Why Couldn't the Universe Exist Without a Cause?

[LogisticsBranch]

I want to add this to the Universe:

Excerpt from Chandra X-ray Center, Operated for NASA by
the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory:

RGG 118: Oxymoronic Black Hole Provides Clues to Growth
[Release Date August 11, 2015]
[Distance Estimate About 340 million light years]
. . . ]
The black hole in RGG 118 is nearly 100 times less massive than the supermassive black hole found in the center of the Milky Way. It is also about 200,000 times less massive than the heaviest black holes found in the centers of other galaxies.

Astronomers are trying to understand the formation of billion-solar-mass black holes that have been detected from less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The black hole in RGG 118 gives astronomers an opportunity to study a nearby small supermassive black hole in lieu of the first generation of black holes that are undetectable with current technology.

Astronomers think that supermassive black holes may form when a large cloud of gas, weighing about 10,000 to 100,000 times that of the Sun, collapses into a black hole. Many of these black hole seeds then merge to form much larger supermassive black holes. Alternately, a supermassive black hole seed could come from a giant star, about 100 times the Sun’s mass, that ultimately forms into a black hole after it runs out of fuel and collapses.

. . . ]
chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2015/rgg118/

 

[inocente]

Every day that passes I feel more and more interested on the mathematical understanding of these theories. I can understand when it is said that a given variable tends to infinity or to zero (or to another value) if another variable tends to zero, or to another value, or when it grows without limit; but for the moment I attribute no meaning to expressions like “zero space”, “infinite gravity”, “infinite density” or others like these.

That, I think, is the issue a number of cosmologists have with the current theory - the inability to make meaningful predictions in the face of infinities.

Concerning logic: you have suggested that we would need to prove the logical necessity of causality in order to affirm that the singularity has a cause. But I understand by logical necessity one that is derived from the application of our logic (the logic that everybody might come to know, if he wishes). So, when you say “Not sure what logic could find to work on in such a situation”, I ask you: to start with, might it be one that includes the principle of non-contradiction?

OK, can you put together a non-trivial statement about causality in a singularity which cannot be both true and false, and which is open to testing logically if not empirically? I can’t, but here’s hoping you or Laserman (hecd ) can.

 

[inocente]

I’ve just been re-reading The Goldilocks Enigma by Paul Davies. Lots of mind spinning stuff in there. In relation to events occurring at a very short time after the Big Bang he mentions Planck time and length. Anything shorter than either of these two measurements (and they are VERY short) and we’re in areas where it is understood that all current theories break down.

As regards the cause of the BB, he makes a very good point. An effect needs a cause and the one proceeds the other in time. If time did not exist before the BB, then causality is rendered meaningless.

He also talks about the probability of the difference between space and time becoming blurred at certain points. You really need to lie down for a while in a darkened room after reading some of this stuff.

And maybe the most telling quote in the book isn’t his. It’s by David Hume (quoting Philo):

"If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving?

Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labour lost, many fruitless trials made; and a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making. In such subjects, who can determine, where the truth; nay, who can conjecture where the probability lies, amidst a great number of hypotheses which may be proposed, and a still greater which may be imagined?"

So much for omnipotence…

I gave up on Paul Davies as he always seemed to speculate and come over all mystic and gooey eyed. Re darkened rooms, not sure if Hawking’s idea is still alive, of time as a complex number a + bi, where at the beginning a is zero and b ramps up first, and hey presto that means there’s no singularity.

Re the Hume, I’ve never been a fan of the intelligent design argument either, to me it reduces God to an excuse. Hume demolishes it, then he demolishes it again, then again… good stuff. Never read him, only bits here and there, and this may not be the whole argument, it may have been edited - philosophy.lander.edu/intro/articles/hume-a.pdf

 

[inocente]

Stephen Hawkings idea of material duality, that the gravity and even the matter in the universe equals zero, is even further from reality than simply saying that the world came from nothing by nothing

Don’t know that argument. The one I’ve heard is that the total energy in the universe must be zero (and by conservation always has been zero). The reasoning is that if it were non-zero, you’d have to explain why it has whatever value you claim and not some other value, and where all that energy came from. Zero also leaves open the possibility of creation ex nihilo, whereas non-zero seems to shut that door.

 

[thinkandmull]

I gave up on Paul Davies as he always seemed to speculate and come over all mystic and gooey eyed. Re darkened rooms, not sure if Hawking’s idea is still alive, of time as a complex number a + bi, where at the beginning a is zero and b ramps up first, and hey presto that means there’s no singularity.

Re the Hume, I’ve never been a fan of the intelligent design argument either, to me it reduces God to an excuse. Hume demolishes it, then he demolishes it again, then again… good stuff. Never read him, only bits here and there, and this may not be the whole argument, it may have been edited - philosophy.lander.edu/intro/articles/hume-a.pdf

The teleological argument is not meant to be seen with the analytical mind, but with the other half of the brain. It’s just simply that the world looks like somebody made it, such as on a beautiful spring morning

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Re the Hume, I’ve never been a fan of the intelligent design argument either, to me it reduces God to an excuse.

An excuse for what?

 

[thinkandmull]

The quantum-eraser has been connected to double slit experiment and I think Bell’s inequality (which has been duplicated recently in more rigorous experiments). Nonetheless, regardless of the skill of the experiments, how can they possibly rule out a hidden factor, one that could even be God? That is the direction these agnostic leaning physicists are intrigued by

 

[inocente]

The teleological argument is not meant to be seen with the analytical mind, but with the other half of the brain. It’s just simply that the world looks like somebody made it, such as on a beautiful spring morning

You old romantic you.

 

[thinkandmull]

Thank you, but I think it is more than a feeling, which romanticism has been all about ofr centuries. When Catholics told me as a younster to see God in the order of the world, my reason could see the truth of it.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The teleological argument is not meant to be seen with the analytical mind, but with the other half of the brain. It’s just simply that the world looks like somebody made it, such as on a beautiful spring morning

That’s what the other half of the brain is for, to see things the analytical mind can’t see.

 

[hecd2]

OK, can you put together a non-trivial statement about causality in a singularity which cannot be both true and false, and which is open to testing logically if not empirically? I can’t, but here’s hoping you or Laserman (hecd ) can.

441.6nm, a gorgeous deep blue

And as I said above, not just physics but metaphysics breaks down in a naked singularity, should such an indecent entity actually exist - so nope, I can’t.

 

[hecd2]

I would be interested on your description and interpretation of the experiments, hecd2!

Ok so this is about quantum eraser and delayed choice quantum eraser experiments.

For the standard quantum eraser experiment, start with any two path interferometer, Young’s, Mach-Zehnder, Michelson will all do. You get interference fringes. Turn down the intensity so that only one photon is present in the apparatus at any one time and record where each photon is detected on the image screen. You find that you get photons more frequently where the bright fringes were and fewer photons where the dark fringes were. In fact if you put a tiny bright spot where each photon landed they eventually add up to form exactly the same fringe structure that you had before. But only one photon is in the apparatus at once, so it must interfere with itself in some way and so each photon must go through both paths. But if you put detectors in the paths they only ever measure a photon in one path or the other, never in both. OK - so this is the famous wave-particle duality and it’s quite weird.

Now, you get cleverer. You find a way to label individual photons according to which path they followed, so when a photon is finally detected you can say which path it followed. As soon as you do that, the interference pattern is no longer visible - if you cause the wave function to collapse (in the jargon) so that you know which path a photon took, it can no longer interfere with itself. But you can get even cleverer. If you find a way to erase that information, so the photons are no longer labelled with which path they took, even though at some time they were labelled, then the fringe pattern reappears if that label is erased. This is the quantum eraser and it’s weird, but wave-particle duality is pretty weird in the first place. (How it’s done is a bit tricky: for every photon you have to create apair of entangled photons with twice the wavelength; one photon of the pair is the signal photon which carries on as normal and the other carries the information about which path the photon took).

But it gets weirder, if you get cleverer still. If you arrange for the erasure to occur after the photon hits the final screen, you still get fringes. Huh? So, if the photon is labelled with which path it took, no fringes. If the photon is labelled and then the label is erased we get fringes, even if the erasure takes place after (in principle a long time after) the photon is detected at the screen. If the label is not erased, no fringes. This is the delayed choice quantum eraser, and it caused a little frisson in metaphysical circles, because it seems that the result, fringes or no fringes, can be determined by a choice made in the future to erase or not erase the label.

To the relief of people of good reason this turns out not to be a violation of causality after all. The reason is that, although the photons are detected before the choice to erase the label or not is made, the fringes only appear after the choice to erase. The way the experiment works is the choice to erase or not erase determines a certain subset of the photons are selected to create the final pattern, and that selection is not made until after the choice. So causality survives.

At least the principle of causality taken in the narrow sense that events in the future cannot influence the past - that survives. Causality in the Aristotlean sense that every event must have a proximate cause (to use sloppy and modern terminology), well it’s not clear that that survives quantum mechanics. But that’'s a different story.

 

[hecd2]

The quantum-eraser has been connected to double slit experiment and I think Bell’s inequality (which has been duplicated recently in more rigorous experiments). Nonetheless, regardless of the skill of the experiments, how can they possibly rule out a hidden factor, one that could even be God? That is the direction these agnostic leaning physicists are intrigued by

Why the constant accusations by some religious people that scientists do science to justify agnosticism or atheism? I can assure you, that the primary reason people do experiments in Quantum Physics is because they like most scoientists, are fascinated by learning more, in this case about the bizarre counter-intuitive world of quantum phenomena that seems to underpin reality. It’s not all about God. Oh, and hidden variable hypotheses are always considered. And not all scientists are agnostic or atheist.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Why the constant accusations by some religious people that scientists do science to justify agnosticism or atheism?

I’m not aware of that “constant accusation”.

What some religious people often complain about is that many atheists/agnostics use science to justify their /atheism/agnosticism.

For example, Richard Dawkins.

That has been going on for a long time, but especially since Darwin.

 

[hecd2]

I’m not aware of that “constant accusation”.

Well, “constant” is probably over-egging the pudding; “frequent” is more accurate and it is my experience that some people believe and express this view. I could find and post examples if you still think I am exaggerating.

What some religious people often complain about is that many atheists/agnostics use science to justify their /atheism/agnosticism.

For example, Richard Dawkins.

That has been going on for a long time, but especially since Darwin.

Indeed, and it has been going on for longer, but why *complain *if science, which after all provides an important perspective on reality, informs some people’s world view. You might not agree with them but I think that what they are doing is quite reasonable, and it is quite reasonable for them to express their views as forcefully as they wish. In other words, why shouldn’t they use their understanding of science as part of their internal argument to reach a position of belief or unbelief? The fact is that scientific knowledge undermines certain aspects of, for example, natural theology. But this is off-topic.

 

[JuanFlorencio]

That, I think, is the issue a number of cosmologists have with the current theory - the inability to make meaningful predictions in the face of infinities.

OK, can you put together a non-trivial statement about causality in a singularity which cannot be both true and false, and which is open to testing logically if not empirically? I can’t, but here’s hoping you or Laserman (hecd ) can.

I have no idea of what you are asking here, Inocente. I am sorry.

This is what I think: If based on some experiences I define certain physical variables and observe their behavior, perhaps I could be able to develop a mathematical model of it. Let’s suppose I do. Let’s suppose then that once ready I use my model to make predictions and also to formulate hypothesis about the past (of course, limited to the phenomena I am dealing with). Let’s suppose that the power of my model to make predictions is acceptably good (not perfect, but for the moment satisfactory to me and to the scientists). This ability to make predictions makes me think that it’s ability to reveal the past is equally good. However, I observe that when I go far into the past with my model, the behavior of the variables looks anomalous. I could think that the scope of my model is limited to a certain range; but I could think also that the behavior of the variables which I defined is anomalous in itself and well represented by my model. Let’s suppose I prefer to think in this last fashion. Then I think, “my model works”, that is to say, “my model represents what was happening at those distant times, and it is true that the variables had an anomalous behavior”; therefore, based on my model I could say something about those distant times. And what I would expect about whatever I said of the past is that it was a logical discourse. If it was not, I would definitely think: “Now I see that my model really does not work; it gives me inconsistent results”.

I don’t think logic is affected by the singularities of any mathematical model.

The principle of causality! You request a logical necessity for it to be applied at those moments which a mathematical model represent as a singularity. I don’t see how the principle of causality could be derived from any set of axioms. Your request really doesn’t make sense to me. However, let’s suppose that because we cannot deduce the principle of causality from any set of axioms we are forced to think that it is just an empirical statement. It doesn’t have ontological value nor universal applicability. Today our defined variables exhibit certain behavior, but tomorrow we don’t know. And we cannot make hypothesis about the past either. Today I perform an experiment under controlled conditions (all is merely accidental, because without causality we cannot control anything) and obtain certain results. It will not be necessary that another experimenter obtains similar results if he performs the experiment in his laboratory, according to my descriptions. He could very well obtain something quite different. Analogously, any cosmological model would have absolutely no value.

But, was David Hume right? Is our principle of causality just an empirical statement?

 

[JuanFlorencio]

Ok so this is about quantum eraser and delayed choice quantum eraser experiments.

For the standard quantum eraser experiment, start with any two path interferometer, Young’s, Mach-Zehnder, Michelson will all do. You get interference fringes. Turn down the intensity so that only one photon is present in the apparatus at any one time and record where each photon is detected on the image screen. You find that you get photons more frequently where the bright fringes were and fewer photons where the dark fringes were. In fact if you put a tiny bright spot where each photon landed they eventually add up to form exactly the same fringe structure that you had before. But only one photon is in the apparatus at once, so it must interfere with itself in some way and so each photon must go through both paths. But if you put detectors in the paths they only ever measure a photon in one path or the other, never in both. OK - so this is the famous wave-particle duality and it’s quite weird.

Now, you get cleverer. You find a way to label individual photons according to which path they followed, so when a photon is finally detected you can say which path it followed. As soon as you do that, the interference pattern is no longer visible - if you cause the wave function to collapse (in the jargon) so that you know which path a photon took, it can no longer interfere with itself. But you can get even cleverer. If you find a way to erase that information, so the photons are no longer labelled with which path they took, even though at some time they were labelled, then the fringe pattern reappears if that label is erased. This is the quantum eraser and it’s weird, but wave-particle duality is pretty weird in the first place. (How it’s done is a bit tricky: for every photon you have to create apair of entangled photons with twice the wavelength; one photon of the pair is the signal photon which carries on as normal and the other carries the information about which path the photon took).

But it gets weirder, if you get cleverer still. If you arrange for the erasure to occur after the photon hits the final screen, you still get fringes. Huh? So, if the photon is labelled with which path it took, no fringes. If the photon is labelled and then the label is erased we get fringes, even if the erasure takes place after (in principle a long time after) the photon is detected at the screen. If the label is not erased, no fringes. This is the delayed choice quantum eraser, and it caused a little frisson in metaphysical circles, because it seems that the result, fringes or no fringes, can be determined by a choice made in the future to erase or not erase the label.

To the relief of people of good reason this turns out not to be a violation of causality after all. The reason is that, although the photons are detected before the choice to erase the label or not is made, the fringes only appear after the choice to erase. The way the experiment works is the choice to erase or not erase determines a certain subset of the photons are selected to create the final pattern, and that selection is not made until after the choice. So causality survives.

At least the principle of causality taken in the narrow sense that events in the future cannot influence the past - that survives. Causality in the Aristotlean sense that every event must have a proximate cause (to use sloppy and modern terminology), well it’s not clear that that survives quantum mechanics. But that’'s a different story.

Please, continue with the other story!

 

[JuanFlorencio]

Well, “constant” is probably over-egging the pudding; “frequent” is more accurate and it is my experience that some people believe and express this view. I could find and post examples if you still think I am exaggerating.

Indeed, and it has been going on for longer, but why *complain *if science, which after all provides an important perspective on reality, informs some people’s world view. You might not agree with them but I think that what they are doing is quite reasonable, and it is quite reasonable for them to express their views as forcefully as they wish. In other words, why shouldn’t they use their understanding of science as part of their internal argument to reach a position of belief or unbelief? The fact is that scientific knowledge undermines certain aspects of, for example, natural theology. But this is off-topic.

I think this is not off-topic. Just read again the title of the thread!

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The fact is that scientific knowledge undermines certain aspects of, for example, natural theology.

With respect to the existence of the Big Bang, how does scientific knowledge undermine natural theology? Can you give me an example?

Einstein certainly didn’t think so.

“I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.” Albert Einstein

 

[Bradski]

With respect to the existence of the Big Bang, how does scientific knowledge undermine natural theology? Can you give me an example?

Good grief, Charles. It was only a day or a so ago that you were supporting the notion of everything having the appearance of being intelligently designed. That is the basis of Natural Theology: ‘Look, it can only have been God’.

For Natural Theology read The God of the Gaps. For every case where it has been claimed that God did something specific because we didn’t know better at the time, the argument now runs that, well…ok, we know how it was done, but God caused it to happen that way (ie what we call naturally as opposed to some miraculous supernatural method).

One does begin to wonder that the Creationists and others do have a point. Why on earth didn’t God make everything just as it is? The more you learn about the natural world, the more you learn about how vastly complex it is. Why did something as simple as God not make everything simple.

It all seems so…convoluted.