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I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don’t need to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having figured out what happened at the begin

by synu 4y ago

I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don’t need to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having figured out what happened at the beginning of the universe because we can never know. This seems to explicitly exclude the possibility that there could ever be a discovery you might read about that would change that.

twiss 4y ago
She explicitly says that the scientific method is insufficient to give an answer to this question. So reading anything written by scientists won't give a conclusive answer. I think it's implicitly hinted that you might as well read something by a religious person, or a philosopher, or anyone with a random theory, as none of the theories can be proven or disproven by the scientific method, and so all of their answers will be equally (un)satisfying. It's theoretically possible that we'll one day find some other method of finding out the truth (perhaps a god will descend from the heavens and tell us? or perhaps we manage to find a bug / exploit in the simulation?) but personally I find it unlikely.
- pronlover723 4y ago
  She did make an appeal to simplicity, claiming that simpler is better, and she stated that religious origins are way more complicated so while they can't be proven wrong, if you accept the idea that simpler is better then religious explanations are unlikely to be true.
  - twiss 4y ago
    Yes, in the context of an example where the scientific method does / did work, and provides a simple explanation, namely evolution. Her argument is that in the case of the origin of the universe, the scientific method doesn't work, instead. That doesn't make the religious "method" better, but also not worse.
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  Honestly I find “it’s unknowable” to be a pretty satisfactory answer. Mostly because to me it points at something that seems almost obvious the more I’ve thought about it. Even if it were possible to see past the “Big Bang”, what possible reason is there to think that would be the end of the rabbit hole? As mind bending as it is to think that the trail is infinite, it’s even more mind bending to imagine that it’s not.
DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
Well to quote user mensetmanusman: "Per thermodynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable beginning." I think 'never' should be understood in this way—either there's something wrong or fundamentally incomplete about our theories, or we can not know certain things. Barring groundbreaking advancements in understanding akin to quantum physics and relativity theory, physics tells us so. Since the papers discussed do not establish such a new and testable theory but still go and discuss things current science cannot access, they cannot taken to be science. Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong or uninteresting. I don't think she excludes the possibility that a groundbreaking discovery could be made that changes that. But the papers were not written in a time that knows of such a discovery.
- synu 4y ago
  Ok, yeah maybe I could see that. But it’s kind of a confusing message - don’t read or take this research on this topic seriously, except in case some research on this topic comes that you should read and take seriously.
  - bardworx 4y ago
    Per PBS SpaceTime, humanity has been able to recreate conditions 0.000001 seconds after Big Bang (arbitrary number), in particle accelerators. But to add an extra 0 would require the energy output of our universe. The implication is that we simply don’t have enough energies to recreate similar circumstance in a particle accelerator and we cannot “see” past microwave background radiation. As such, as of now, there isn’t a straight path to understand the Big Bang further in any context.
  - tux1968 4y ago
    A more charitable reading would be "appreciate that all such theories are necessarily humble and limited; unless the entire context of science and human understanding becomes fundamentally and dramatically transformed"
    - synu 4y ago

by synu 4y ago

twiss 4y ago

She explicitly says that the scientific method is insufficient to give an answer to this question. So reading anything written by scientists won't give a conclusive answer. I think it's implicitly hinted that you might as well read something by a religious person, or a philosopher, or anyone with a random theory, as none of the theories can be proven or disproven by the scientific method, and so all of their answers will be equally (un)satisfying. It's theoretically possible that we'll one day find some other method of finding out the truth (perhaps a god will descend from the heavens and tell us? or perhaps we manage to find a bug / exploit in the simulation?) but personally I find it unlikely.

pronlover723 4y ago
She did make an appeal to simplicity, claiming that simpler is better, and she stated that religious origins are way more complicated so while they can't be proven wrong, if you accept the idea that simpler is better then religious explanations are unlikely to be true.
- twiss 4y ago
  Yes, in the context of an example where the scientific method does / did work, and provides a simple explanation, namely evolution. Her argument is that in the case of the origin of the universe, the scientific method doesn't work, instead. That doesn't make the religious "method" better, but also not worse.
bandyaboot 4y ago
Honestly I find “it’s unknowable” to be a pretty satisfactory answer. Mostly because to me it points at something that seems almost obvious the more I’ve thought about it. Even if it were possible to see past the “Big Bang”, what possible reason is there to think that would be the end of the rabbit hole? As mind bending as it is to think that the trail is infinite, it’s even more mind bending to imagine that it’s not.

DemocracyFTW2 4y ago

Well to quote user mensetmanusman: "Per thermodynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable beginning." I think 'never' should be understood in this way—either there's something wrong or fundamentally incomplete about our theories, or we can not know certain things. Barring groundbreaking advancements in understanding akin to quantum physics and relativity theory, physics tells us so. Since the papers discussed do not establish such a new and testable theory but still go and discuss things current science cannot access, they cannot taken to be science. Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong or uninteresting. I don't think she excludes the possibility that a groundbreaking discovery could be made that changes that. But the papers were not written in a time that knows of such a discovery.

synu 4y ago
Ok, yeah maybe I could see that. But it’s kind of a confusing message - don’t read or take this research on this topic seriously, except in case some research on this topic comes that you should read and take seriously.
- bardworx 4y ago
  Per PBS SpaceTime, humanity has been able to recreate conditions 0.000001 seconds after Big Bang (arbitrary number), in particle accelerators. But to add an extra 0 would require the energy output of our universe. The implication is that we simply don’t have enough energies to recreate similar circumstance in a particle accelerator and we cannot “see” past microwave background radiation. As such, as of now, there isn’t a straight path to understand the Big Bang further in any context.
- tux1968 4y ago
  A more charitable reading would be "appreciate that all such theories are necessarily humble and limited; unless the entire context of science and human understanding becomes fundamentally and dramatically transformed"
  - synu 4y ago