maths and all, if you want), and the end saying: "btw, there is no origin, and no end. Realiy has always existed". Do you think our scientists (or any other kind of curious human being) will say "Alright, got it. Won't keep investigating then. Thanks!". That won't happen, our human brains cannot understand that concept, and there will always be the "but how does it work?!"
  • aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
    Just because everything within this universe has some preceding cause doesn’t mean that the universe itself can’t have a beginning without anything preceding it.
    • jondeval 4y ago
      This is an interesting and important point. I'll attempt to rephrase your point slightly differently: Everything we observe in the universe has a sequence of linear causes stretching backward in time. However we can't be sure from these observations that Universe (or multiverse or something similar) itself has been caused in a similar way. -- I hope I got that right. But is the physical universe (or multiverse or something similar) that we experience a good candidate for the uncaused base reality that just exists? A good reason to think not is that universe is composed of stuff and parts that change relative to each other. If something changes, ie goes from potential to actual, then there is something that is more actual, or more real, from which we should be able to explain the change. Another way to say it is that we may not know what base reality is, but in order for it to be a good candidate for 'the' base reality, it should be completely simple. And the universe as whole, by all appearances, is quite complex.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  > So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics. I thought that was very insightful. Today people try to pawn of all sorts of opinions as “science” by covering them with the language of science.
• vouaobrasil 4y ago
  I think one thing that humans have not come to terms with is the possibility that some fundamental fields are essentially dead in terms of possible new discoveries that most people will care about. That doesn't mean that there's nothing left to do. There are minor details in some fields but they are more like engineering problems. Physics may be one of those fields and I certainly think math is as well. However, it's sometimes hard to recognize because there is a core group of people that keep it going because it's their nest egg.
  • johndunne 4y ago
    I believe this sentiment is what a large cross section of the physics community was thinking prior to Einstein’s breakthroughs.
  • jb1991 4y ago
    I quite disagree with this. Visionaries come along to unseat centuries of limitations, raising the ceiling forever. Those visionaries are rare, but there will be more.
    • vouaobrasil 4y ago
      Maybe, but if you look at the list of famous unsolved problems in math, it has been dwindling for a long time. The list used to contain problems that undergrads could understand. Biology is still like this -- you can take quite a few interesting unsolved problems in biology and explain it to most people. Math has a few left like the Riemann hypothesis, but the vast majority of new work that has been coming out is more like refinements (I say this as a PhD in math who as actually read them). We look at history and expect it to repeat itself, but if you closely examine math history you can actually see a decline. Take the time to truly examine "visionary" things that have happened in math and those events are actually getting fewer and fewer. I seriously doubt there is much left to do that is of interest to more than 5-10 people in each subfield.
      • galleywest200 4y ago
        Are you suggesting there are no more unknown problems in mathematics, that "the list" will not be added to?
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  But isn't Webb calling the BBT into question? Even if we answer how it began there is still: 1) Why? 2) What was there before that? 3) And before that? 4( And before that? And so on. It's the rabbit hole only hallucinogens can fill.
  • Victerius 4y ago
    My pet theory: Something has always existed. There was no beginning. No origin. No first cause. No t=0. No start. It's always been there. What was before that? That. And that. And that. Always that. And the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not absolute and can be broken.
    • pixl97 4y ago
      Understanding what time is and what time isn't can deeply affect ones view of the universe. Being stuck down here in a gravity well we think of time as a fundamental thing that ticks along the same for everyone. But when we start looking at things at cosmological scales even the idea of a t=0 starts to bend and break. For example look at particle interactions. The vast majority of them you can play them forward and backwards and they look exactly the same. You wouldn't be able to tell which way the video is running. The only way we can tell there is an arrow of time is because at some point a field asymmetry occurred. In a universe where all fields are symmetrical the idea of time simply breaks down and has no meaning. The history of the Universe channel touches on this in their latest video. Linked the wrong video, this is the one I meant to link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9m0sz2sUfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9m0sz2sUfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSCrSkK2HcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSCrSkK2HcQ
    • stackbutterflow 4y ago
      If time exists then there's always a before. Unless at some point time didn't exist. But if time didn't exist and then suddenly something started to tick, that's still a transition from "no time" to "time" and this "no time" was before "time". These thoughts are driving me crazy. There must be a piece of the puzzle we're missing. There must be something about time that isn't or wasn't always linear. Otherwise there's no end to the "who created it" question. It's similar to asking what contains the universe. And what contains the thing that contains the universe.
• sys_64738 4y ago
  For decades they told us it was the Big Bang and we believed them.
  • tuyiown 4y ago
    «they», «us», «we» ? no matter what your beliefs are, I urge you to figure out where it comes from, by who, and how your beliefs are shared.
    • sys_64738 4y ago
      I don't have a prevailing interest is how the universe was formed. The subject matter doesn't interest me. What does interest me is that the generally accepted position of all scientists who worked in this field said "Big Bang" was the de facto position. Until is suddenly isn't. That just throws the whole reputation of all those scientists into doubt with the average Joe.
      • paulryanrogers 4y ago
        Everyone should be willing to change their position often and without shame. Scientists in particular should not be elevated for holding unmovable conclusions about anything. They must be open to evidence proving their theories wrong. Those who prefer blind trust in unchanging authorities will be disappointed.
      • tjpnz 4y ago
        The Big Bang theory is still very much the de facto theory. The JWST findings while interesting are just one data point and they'll be further investigated. But it's way too early to say that BBT is dead. Scientists are constantly finding better theories for explaining things and I think the population in general understands and accepts that.
• sagivo 4y ago
  Looking at a static stone and deducing where it fell from may work based on the current rules you know today but no one tells you these are the only rules. We have to look at science as best guess for the moment and not as absolute truth.
• yewenjie 4y ago
  Any theory of everything has to fall into one of the options of Agrippa's Trilemma - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma
• akprasad 4y ago
  But, after all, who knows, and who can say Whence it all came, and how creation happened? the gods themselves are later than creation, so who knows truly whence it has arisen? Whence all creation had its origin, the creator, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not, the creator, who surveys it all from highest heaven, he knows — or maybe even he does not know. -- Nasadiya Sukta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta)
  • monktastic1 4y ago
    Okay, this is truly bizarre. I came here to share this exact quote (after reading a prior comment about how the universe itself may never know), only to find that someone already posted it... whose handle is the same one I use on other sites, because I share the same initials. Genuinely thought I'd gone crazy for a moment and posted this with an alternate account.
    • Bakary 4y ago
      I would say it's an unlikely coincidence, but not truly bizarre. - It's common for desi names to start with A or K - It's common for desis to use initials when referring to themselves - Some desi surnames are over-represented in the population - People with desi names are likely to come in contact with South Asian culture irrespective of their environment or if they speak the relevant languages. Or rather, they are more likely to have these avenues to begin with if they ended up with such a naming scheme. - There are only so many foundational or well-known texts in any culture, so if there is a relevant passage, it has a high likelihood of being cited It's not that different from a Jay Smith and a John Smith quoting a relevant C.S. Lewis or Biblical passage and having a jsmith handle.
  • throw7 4y ago
    'Maybe the creator doesn't know what he created.' Meaning he suffers from dementia and forgot what he created? I suppose that's possible.
    • jackmott 4y ago
• westcort 4y ago
  We may not know the answer to how the universe began, but a time loop at the beginning of the universe is my favorite explanation. Gott and Li proposed this model and you can see Gott explain it elegantly here: https://youtu.be/raTqAyLikLU https://youtu.be/raTqAyLikLU
  • egello 4y ago
    The thing about time loop is that, how and when did it began? I just can't wrap my head around something being here, there and everywhere at all times.
    • ben_w 4y ago
      with time loops. It began half way though me writing this sentence — that's the thing
    • c048 4y ago
      That's the thing about time-loops; you don't need to have a start and a beginning. There's a good movie about that concept; Interstellar.
      • Tenoke 4y ago
        Interstellar is pretty much nonsense even given the premise. Even if you are talking about time travel you can easily make something more plasuible than that. Also Interstellar had information passing from the future to the past which isn't really what's typically sufficent to consider it a time loop.
        • westcort 4y ago
          The time loop is allowed by the current understanding of physics. The math checks out.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • 4y ago
• barrysteve 4y ago
  Sabine likes to swing an axe into a tree. Her preaching gets tiresome fast though. She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it. Many solved or solveable problems in science are ghastly complex and computers improved or solved them. The LHC is a most-obvious example for that category. Do I even need to point out the counter-arguments or are we just taking Sabine at her word.. This thinking mirrors a cultural-faith shift and has little to do with the premise of the article, that we dont know and cant know the universe before the Big Bang. A scientist who doesn't preach is worth their weight in gold, usually because they're too busy doing science to preach. She is the red dressed woman on the Tiber River telling us how she won't let this stand anymore. Meanwhile the rest of us just get on with it. Accordingly saying this comment was a waste of time.
  • jessermeyer 4y ago
    > She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it. God wills the Universe into Being. I have explained everything completely. What qualities of a selection function do you have that would choose a different explanation? One that doesn't require something more complex than the Universe to explain the Universe?
    • barrysteve 4y ago
      Well it's not so hard to break apart all the presuppositions in that sentence, but I know you're not looking for this. Arguing tiber-river style divine simplicity is best left up to the dominican monk gregory pine and his debate partners. You might be disappointed to discover I was making a practical point, not using the ideal-metaphorical language of sabine and her culture. Practically speaking no matter where sabine and the concept of simplicity, teamwork and the coming relational tribalism goes, one can work on the ghost of the tree she is trying to chop down or drag an incomplete, complex part of science through the bubble of 'simplicity' out to disrupt the other side. Put more briefly, no matter how simple we all agree 'it' is, you can disrupt that bubble with infinite complexity, just as easily as she cuts down trees.
  • ben_w 4y ago
• gcau 4y ago
  Things like the big bang seem to be things after the beginning of the universe. In the same way, the issue with a god is "who created god, and who created that who created god...". If he's eternal, who/what made him eternal? We have the same problem in science, and I think any explanation/theory would have the same problem. Also, I dislike that when some physicists explain this they say, "sure, you can get something from nothing" and then change the definition of 'nothing' for their explanation to work. I feel like it's a disservice to not just admit mayyybe we don't know some things. Disclaimer: not a physicist and maybe missing something.
  • danwee 4y ago
    Indeed. We'll never know the beginning of everything; science cannot accomplish that, religion cannot provide satisfactory answers, and philosophy will always leave you half empty half full. That being said, discovering things is fun, so as human beings we should not stop doing science/religion/philosophy/etc ever.
  • aliasxneo 4y ago
    In the case of the Bible, it makes it explicitly clear that God is uncreated. Asking the question, "Who created an uncreated God?" doesn't make much sense in that case.
    • tsimionescu 4y ago
      Of course, but then immediately leads to the question: if we admit that it is possible for God itself to be un-created, why can't the universe itself be uncreated as well?
      • aliasxneo 4y ago
        That was a popular theory for a long time, although I think it's declined over the years. I don't recall the reasons why, though.
        • krapp 4y ago
• eis 4y ago
  • solarengineer 4y ago
    Here's how I understood it: "The Gods themselves are part of creation. Even if there were a Creator, he may not know for certain whether it was indeed him who created"
    • eis 4y ago
      But that doesn't get us any further than "We don't know yet." It doesn't prove or disprove anything. By the same line of reasoning one could say there is no time at all and all our memory of the past is an illusion generated by a simulation. The linked video talks about this: there are an infinite amount of theories that one can come up with to explain the current state and it might not be possible with our current understanding to prove them wrong. The problem I have with religious texts is they are very vague and evidently open to a lot of interpretation. And by talking about things like God and building a logical system out of wrong axioms that is then applied to daily life choices they actually can create real issues - we've had enough of them in history.
      • al_mandi 4y ago
        [flagged]
        • eis 4y ago
          [flagged]
          • al_mandi 4y ago
            What does having texts with some degree of interpretation have to do with whether those texts are true or not? Sounds like a genetic fallacy. > The existance of these monsters does not prove religions don't create issues. Or what's your claim? My claim is that without religion, we'd be in a far off worse place.
• liendolucas 4y ago
  Alright finally an explanation on why all the other explanations work. To me the most convincing theory how the universe began is this one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Wbb1cqubo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Wbb1cqubo
• aortega 4y ago
  If we will never know, then there should be some kind of proof that the beginning of the universe is un-knowledgeable, sort of like Godel's theory of incompleteness. But there is none, so the affirmation is incorrect: We don't know if we will never know.
  • mensetmanusman 4y ago
    Proof requires axioms, and the universe hints towards what they are but isn’t explicit. Per thermododynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable beginning.
    • c1ccccc1 4y ago
      You got the direction backwards. Increase in entropy means that the farther back you go in time, the less information the universe has in it in some sense. The initial state of the universe would therefore be very simple, having low entropy. If the state were simple enough, then in principle, we could figure it out in exact detail. The thing that thermodynamics says is unknowable is the distant future of the universe. We can predict that it will be dark and cold and empty and sparsely filled with ever-more red-shifted radiation, but it's impossible, even in principle, to know the details of exactly where each individual particle in going to end up.
      • mensetmanusman 4y ago
        Maybe we are thinking of S=k ln(0 or 1) then? Undefined or zero is not a great place to start:)
  • pronlover723 4y ago
    There are plenty of things we will never know and that there is no way of ever knowing. Here's some. Given this 10k year old pot https://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20120207-JomonPottery.JPG https://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20120207-JomonPottery.JP... What is the name of the person that created this pot, What day did they create it? Were they in a relationship at that time? Did they have children? How many siblings did they have? There's no way to know. You can theorise time travel to find out or you can weasle into believing we'll somehow make machines in the future that can measure every facet of every atom related to the creation of the pot in such a way as to be able to trace their trajectories through time backward but both of those are grasping at straws, things that are unlikely to ever actually come to pass. The reality is we'll never know the answers to those questions. The same is true of how the universe began. The best we can do is follow our theories of how the universe works backward and see where they lead and then try to create those initial conditions and see if we get the results we expect. It may be impossible to create those initial conditions though and even so, we'd be guessing at what those initial conditions actually were as we'd be assuming that running our calculations in reverse is true describe the actual initial conditions whereas they really only describe assumed initial conditions.
• mxkopy 4y ago
  John Wheeler popularized the term "it from bit" and the idea of a participatory universe. The limits of human observation aside, it could be that the universe itself doesn't really know how it began. If a superheated plasma is indifferent to being in a 5 dimensional black hole as opposed to a state where only space exists, then, in a sense, there isn't any difference between the two explanations (given that the plasma is the entire universe). There's this phenomenon in science where you think something is arbitrary, it could've happened in any number of ways. Then you do some digging and find out there is actually only one possible way for it to happen, none of the other ways make logical sense. And it's not a matter of initial state or anything, but of geometry or something. Sometimes, after I put down the crack pipe, I wonder if there is only one possible way for the universe to exist, and knowing it isn't a matter of observation, but of abstraction, that irreal logical constructions are actually not abstract enough to explain the universe, etc. Maybe a variable initial state doesn't make logical sense at the end of the day. Maybe the numbers we have to plug into the models to make them work are like pi or the zeros of the zeta function, maybe they just fall out of some result in group theory or sth idk
  • goldenkey 4y ago
    After I pick up the crack pipe from my HN brother, I come to the same conclusion. Most questions aren't even answerable in a cosmic context because they become ill formed at that level.
    • stakkur 4y ago
      After requesting the crack pipe from my fellow traveler, I conclude that the answer doesn’t matter. The universe Is.
      • honkdaddy 4y ago
        Putting down my bong and loading another, I remark to the travelers that the human brain is the only set of atoms in the universe which wonders why they are there. All the other atoms seem perfectly happy to exist at all.
• cdelsolar 4y ago
  Why is there even such a gigantic universe? Like what is the purpose of it - why was there a Big Bang? If I really think hard about these questions it makes me uncomfortable and anxious.
  • drewolbrich 4y ago
    In a gigantic universe, it’s statistically more likely that something interesting like you will happen in it.
  • h2odragon 4y ago
    Why anxious? the answers to those questions, while interesting and entertaining, aren't relevant to you today. Just be glad you get to experience this tiny little part of the universe for the brief time you're here.
    • cdelsolar 4y ago
      Is the universe gigantic enough and long-lasting enough that my consciousness will come back in some form after I die?
      • hota_mazi 4y ago
        There is no evidence to believe that's true, so you shouldn't believe it and assume that your current life is all you have. Enjoy it to the fullest while it lasts.
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        Uncountably many will that differ from you by random degree on uncountably many dimensions. How much like you do they have to be, to actually be you? Everybody reading this differs from you by only small degree. You differ from yourself-of-yesterday by a typically smaller amount, and -of-last-year by a less-small amount.
      • saulpw 4y ago
        "Your" consciousness, no. But consciousness in general may be eternal. Death of your self is like a drop of water returning to the ocean.
• singularity2001 4y ago
  the radius of the visible universe is about 14.0 billion parsecs (about 45.7 billion light-years), while the age of the universe is 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years. I must have missed out on some caveats to the speed of light.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    You did - space-time can expand with unbounded speed, and that is what happened in the early universe. Remember that the big bang is not some point in space-time which we are moving away from, it is a point in space-time that has expanded to the size of the current universe (and keeps expanding). The speed of light is only a limit on how fast matter/energy can move through space-time.
    • ksidudwbw 4y ago
      The speed of causation is also so unintuitive imo, but also a must to make anything make sense logically. After watching many hours of youtube i still cant wrap my head around it. Say you're accellerating 1g forever you never reach the speed of light for other observers.. Whats cool about gravity is that the spacetime 'train tracks' are tilted slightly into the earth so youre pulled down, but the earth is resisting tou going into it. Just waving your hands around is the same feel as playing with magnets
      • tsimionescu 4y ago
        I think the most intuitive explanation I've seen for c is that in fact everything always moves at a fixed speed, c, in space-time - either through space or through time (from past to future). You can neither increase nor decrease your total speed, you can only change its direction - the larger the space-only component is, the smaller the time component is. Additionally, mass deforms space-time such that a little bit of your motion towards the future is directed to the center of mass instead.
  • drran 4y ago
    You just discovered the Big Bug theory.
• amriksohata 4y ago
  In Hindu scriptures there are many many universes that are bubbles perspiring from a particular form of Vishnu as he lies down. With each breath the universes are formed and destroyed, for us the time is very very slow but at his level he is literally breathing in and out and the bubbles come and go.
• aurelien 4y ago
  This universe became just in universes bubbles explosion. One day, we will be able to determine which of the marbles of universes in the universes bag of marbles collide to create this one new marbles. Sciences is here to go further, not to stop thinking at the edge of one way of think.
  • aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
    Ok, then how did the “marble bag” came into existence?
    • yesco 4y ago
      It arose from the dream of a flying space turtle
• jgrowl 4y ago
  Therein lies the True eternal distinction between Reason and Faith. Reason is that which can be known and where it ceases becomes Faith. They are separate parallel structures, to mistake one for the other is folly. We know that everything we can see originated as a single point of one uniformly distributed substance. We know that everything we can see will return into one uniformly distributed substance (Heat and red-shifted light). Belief is Necessary to fill in the gaps between creation cycles (Or its rejection entirely).
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • michaelsbradley 4y ago
    “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth…” https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio.html https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
    • hota_mazi 4y ago
      Faith is the justification that people give when they believe something for no good reason. You can believe anything based on faith, therefore, it's not a reliable path to truth. Only reason is. The faster our civilization gets rid of faith, the better off we'll be.
      • michaelsbradley 4y ago
        Fides et ratio was written to address that problematic way of thinking (what you just expressed). Maybe give it a read.
        • hota_mazi 4y ago
          Could you outline what's problematic about it here?
  • 4y ago
• superposeur 4y ago
  I’m a big fan of the blog, but disagree with this entry. Her argument could be applied to the idea of the Big Bang itself: we can never receive light from any further back than the “surface of last scattering”, so the notion of a hotter prior epoch is an extrapolation. The extrapolation is a good one as it uses independently-tested laws of evolution, at least to the point these laws presumably break down, as she points out. Similarly, it’s entirely conceivable that we may find independent ways to test which of the proposed modifications of the evolution laws is correct, for instance by using data collected from binary mergers. Then, these modified laws would lead to a modified story of what happened near the Big Bang. Alternatively, it may happen that all but one or a few of the proposed modifications do not play nicely with the other forces of nature at a theoretical level. Or maybe not, but we certainly can’t rule out this possibility a priori. Moreover, her point about not having a multi-universe data set would dismiss all of cosmology as mere “ascience” — again, including the notion of the Big Bang itself. Instead, I think it likely that the present multiplicity of early universe proposals will be pruned as more data becomes available.
  • lambdasquirrel 4y ago
    > Her argument could be applied to the idea of the Big Bang itself What's wrong with that? The thing about science is that it cannot pretend that it knows. It needs to prove. To which end, I don't think we should be supposing that we're going to know. Otherwise we're doing religion.
    • necovek 4y ago
      Science is, effectively, religion/faith in a particular set of base presumptions (axioms of set theory or logic theory guide all "logical" reasoning). Basically, limits of human mind understanding things come with just having to trust some things are simply so. The biggest difference from things more commonly referred to as "religions" is that science invites you to challenge all these assumptions and look for a better (and smaller, simpler) working set that still explains all the phenomena we observe at least as well as the sets of axioms we currently use. And it knows that all the knowledge we gain is simply the approximation of the real stuff, and that we can only work to improve those approximations.
• t6jvcereio 4y ago
  We will never know! Stop asking questions, that's not how science is done!
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  And guess what: it doesn't f*ing matter.
  • deanCommie 4y ago
    It's true. Nothing "matters". Alternatively, and secularly: It may be the ONLY thing that matters.
• Guy2020 4y ago
• IAmGraydon 4y ago
  “We will never know” is such a contradictory statement. On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout the entirety of our future. Add it to your list of things to never write.
  • jmyeet 4y ago
    I think "fatalistic" is a better word than "contradictory". I otherwise agree. There are a lot of misconceptions about the Big Bang. The Universe is a metric space. The "metric" part here is deliberate, specific and technical. It really means that given two points the metric can tell us what we call the "distance" between them. Abstract maths deals with spaces that do and don't have metrics. The best explanation I've heard of the Big Bang is not that the Universe originated from a single point but rather the metric between all points in the Universe at the time of the Big Bang was 0. There's an open question about whether the Universe is finite or infinite. I mean the actual Universe not the observable Universe. This is almost a metaphysical question since we'll probably never know. We don't really know how gravity and space acts in such extreme environments but with black holes (that we also don't understand at the quantum level) we have plenty of examples of admittedly less extreme but still exxtreme corollaries. It is kind of mind-bending though. One description I read says that time acts like space and space acts like time within the event horizon. As in, you can see light entering the black holes behind you but that's the past and we can view the past all around us (eg distant galaxies are us viewing the past). Towards the singularity is the "future" and we can no more see that than we can see any future. We, as sentient beings, have a difficult time comprehending things beyond our existence. What I mean is that before we were born, we didn't exist. After we die, we don't exist. We can't really comprehend that intuitively because our perception of the world is predicated on our cognizance. The past is easier. Stuff happened before we were born. But now we do exist. So at some point in the future we won't exist. How can you comprehend your own lack of existence? I feel in some ways similar about the Universe. Our observations are predicated on concepts like "time" and "space" that at some point didn't exist. How do you reason about the lack of existence of space let alone time when everything we know is predicated on that? Still, I too feel like the author is too pessimistic about how much more we can learn here. Assuming we aren't extinguished in the next few centuries (which is actually more difficult than it sounds at this point) we are going to be here for an inconceivably long time. Given our understanding of the Universe, that's likely to be >10^100 years. That's a long time to figure stuff out.
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  But isn't Webb calling the BBT into question? Even if we answer how it began there is still: 1) Why 2) What was there before that? 3) And before that? It's the rabbit hole only hallucinogens can close.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• folsom 4y ago
  I am sure all pot smokers know the answer. The observable universe is in a much larger universe with many like itself. Sometimes universes collide and form a new universe. There is an infinite stack of these much larger and much smaller universes (more like a fractal tree actually); some are hot and some are cold but even cold universes can collide make a hot universe.
  • draw_down 4y ago
  • lioeters 4y ago
    Soma drinkers, lotus eaters, born-again mushroom enthusiasts.. We know how the universe began, trillions of different ways. Creativity and imagination are as much part of fundamental physics as quarks and entropy.
• jondeval 4y ago
  My strong opinions, weakly held: * God is not a good hypothesis for any secondary cause. The creation of space-time as we currently understand it must have had a secondary cause. Let's patiently keep looking for a scientific hypothesis (theoretical or empirical) that is an incremental improvement on what we already know. * Religious people who conceive of God as the creator, believing that the word 'creator' refers to the creation of the universe at some point in the past, are completely misunderstanding the use of the word and need to do some more homework. * Non-Religious people should stop conflating 'metaphysical' statements with religion. Can we agree that we need to make metaphysical statements from time to time if we are having a conversation to understand something 'about physics'?
  • jjcon 4y ago
    > Religious people who conceive of God as the creator, believing that the word 'creator' refers to the creation of the universe at some point in the past, are completely misunderstanding the use of the word and need to do some more homework. Can you explain what you mean here - I couldn’t follow
    • gjsman-1000 4y ago
      "misunderstanding the use of the word" Aka, I've used someone else's redefinition of the word away from the vernacular understanding, to redefine it to support my view of the world. See also "recession."
      • jondeval 4y ago
        Not quite. Although I fully understand the feedback. There are 2 equally valid senses in which the word creator can be used. Both conform to standard definitions but each used in a different sense. I tried to add clarity in the response above. Thanks!
    • pronlover723 4y ago
      I took it to mean "god is somewhere, you need to explain how that somewhere and god themselves came into being"
• mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  I honestly never cared for Hossenfelder's science communication. She's far too dismissive and dishonest in representing theoretical views she disagrees with. And I don't necessarily have the physics understanding to pick these biases out too easily. I think Sean Carroll for instance does a much better job at this when he interviews people whose views he disagrees with in his podcasts, which happens quite frequently.
  • TheBlight 4y ago
    I have a similar difficulty in listening to her. I think she does it to provoke interest but it has the opposite effect on me.
  • emerged 4y ago
  • koshnaranek 4y ago
    I enjoy it. There are a lot of communicators who shy away from giving their own opinion about anything that isn't the overwhelming consensus. They might be wrong after all. It is refreshing to have somebody actually disagree with something and then back it up.
    • green_on_black 4y ago
      It depends on what you mean by "back it up", especially regarding rigor. The more "surprising"/disagreeable an idea is, the more rigor we (or at least I) expect of the arguments.
  • UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
    agree but be aware carroll swings way way way way to the other extreme especially about the pet theories he happens to like: multiverses ; the everett interpretation of qm ;boltzmann's brains and so on
    • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
• moomin 4y ago
  I don’t think people are understanding the subtlety of what she’s saying here. She’s saying that since there are no predictions to be made, there’s nothing falsifiable in any of the many theories. Worse, if the theories _do_ make falsifiable predictions that still will only reduce the imaginative space, not reduce it down to one theory, and that instead we choose between theories on the basis of how many “constants” they require. This argument isn’t invalidated by possible future discoveries. It’ll still be possible to generate competing elegant mathematical models that only differ in ways that are unobserved.
  • everybodyknows 4y ago
    A concise shorthand for "non-falsifiable theory" is "faith".
    • lisper 4y ago
      Only if you choose to believe that a non-falsifiable theory is actually true. Otherwise it's not faith, merely a hypothesis.
      • moomin 4y ago
        As anyone who’s watched Dinosaur Train could tell you, a hypothesis is “an idea you can test”.
        • lisper 4y ago
          Dinosaur Train doesn't get everything right. An untestable hypothesis is still a hypothesis. Even an unfalsifiable hypothesis is a hypothesis. But testable hypotheses are better then untestable (and unfalsifiable) ones because, well, you can test them to see if they are false.
  • superposeur 4y ago
    Yes, but this is a generic rubric to apply to all frontiers of science: falsifiable theories are good; unfalsifiable theories are bad; even when you falsify a theory, there will always be room to fudge and rescue it by making it more baroque; the principle of parsimony should be applied to give less credence to baroque theories. I see no reason to place the frontier of "what happened right at / before the Big Bang where vanilla GR breaks down" in a different epistemic category than all other frontiers of science, as the blog post seems to do. i.e., I see no reason that we should not build models and collect data in order to expand into this frontier, as we profitably do in other areas of science.
• zugi 4y ago
  In his famous talk "A Universe from Nothing", Lawrence Krauss makes the same point, if slightly less definitively. ("We may never know", and that's okay - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo) By analogy he describes how, due to the expansion of the universe, Milky Way residents 100 billion years from now will be unable to observe the cosmic background radiation or any galaxy but our own. Civilizations wil evolve, invent science, use the best tools possible, and incorrectly conclude that the universe consists of one single galaxy alone in a vast sea of empty space. When we triply rewrite hard drives, we understand that information can be destroyed. Sometimes the universe does the samething. Sometimes information is irretrievably lost.
• dominojab 4y ago
• MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Ignoramus et ignorabimus.
• xwdv 4y ago
  I wonder if we really want to know, or if we'd rather enjoy speculating for all eternity. Seems like the journey is more fun than the destination.
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  Impossibility: the limits of science and the science of limits by John D Barrow — rest in peace — is an excellent book about the aspects of the Universe we can never know. For example, the visible Universe and whether constants are constant. When this blogger starts by pushing back on philosophers, I think they may mean scientists like Barrow, which is a shame because he makes for very compelling reading. In fact, have I not seen warnings here, from reputable posters, about this Backreaction blog? In any case, I recommend the ahem “philosophy” book heartily.
• kosh2 4y ago
  The only thing that can maybe be understandable for us is an infinite universe. What was before 0? -1. What before that? -2. But how can we ever understand how out of a state of nothingness came something? That is where the science "ends" and the door to philosophy opens. Those are similar problems like "Why is there not nothing?", "Why are the laws of nature not different?" etc.
  • goldenkey 4y ago
    In projective geometry negative infinity and positive infinity meet :-)
  • green_on_black 4y ago
    To add to your point, why should there be nothingness? Who is to say that 0 is before 1? There's 1/2 somewhere right? And 1/4 before that, etc. It's not obvious that there "should" be nothing, rather than perpetual something. It's not obvious we should work with integers and not the reals. Or the rationals. Or the rationals without zero, which cannot exist as a denominator (in the common definition of the rationals). It's not obvious that we've ever detected zero. And why a line? Why not a circle? And even if a line, couldn't it be the limit of a circle whose radius tends to infinity? Etc.
• wheelerof4te 4y ago
  Of course we don't know. That does not mean we should stop searching for the answer. But before we try to understand how the universe began, maybe a better starting point would be: how did we begin? Finding out what exactly happened to us that made us different than the rest will lead to answers to greater mysteries of this world.
• eterevsky 4y ago
  It's somewhat ironic to see this statement from Sabine Hossenfelder, who as a quantum super-determinist holds quite specific beliefs about the beginning of the universe.
• galaxyLogic 4y ago
  This is what I don't get: "... if the universe expands today, this means if we look back in time the matter must have been squeezed together, so the density was higher. If the universe expands today, how does it follow that it was also expanding yesterday, or a million years ago? Maybe universe expands, then contracts again cyclically?
  • vkou 4y ago
    > Maybe universe expands, then contracts again cyclically? It's possible, but you're going to have to come up with a theory for why whatever 'force' is driving the expansion goes from negative, to positive, and back.
    • WXLCKNO 4y ago
      We live inside an engine piston?
      • vkou 4y ago
        And what wheel drives the inner workings of that piston?
        • eis 4y ago
          Maybe a better analogy would be a spring that goes from contraction to expansion and back again? A lot of things behave like waves so could it be some space field swinging in a wave-like pattern? Is there some evidence for the expansion to have also happened say 10B years ago in the CMBR?
    • galaxyLogic 4y ago
      Is there a good theory as to why Universe is expanding and acceleration its expansion? Dark Matter? Dark Energy? Cosmological Constant? Those are more like "We can not really explain it so we assume there is something like "Dark Energy" which causes it all.
  • SiempreViernes 4y ago
• rwbt 4y ago
  Reminds me of something Karl Popper philosophized about. I'm completely butchering it ofcourse, but it goes along something like this - Every scientific theory is waiting to be falsified by future generations. He concludes that everything in Empirical sciences cannot be proven, but instead they're only falsifiable.
  • tsol 4y ago
    The fact that things we have accepted as scientific fact have, in the past been proven to be utterly false points to the fact that any of the scientific facts we believe in may be false. And then there's always the possibility that you're a brain in a jar and this is just a dream so everything you believe is actually false. (wake up)
• luis8 4y ago
  We will know at the end of it and we will recreate it. Or at least I hope that's the outcome
• LiberationUnion 4y ago
  Oh, no. I'm so devastated. -_-
• edmcnulty101 4y ago
  I think we're limited by our genetics. There's a limit to our species intelligence. To a monkey an iPhone is just a rock. To humans the universe is equivalent to a piece of chorizo on a telescope.
  • eis 4y ago
    Yes we are limited by our genetics but what does that mean when you consider that we are starting to learn how to manipulate our genes? Evolution doesn't seem to stop. Science is advancing at an increasing pace and the boundary is pushed forward each and every day. What might become of humans in a million years?
    • edmcnulty101 4y ago
      This is a very good point. As from, so to. All it takes is one person with a mutant super-intelligence gene to bring forth a new step for human kind or one scientific discovery on how to hyper evolve a new babies intelligence. And we have several billion more years before the sun shuts down, so hopefully that will emerge.