"God did not create Universe!", says Hawking.

[Mizango]

My favorite quote/opening to his literature:

"We are standing on a rock that is spinning at 1,000 mph, that is orbiting a star at 62,000 mph, that is circling the galaxy at 200,000 mph, while that galaxy moves at over a million miles per hour, we have always been space travelers".

Holy shit..... you are awesome, why are we not friends? I have that quote on a Carl Sagan calendar I have in my office! Oh man, you kick ass.

@ Sath, I was about to message you but wasn't sure if you were still in class or not. Glad you found it.

[Acturus]

You're wooshing me right..?

If you're not wooshing me, Carl Sagan is a fantastic author and everyone here should read his works. Big loss when humanity let him go =/.

You didn't hear the overly sarcastic eye-roll in that "*cough*"?

[Tobatobu]

God is just an idea that some stupid fool submitted to their kids as cop out not to explain why and didn't realize it would grow out of control.

This gentlemen explains it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u2ZsoYWwJA

[Max™]

that keyhole pic is from university of virginia

Ok so random question, do scientists have any idea what was going on in the universe before the big bang happened? I'm pretty curious. Is our universe just the result of some sort of natural process from an older/larger universe/dimension?

The direction you define as time, in which the our language has words to describe concepts such as being before and after exists, may not have any understandable correlate if you leave the Universe.

Time is not a process, time is a direction, now is not the only moment that exists.

Before you read this sentence, the moment when you did read it existed, just a little bit downstream from you.

Now that you've read it, that moment doesn't stop existing, it's still over there *points towards the past in an impossible manner which causes my hand to rotate through itself like a tesseract* OW!

FUCK!

FUCKING HIGHER DIMENSIONAL HAND CRAMPS!

[Acturus]

God is just an idea that some stupid fool submitted to their kids as cop out not to explain why and didn't realize it would grow out of control.

There's this man... in the sky...

http://www.iwatchstuff.com/2009/06/2...ng-trailer.jpg

[BerenTebogo]

Holy shit..... you are awesome, why are we not friends? I have that quote on a Carl Sagan calendar I have in my office! Oh man, you kick ass.

@ Sath, I was about to message you but wasn't sure if you were still in class or not. Glad you found it.

Next class in 15 was tanning and at gym. Rape and pillage this thread in my name. <3

[Knightmare]

Next class in 15 was tanning and at gym. Rape and pillage this thread in my name. <3

Some dude who goes to the gym and tans? What would you know about science, math and god.

[Max™]

Buff, tan, math, science, god?

http://daily.gay.com/.a/6a01156e9cba...a83f970c-320wi


Someone who worships the right one knows plenty.

[Atreides]

you definitely didn't answer my question at all

[Knightmare]

Buff, tan, math, science, god?

http://daily.gay.com/.a/6a01156e9cba...a83f970c-320wi


Someone who worships the right one knows plenty.

I don't know who that dude is besides the fact he is gay.

[Mizango]

Next class in 15 was tanning and at gym. Rape and pillage this thread in my name. <3

You got it baby.

[Maxwell]

To be fair to the theists here, before the debate falls into the traditional atheist circle jerk (which I'm not against, I highly enjoy patting each other on the back and pointing out the rather obvious errors in the theist arguments), I must point out that in principle the physicists/scientists in this thread share the same passion/motivation that the theist do.

I'm speaking of course of "the magnanimity of the unknown". The curious human, the rational animal, the questioning conscience, stands mouth gaping in awe at the vast universe and all of it's mysteries. In a sense, the theistic mind attempts to quantify everything they don't understand, don't know, and don't know they don't know into a single entity or representation. They find purpose in the great gap, as in that gap of knowledge they place infinite possibilities, and in those infinite possibilities, the answer that they are indeed special, and not alone. They in a sense devote themselves to the mystery of the universe. They marvel in it's grandeur and every time science pulls a piece of the unknown away and puts it in the small circle of knowledge we have about the universe, their unquantifiable deity becomes disturbingly quantifiably smaller.

Scientists however start from the same place, a simple awe and reverence to the magnanimity of our universe, and devote themselves to understanding everything they can about the great unknown. This isn't motivated by a need to find a greater purpose, or some arbitrary reason for existing, but rather to know all that can be known, and by that journey into the unknown, reveal even more questions. Scientists expand their own "great unknown" every discovery they make. One of the most true statements made by Einstein was "The more I learn about the universe, the more I realize just how little I know". The proverbial god of science (and I stress the word proverbial) is the magnanimity of the unknown, and the more we discover, the larger our god becomes.

[Max™]

you definitely didn't answer my question at all

I was trying to say that there is barely language to properly ask that question, much less language to make sure it is answered correctly.

The simple definitions of causality we are accustomed to dealing with, the idea that things have to have a cause, there is no guarantee that these concepts can be mapped properly beyond the universe.

There is no guarantee that the phrase "beyond the universe" has meaning, the most we can do is start from guesswork, and see if we can ask the right questions to build the right models to produce a universe like we see from pre-singularity states.


If THAT is what you are asking, then yes, there are ideas floating around, ekpyrotic, cyclic bangs, holographic models, black hole "seeding" models, and whatnot.

No they are not based on anything other than the ability to say that certain ideas WOULDN'T be expected to produce a universe like we observe.

There are models in which the question "what is outside the universe" makes about as much sense as "what is outside of the real numbers" or "what is outside of a triangle", too.


Also: if you are hoping Thor is gay so he'll fuck you, Knight, be careful that he doesn't split you in twain with enough force to cleave the land itself!

[Ashmada]

Also: if you are hoping Thor is gay so he'll fuck you, Knight, be careful that he doesn't split you in twain with enough force to cleave the land itself!

Methinks he's refering to the address : "daily-gay.com"...

[Gadritan]

Alright. Since the jig is up, I'll go ahead and fess up. I did it.

[Mizango]

Ok so random question, do scientists have any idea what was going on in the universe before the big bang happened? I'm pretty curious. Is our universe just the result of some sort of natural process from an older/larger universe/dimension?

No, its pretty much up to whom you ask. As I said earlier, there are some that believe that before the big bang, the 4 forces were unified at some point and for some unknown separated and cause what is commonly known as "the big bang". Although the big bang theory is famous, it's also widely misunderstood. A common misconception about the big bang is that it describes the actual origin of the universe, which is not accurate at all. The big bang is an attempt to explain how the universe developed from a very tiny, dense state into what we see and know today. What the big bang doesn't attempt to do is to explain what initiated the creation of the universe, or what came before the big bang or even what lies outside the universe. Anyone that tells you otherwise is a crackpot and has no clue what the hell they are talking about, this is something that theists like to claim but is 100% false.

Another misconception is that the big bang was some sort of an "explosion", which isn't accurate either. The big bang describes the expansion of the universe. Fred Hoyle is the one that actually came up with the term "big bang" in a derogatory attempt to ridicule colleges that believed in it. So the big bang was not and is not defined as an explosion in the classic sense in the world of science. What we do know is that they universe is expanding rapidly and everything in it is moving to and fro nonstop. That includes the planets, galaxies, including our Milky Way and everything out there we see and know. Even when you look up at the Sun you are seeing as it was 8 mins ago, there live in a dynamic universe. Like I stated earlier, we rarely deal in absolutes, because for every theory, finding or discovery we make, there are 5 people of equal talent and genius trying to shatter it and prove it false. If religion was help to the same rigorous, stringent standards as we hold science theories to then there would be none.

A favorite Sagan quote that goes well with this thread:

You see, the religious people -- most of them -- really think this planet is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can't the gods leave well enough alone?

All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would've listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition. -Carl Sagan

[Max™]

Methinks he's refering to the address : "daily-gay.com"...

Google images > right-click > copy > paste, didn't catch the site, lol. Just typed "Thor" and grabbed a pic.


I hate using the term big bang, it wasn't big, it didn't bang, it's nothing like an explosion.


An explosion is SOMETHING flying apart into SOMEWHERE...

The initial unfurling of the Universe was SOMEWHERE expanding into existence, from our perspective.

The idea that it exploded into somewhere itself, is understandable given the nature of our minds, but misguided at best.

This is where language fails, we don't have a proper concept for a nothing/nowhere state where somewhere could arise. Whatever you picture when those words fall into your mind, it isn't right.

The closest I can come to describing what it may be like, is that if you were able to have some unsight that let you observe unthings in a nowhere region, there is no reason to assume you could apply anything like a position, or a duration, or ordering, to any of these nonevents. There is no measure against which you could define change in a consistent way, there is no background against which you can locate things.

This is not a concept human minds are built to deal with, higher dimensional structures are bad enough, but nondimensional structures?


Which again, though it is extremely limited, there is nothing incorrect about saying the Universe is a 4 dimensional sculpture of spacetime, with a general shading of order decreasing towards one edge, or increasing towards the other edge.

We're scribbles across that trend, as we generate small, but purposeful increases of order in the wrong direction.

[Akiyama]

More surprised he's still alive.

[Knightmare]

Alright. Since the jig is up, I'll go ahead and fess up. I did it.

I like the explanation that some triforce (weak, strong, electro-magnetism) held together by gravitational force fell apart and exploded to create the universe. Gives it a more Zelda feel.

[Mizango]

Theoretical physicists aside, seeing as how its what they do. I've spoken many a times of my affinity for João Magueijo, but he and his colleagues like Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, Lee Smolin, Joseph Polchinski, A. P. Balachandran and on and on, all have ideas on what came before the big bang, and some of them are quite interesting. But saying we know definitely is false, it all comes back to us admitting when we don't know.

I wish some of you knew what it took to get something published or the scrutiny every minute detail of a theory or change to a model has to go through lol. It would shred the shit out of any normal persons sense of self worth.