"...one thing is for certain: the Big Bang is not the beginning of the Universe!"

BR-549

Joined Sep 22, 2013
4,928
What is the basis for the assumption that nothingness(space) came into existence with somethingness(matter)?

A math equation perhaps? They say the universe is expanding out. So the mass is getting less dense. What about space? Is it getting less dense too? Where is the expanding space coming from? The universe is not adding more matter.......so how is it adding more space? Where is the space spigot? What is pumping space into this balloon? The space and the time came with the matter......remember?

See how utterly stupid that is? When you replace intellect with math.......the result is always stupid.

Does nothingness need to be made? Does nothingness exist? Is space a state of non existence? What was there until space replaced it? What's outside of space.....and why can't we see a boundary or interface? If space came into being with matter and energy........it's the largest structure known. It would have the largest boundary and interface. Wouldn't some light be reflected? What would the inside of a sphere look like......after 13 billion years of starlight?

Just because our local space has 13+ billion years of pollution in it........doesn't mean space has properties.

Does salt come from water? Of course not...it only resides in water. Does energy , matter and time come from space? Of course not......they only reside in space.

Time is a property of displacement........it is the duration of displacement........not the length of displacement.

The length or space of displacement can be zero.......but the time of displacement can never be zero.

Space is not necessary for time.
 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
13,081
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shortbus

Joined Sep 30, 2009
10,045
While many of you will call this "stupid", why can't the universe be expanding from the destruction of stars? I read somewhere that the sun and our solar system has not always been the same, that it was formed when another star or many stars exploded. So why can't that have happened all across the known universe? With each "explosion" forcing the universe larger.
 

bogosort

Joined Sep 24, 2011
696
When you replace intellect with math.......the result is always stupid.
What you're really saying: "When you replace intuition with math, the result is always non-intuitive."

Newtonian physics is intuitive because it well-describes the way things behave at human scales. That's what intuition is, a sense of how things work. And since we each have decades of experience with human-scale things, Newtonian physics nestles in easily with our intuition.

But Newtonian physics fails miserably at describing the universe at scales beyond our everyday experience, e.g., the physics of high-energy things, high-speed things, and very small things. Of course, we didn't realize this at first; the loss of Newtonian innocence happened slowly. As our technology and experiments became more sophisticated, we were increasingly able to investigate the physics of phenomena well-outside of our everyday experience, and at each turn we found that the data didn't fit our Newtonian expectations. But we didn't immediately throw out the old rulebook; instead, we tried tweaking it in various ways, trying to get the data to fit. Regardless of what the experiments were telling us, physicists were sure that Newton couldn't be that wrong.

However skeptical you may be, physics as a discipline is far more skeptical.

But at some point even the most ardent (though rational) skeptic cannot argue with the data. New theories were created, based not on how we think the universe should behave, but rather how it was telling us it does behave. The most successful of these -- relativity at the large scale, and quantum field theory at the small -- are well-tested and astoundingly successful, even if still incomplete. Indeed, they are fundamentally mathematical models, but so is Newtonian physics; mathematics has always provided the framework for any successful physics.

The new theories are not intuitive. So what? Why should we expect the universe at atomic scales to behave intuitively to us? Why should our everyday experience of what we haphazardly call time, space, and matter overrule what our carefully devised experiments are telling us?

The hard job of science is to tell us how things are, not how we would like them to be.

What is the basis for the assumption that nothingness(space) came into existence with somethingness(matter)?
Space is not "nothingness", it is made of the same stuff as matter, just at a lower energy state. (Incidentally, the notion of space as empty nothingness is far less intuitive to me than thinking of it as somethingness with specific properties.)

They say the universe is expanding out. So the mass is getting less dense. What about space? Is it getting less dense too? Where is the expanding space coming from? The universe is not adding more matter.......so how is it adding more space? Where is the space spigot? What is pumping space into this balloon? The space and the time came with the matter......remember?
You're visualizing this as if the universe is a volume inside another bigger space, getting filled with more stuff and growing. The universe is everything -- it is not embedded in anything -- and it has precisely the same amount of stuff in it now as it did at the beginning; no extra stuff is being pumped in. When cosmologists say that the universe is expanding, they mean that the distance between very far objects (much greater than galactic scales) is getting larger. Essentially, the geometry of space (the metric) is changing. The good news, however, is that at galactic scales and smaller, gravity dominates: whatever is in our neighborhood now will always be in our neighborhood.

Time is a property of displacement........it is the duration of displacement........not the length of displacement.

The length or space of displacement can be zero.......but the time of displacement can never be zero.

Space is not necessary for time.
Consider your logic. You said that time is a property of displacement, but displacement is a measure of space! So, according to your own definitions, space is indeed necessary for time.
 

Glenn Holland

Joined Dec 26, 2014
703
Images from the Hubble telescope show large clouds of material in which stars and planets are forming.

I've often wondered where do those clouds come from? Are they from supernova explosions or the remnants of the big bang itself?
 
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xox

Joined Sep 8, 2017
838
I've always felt trying to postulate things which cannot be proven to be a bit superfluous. Science should be nothing more than a tool for making predictions. No need to attach a "reality" to the conceptual models that have created, for who is to say what is actually working behind the scenes, far beyond what can be sensed or even measured by whatever technology is currently available to us? Wormholes, multi-verses, vibrating strings emanating from the fabric of space itself - for all we really know, the entire visible universe is just a subatomic particle within an infinite, incomprehensible sea of phenomena. Why speculate? Just assume that the laws of physics have no end and simply leverage what we do know in order to fine-tune our computational abilities. Explore the ideas which have practical applications and leave the metaphysics to the philosophers...
 

joeyd999

Joined Jun 6, 2011
5,234
Just assume that the laws of physics have no end....
Well that's a pessimistic view! I assume that at some point we are going to discover that the universe is governed by some incredibly simple equation, like x=y+42 or something.
 

xox

Joined Sep 8, 2017
838
Well that's a pessimistic view! I assume that at some point we are going to discover that the universe is governed by some incredibly simple equation, like x=y+42 or something.
Okay, but even supposing we do at some point nail down some finite set of "intrinsic" principles, that still isn't enough! Because the mere interaction of these creates more complex "emergent" mechanisms which must in turn effectively be treated as laws in their own right. For example, no simple equation could possibly explain the fact that a specific density of mass spontaneously results in the formation of a main-sequence star, or that a similar configuration of neutrons results in a pulsar, or that an even denser configuration of mass yields a black hole from which nothing escapes...oh except for when they are exceptionally massive, in which case these weird jets of material are ejected from the poles, etc, etc, etc.

Even things that we sort of accept as laws are really just convenient statistical models for dealing with computations that are simply impossible to calculate by other means, such as temperature (average kinetic energy of a system of a gazillion particles) or quantum mechanics (probability density functions which allow us to make some very accurate predictions about systems of incredible complexity).

And anyway how useful would it be, really, to attempt to use M-theory or something to describe the citric-acid cycle of cells or what have you? At the end of the day we just need some sort of model that best fits the problem being solved.
 
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