The great American read

[SUPcheat]

I stared at my navel a lot pondering the meaning of grok as the bong burnt down....does that count?

Only if a seed popped and hit you in the eye and you have the scar to prove it.

[Chan]

To be an atheist I'd have to have some kind of actual working opinion on religion. My only belief is a firm belief that I don't believe in belief.

I believe you're correct with your belief.

I'm calling BS.  You've studied quantum physics but haven't considered the nature of infinity, creation, identity, time? 

[PonoBill]

Sure, doesn't mean I think I really understand it. Besides, space and time might be just a local expression of gravity, there's probably no such thing as infinity and creation just means this particular universe has the particular tweaks in its constants the enable us to exist.

[Tom]

If we really do exist.

[eastbound]

My only belief is a firm belief that I don't believe in belief.

well said--tho you describe a tough row to hoe--certainly worth trying.

[PonoBill]

I know why Chan is calling bullshit--for one thing she knows me too well. And she knows I'll argue about almost anything and take either side. But I really don't believe in belief. To me, that presupposes that there is no evidence that will sway your opinion. The more I learn, especially about complex things like Physics, but really about anything, the more I realize the limitations of my understanding. I'm really always prepared to surrender any position, not because I'm wishy-washy, but simply because I've had fundamental concepts overturned far too many times to invest in belief. I'm willing to think something is true barring evidence to the contrary, but believe? Nope.

I spent a lot of time on string theory, trying to understand the intricacies and upgrading my math to try to follow some of the basic concepts. Then the large hadron collider found only one Higgs boson--pretty cool that they actually found that, but supersymmetry is kind of toast, because there should have been a lot more at about the same energy. Well, not dead, might be true, and might be revived sooner or later with revisions, but right now, string and M theory are back burner, it's Loop Quantum Gravity that gets all the attention.

Loop Quantum Gravity implies a limit to how small anything can be. There are no singularities, no dimensionless point with infinite energy density. Not at the heart of a black hole, and not during the big bang. That screws up a lot of notions of the nature of space, time and matter.

If something as basic as that is wiggling around, then what do we really know?

[Chan]

I share your views on almost all points, with one small (or large) exception I believe that accepting infinity as a necessary condition of time is more rational than not.  Now I'm going to have to add Loop Quantum Gravity lit to my future reading, if I can find one written in layman's terms that is. 

[PonoBill]

I share your views on almost all points, with one small (or large) exception I believe that accepting infinity as a necessary condition of time is more rational than not.  Now I'm going to have to add Loop Quantum Gravity lit to my future reading, if I can find one written in layman's terms that is.

Well that's easy enough: Reality Is Not What It Seems -- Carlo Rovelli. Get it as an audio book, the guy who does the reading does a fine job. His ability with accents is quite good--so much so that it's not noticeable at first.

Time is probably an emergent property of gravity that just seems to exist in a continuum from our macro viewpoint. We certainly already know that it's relative. Infinity is a mathematical notion that might have no physical analog. It may be true that nothing can be divided infinitely, that everything has a minimum size, including the geometry of space itself, and very likely time as well. Likewise there might be a maximum size for everything, no infinite universe. Very big, like 10 to the 500th power bigger than the Planck scale, but not infinite. There's a fundamental difference in implication between very big or very small and infinite.

[stoneaxe]

OK...now this is getting serious. You mean this all really could be just God playing a video game? I wish he had given my character abs.

[Admin]

If the universe is all encompassing and if it has a start date (13 Billion or so) and an area (even if the area is expanding) what is the current thought on nothing?  Is nothing what is thought to have existed prior to the universe or outside of its area?

This is good - https://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/astronomy-terms/before-big-bang.htm

[Weasels wake]

If the universe is all encompassing and if it has a start date (13 Billion or so) and an area (even if the area is expanding) what is the current thought on nothing?  Is nothing what is thought to have existed prior to the universe or outside of its area?

Could "nothing" in this case, just be a fancy, tricky, scientific term for "I don't know" or "it's unknowable"?
That's what I've always thought.  Put it in the "Nothing file".

[SlatchJim]

But I really don't believe in belief. To me, that presupposes that there is no evidence that will sway your opinion. The more I learn, especially about complex things like Physics, but really about anything, the more I realize the limitations of my understanding. I'm really always prepared to surrender any position, not because I'm wishy-washy, but simply because I've had fundamental concepts overturned far too many times to invest in belief. I'm willing to think something is true barring evidence to the contrary, but believe? Nope.

I'd say you're the Pope of "...perhaps" 

OK...now this is getting serious. You mean this all really could be just God playing a video game? I wish he had given my character abs.

He not only gave you abs, but surrounded them with the "Waistcoat of Hydrothermal Insulation", which, if I'm not mistaken is a +5 to gravitational pull. 

[Chan]

"God's Cook Book Recipe One:
The Universe Ingredients

~73% Dark Energy
~23% Dark Matter
~3% Free Hydrogen and Helium
~0.5% Stars
~0.3% Neutrinos
~0.2% Space Junk
Directions: Mix together in three spatial dimensions. Wait 13.74 billion years. Brag to Odin. Watch him take the credit. Cry about it."

Stolen from Zarnaxus Meson


As close to a condensed working answer on the components of everything and nothing that I've seen and still not much closer to complete knowledge of either than Aristotle was over 2300 years ago.
 

[PonoBill]

Yeah, so you'd like Carlo Rovelli, Chan, lots of appropriate props to ancient Greeks as clear thinkers and adept thought experimenters, though they didn't like to get their hands dirty. Also a certain reverence for italian poets like Dante Alighieri for philosophical thought that comes kind of close to the structure posited by loop quantum gravity for spacetime.

Right now I'm reading "Three Roads To Quantum Gravity" by Lee Smolin. Good stuff, though very confusing. He casually says the universe is really much bigger than 14 billion lightyears across but doesn't really explain WTF he's talking about. Infers that the 14 billion light years that we can experience is just the region we're restricted to since nothing can travel faster than light, and the big bang happened 14 billion years ago, so all that we can experience or see regardless of what tool we might use is 14 billion years worth. I'm having a tough time with this. It sort of makes sense and might account for the clearly much greater mass of the universe and give a real clue to what dark matter and dark energy really are (ordinary stuff we just can't experience), but I've never heard this anywhere else and it's slippery.

[stoneaxe]

and now sterile neutrinos are coming along and mucking up the works.