Best astrophysics & space science books according to redditors
We found 643 Reddit comments discussing the best astrophysics & space science books. We ranked the 119 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 643 Reddit comments discussing the best astrophysics & space science books. We ranked the 119 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
>First of all don't worry about cosmology and the big bang and black holes and all that
This piece of advice should be ignored. These are absolutely fascinating topics and you should study them in more depth if you want to. In order to get a popularized taste for it, I recommend beginning with:
-Kip Thorne: Black Holes and Time Warps
and
-Neil deGrasse Tyson, Origins
After you have satisfied your taste by reading more digestable, popular accounts, you can decide if you want to read more detailed and mathematically involved accounts. The downside is that the accessibility of the mathematically rigorous formulations are behind a mass of very detailed and very complicated physics. You basically have to be trained in physics.
It is true, we don't know what's behind the event horizon. If the black hole would be sufficiently massive (like, really supermassive) then if you are far enough from the center you would not be able to tell that you are inside of a black hole. After all, galaxies are moving around in the universe, and for all we know they could be orbiting the center of a black hole. However, this is all speculation. A good book for a beginner is perhaps Kip Thorne's book http://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763
> The thought of matter spawning out of nowhere for no reason seems.. weird, doesn't feel right, you get what I'm saying?
Quantum mechanics makes no sense to people who evolved in a macroscopic universe.
When we drive to work in the morning and come to a fork in the road, our car does not take one path while we (suddenly car-less) take another path before meeting up again prior to reaching our destination.
TVs and anti-TVs do not suddenly pop in and out of existence all the time.
Despite the fact that I am forgetful, my keys do exist somewhere.
In the quantum world, things are different, particles get separated from their physical properties, only to be reunited later on. Matter does indeed pop in and out of existence constantly. And particles may or may not be a certain way until they are observed.
When the universe was very young, it was very small. Quantum things happen when things are very small. Lawrence Krauss has shown that, for example, the universe could have come about from a physical nothing. Amazon. Also: youtube talk.
The universe consistently surprises us. Most discoveries about how the universe works have led to only more questions. The universe is not obliged to us to make sense.
It's also being expanded into one of the few books I've ever preordered.
I. Sure, some forms of theism are coherent (Christianity is not one of those forms, for what it's worth; the Problem of Natural Evil and Euthyphro's Dilemma being a couple of big problems), but not all coherent ideas are true representations of the world; any introductory course in logic will demonstrate that.
II. The cosmological argument is a deductive argument. Deductive arguments are only as strong as their premises. The premises of the cosmological argument are not known to be true. Therefore, the cosmological argument should not be considered true. If you think you know a specific formulation of the cosmological argument that has true premises, please present it. I'm fully confident I can explain how we know such premises are not true.
III. There is no doubt that the teleological argument has strong persuasive force, but that's a very different thing than "being real evidence" or "something that should have strong persuasive force." I explain apparent cosmological fine-tuning as an entirely anthropic effect: if the constants were different, we wouldn't be here to observe them, therefore we observe them as they are.
IV. This statement is just false on its face. Lawrence Krauss has a whole book about the potential ex nihilo mechanisms (plural!) for the creation of the universe that are entirely consistent with the known laws of physics. (Note that the idea of God is not consistent with the known laws of physics, since he, by definition, supersedes them.)
V. This is just a worse version of argument III. Naturalistic evolution has far, far more explanatory power than theism. To name my favorite examples: the human blind spot is inexplicable from the standpoint of top-down design, but it makes perfect sense in the context of evolution; likewise, the path of the mammalian nerves for the tongue traveling below the heart makes no sense from the standpoint of top-down design, but it makes perfect sense in the context of evolution. Evolution routinely makes predictions that are tested to be true, whether it means predicting where fossils with specific characteristics will be found or how fruit fly mating behavior changes after populations have been separated and exposed to different environments for 30+ generations. It's worth emphasizing that it is totally normal to look at the complexity of the world and assume that it must have a designer...but it's also totally normal to think that electrons aren't waves. Intuition isn't a reliable way to discern truth. We must not be seduced by comfortable patterns of thought. We must think more carefully. When we think more carefully, it turns out that evolution is true and evolution requires no god.
VI. There are two points here: 1) the universe follows rules, and 2) humans can understand those rules. Point (1) is easily answered with the anthropic argument: rules are required for complex organization, humans are an example of complex organization, therefore humans can only exist in a physical reality that is governed by rules. Point (2) might not even be true. Wigner's argument is fun and interesting, but it's actually wrong! Mathematics are not able to describe the fundamental behavior of the physical world. As far as we know, Quantum Field Theory is the best possible representation of the fundamental physical world, and it is known to be an approximation, because, mathematically, it leads to an infinite regress. For a more concrete example, there is no analytic solution for the orbital path of the earth around the sun! (This is because it is subject to the gravitational attraction of more than one other object; its solution is calculated numerically, i.e. by sophisticated guess-and-check.)
VII. This is just baldly false. I recommend Dan Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" and Stanislas Dehaene's "Consciousness and the Brain" for a coherent model of a materialist mind and a wealth of evidence in support of the materialist mind.
VIII. First of all, the idea that morality comes from god runs into the Problem of Natural Evil and Euthyphro's Dilemma pretty hard. And the convergence of all cultures to universal ideas of right and wrong (murder is bad, stealing is bad, etc.) are rather easily explained by anthropology and evolutionary psychology. Anthropology and evolutionary psychology also predict that there would be cultural divergence on more subtle moral questions (like the Trolley Problem, for example)...and there is! I think that makes those theories better explanations for moral sentiments than theism.
IX. I'm a secular Buddhist. Through meditation, I transcend the mundane even though I deny the existence of any deity. Also, given the diversity of religious experience, it's insane to suggest that religious experience argues for the existence of the God of Catholicism.
X. Oh, boy. I'm trying to think of the best way to persuade you of all the problems with your argument, here. So, here's an exercise for you: take the argument you have written in the linked posts and reformat them into a sequence of syllogisms. Having done that, highlight each premise that is not a conclusion of a previous syllogism. Notice the large number of highlighted premises and ask yourself for each, "What is the proof for this premise?" I am confident that you will find the answer is almost always, "There is no proof for this premise."
XI. "...three days after his death, and against every predisposition to the contrary, individuals and groups had experiences that completely convinced them that they had met a physically resurrected Jesus." There is literally no evidence for this at all (keeping in mind that Christian sacred texts are not evidence for the same reason that Hindu sacred texts are not evidence). Hell, Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Christ" even has a strong argument that Jesus didn't exist! (I don't agree with the conclusion of the argument, though I found his methods and the evidence he gathered along the way to be worthy of consideration.)
-----
I don't think that I can dissuade you of your belief. But, I do hope to explain to you why, even if you find your arguments intuitively appealing, they do not conclusively demonstrate that your belief is true.
Hey Lawrence! Huge fan of you work, thanks for everything you do.
Here's a link to the new book he mentioned for anyone who wants to pre-order:
A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing
Well worth the $15 in my opinion, to learn about all sorts of cutting edge stuff about the nature and origin of our universe.
And here's the YouTube video to give you a taste for the content. It's a little long, sixty-five minutes total, but definitely worth it.
--
For my questions:
You can read or watch "A Universe from Nothing" by physicist Lawrence Krauss.
To very briefly summarize this theory, it appears we live in a zero net energy "flat" universe. All the positive energy (like mass) is balanced by the negative energy of gravity. Such a universe could theoretically spontaneously arise from nothing. Nothing meaning no mass, no particles, no space, no time, no laws of physics.
It's kind of how +1 and -1 form 0 in reverse. You can, in theory, get "something" out of "nothing" if the conditions are right. And it appears that the universe in which we live fits those conditions.
It's also possible the universe has no temporal bounds -- that it had no beginning. In this respect, it makes no sense to refer to a "start" of the universe. Time for the universe could be like the surface of a sphere -- it has no beginning, just a defined surface area. Time is a very strange and non-intuitive thing. For example, we know time "bends, compresses and stretches" as in general relativity.
But of course none of this matters. Not knowing the origin of the universe is just not knowing. It doesn't mean it must be god. Atheists are comfortable not knowing. We simply do not believe there is enough evidence for god/gods.
> We get that our universe is ALL there is, and there is no place to go except within that 4d space-time. The problem is that in our heads, the univers is still contained within a larger "space".
If what you're looking for is a convenient metaphor that is both simple and mathematically accurate, then I'm afraid there simply isn't one. Your best bet is reading books like A Universe from Nothing, which remain relatively simple to grasp yet offer explanations of quality you're unlikely to find on the internet or TV.
Don't bother, just pick up a GR textbook like Hartle or Schutz. Those books teach the math as they go.
Not OP, just helping out with some formatting (and links!) because I like these suggestions.
> 1) The Magic Of Reality - Richard Dawkins
>
> 2) The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
>
> 3)A Brief History Of Time - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari (Any Book By Daniel Dennet)
>
> 5)Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
>
> 6)From Eternity Till Here - Sean Caroll (Highly Recommended)
>
> 7)The Fabric Of Cosmos - Brian Greene (If you have good mathematical understanding try Road To Reality By Roger Penrose)
>
> 8)Just Six Numbers - Martin Reese (Highly Recommended)
I bet my dad that since I was bigger, I would fall into the pool before my younger brother did. He took a video camera out and recorded it, and we fell at the same time. I got mad and said that we had to do it again, so we did, and we both fell at the same speed. Then he explained gravity to me, and showed me Galileo's experiments off the leaning tower.
I don't recall ever having another understanding of the world that I believed so much, but turned out to be false - but this is a memory that's stuck with me for decades, so I think that in some way that experience did shape me.
Also, Lawrence Krauss has this book that is really good, although the subtitle question was not suitably answered for me.
Carroll
Carroll, course notes (free, I think it may be a preprint of the book)
Schutz
Wald
MTW (Some call it the GR bible)
They're all great books, Schutz I think is the most novice friendly but I believe they all cover tensor calculus and differential geometry in some detail.
https://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/055338466X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
Spoiler: Earth is not flat, nor is it 10000 years old
There are several detection methods when it comes to detecting extra-solar planets. These methods include:
Pulsar timings: Periodic variations in the pulse arrival time due to Earth-mass or smaller planets orbiting a pulsar. Angular momentum comes into play here.
Doppler Spectroscopy: A doppler shift, (In the case of light, objects moving towards you are blueshifted, and away from you are redshifted) in the wavelength of light recieved from a planet due to it moving towards or away from us.
Astrometric variations: A precise measurement of stellar position to find the wobble due to a planet orbiting a star. Though we say that planets orbit stars, they really orbit centers of mass, and the star orbits this same center of mass. For stars with very large masses compared to their orbiting planets this center of mass will fall within the radius of the star.
Transit photometry: Seeing a planet passing in front of its star causing the star to dimm slightly and periodically. This requires the planet to orbit in our line of sight.
Microlensing: Much like the gravitational lensing we see from having galaxies between us and a more distant target, planets also cause lensing by moving in front of the star, this effect is extremely small as you might imagine, thus the name.
If I understand your question correctly it would be like looking from above the plane in which the planets orbit, so the best method for detecting planets would be astrometric variations. We can see the star orbiting a common center of mass with the planet, which we wouldn't see if the star did not have companions orbiting it.
First time trying to answer a question here, hopefully I didn't mess it up!
These methods were taking from my astrophysics notes, these notes are without their own sources unfortunately (I'm an astrophysics student).
Edit: A relavent source (click the different methods to get a swanky gif of it in action!) 5 Ways to Find a Planet.
The textbook we use in astrophysics is Foundations of Astrophysics (Ryden & Peterson).
You may wish to - if you're not already aware of it and/or read it - look into Lawrence Krauss' A Universe from Nothing - Why there is something instead of nothing. This might help and it's an intriguing read regardless. I've also seen multiple youtube videos of Krauss presenting this.
However, a point for folks to keep in mind is what a physicist calls 'nothing' may not be what they call 'nothing'.
Oh, and spoiler - it's cuz 'nothing' is unstable.
For some physics :
Penrose - Road to Reality
Gleick - Chaos
Some math/philosophy :
Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Anything early by Dawkins if you want to avoid the atheist stuff though his latest is good too.
Anything by Robert Wright for the evolution of human morality.
Pinker for language and the Mind.
Matt Ridley for more biology.
Ughhh, bashing on theoretical physics is such a tired game, and this article is as misrepresentative as ever.
The most egregious flaw is probably poisoning the well with the comparison to intelligent design. The problem with intelligent design is not merely that it's "untestable", it's that it's untestable even in principle, and most importantly, it's vacuous: the content of the proposal is "God did it", which is not an explanation.
More to the point, the way the author quotes related topics like string theory and their advocates in order to disparage them or say just enough to make them sound bad, while being otherwise uninformative.
In particular, he brings up the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics several times, conflating it with multiverse theories in general. This is mispresentative since it is (1) primarily an interpretation of a theory, not a theory itself, (2) particularly outlandish to a casual audience, who if anything have been conditioned to think Bohr's version to be reasonable, and (3) has nothing to do with most actual multiverse theories, which are not described, and except for one not even named. For a useful overview, see Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality.
All of this is intermingled with a lot of philosophy, mostly Popper, which I can't really comment on except that I've heard that Popper's views are not quite so dominant in academia as they are often portrayed in popular media, and thus shouldn't treated as the authoritative opinion on what constitutes science.
This is especially grating because some of these theories could very well make testable predictions about our own universe, in particular those relating to inflationary cosmology. This, of course, would undermine the author's attempts to throw everything related to "the multiverse" under the bus.
In any case, it's not possible to interpret the science with respect to the philosophy based on what the author has written.
TLDR: The issue is an important, but this article adds little of substance, and is actively misleading.
Below, I'll post something I actually wrote first, which is kind of tangential but addresses another way in which theoretical physics is often falsely framed as "unscientific".
A little more than ELI5 but worth the effort, Kip Thorne, the physicist who consulted on the film, wrote a fantastic book that covers this question in depth.
You can read it here.
I recommend reading the entire Prologue since it's relatively short and pretty fascinating, and will give you the background to why it must be a very large black hole, but the part directly relevant to your question is the section entitled Gargantua on page 41. (Also relevant is the establishing of the problem on pp. 34-35)
If you like his writing, buy his book Black Holes and Time Warps. The link above is just some random PDF I found on a search.
To sum him up though, a super-massive black hole will have negligible tidal forces at its "surface" (event horizon). You therefore could hover just above it and not be spaghettified. Once you cross the horizon, you'd still be okay for a while, but now no amount of force could keep you from falling ever closer to the center. As you approached the center, tidal forces would increase exponentially until eventually you would be pulled apart. So yes, it would be gentle. At first. But once you go inside, spaghettification is inevitable, though not necessarily immediate.
TL:DR A big size to make it more gentle? Yes. Possible to enter without spaghettification? Temporarily yes, ultimately no.
The basic theme of differential geometry is to take calculus in R^(n) and do it in a more general n-dimensional spaces (called manifolds) that are "locally" like R^(n). For example, think of a sphere: when you look at it close enough (like when you're living on the Earth), it looks flat, and you can do calculus with lines on the ground and everything works out. On a larger scale, though, things get messed up when you look at scales large enough for the curvature of the Earth to make a difference. So you always have to look infinitesimally close (that's where the "differential" part comes in). Feel free to ask more about that.
As for notes, I mostly learned from this guy, whose notes on differential geometry are available online. I also really like this book. If you'd prefer a more easygoing, computational approach, take a look at this book, or some other gentle introduction to GR.
ETA: If you'd like to think about non-Euclidean geometry using only basic linear algebra, take a look at these notes.
Not OP, but I highly recommend The Quantum Universe (Amazon link) as an accessible and really informative dip into quantum physics. I really wish I'd had this or something like it back when I was an undergrad.
As for the rest of physics that's written this well, I dunno. :)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Hidden-Reality-Parallel-Universes/dp/0307278123
In a world of infinite universes, there's also one where Randy "Macho Man" Savage is the p4p, and Demetrius Johnson beats Fedor in PRIDE
These:
How to Read the Solar System: A Guide to the Stars and Planets by Christ North and Paul Abel.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.
Cosmos by Carl Sagan.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan.
Foundations of Astrophysics by Barbara Ryden and Bradley Peterson.
Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program by Pat Duggins.
An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything by Chris Hadfield.
You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes: Photographs from the International Space Station by Chris Hadfield.
Space Shuttle: The History of Developing the Space Transportation System by Dennis Jenkins.
Wings in Orbit: Scientific and Engineering Legacies of the Space Shuttle, 1971-2010 by Chapline, Hale, Lane, and Lula.
No Downlink: A Dramatic Narrative About the Challenger Accident and Our Time by Claus Jensen.
Voices from the Moon: Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences by Andrew Chaikin.
A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin.
Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA by Amy Teitel.
Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module by Thomas Kelly.
The Scientific Exploration of Venus by Fredric Taylor.
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe.
Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White and Richard Truly.
An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Bradley Carroll and Dale Ostlie.
Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley.
Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Clark.
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
Russia in Space by Anatoly Zak.
Rain Of Iron And Ice: The Very Real Threat Of Comet And Asteroid Bombardment by John Lewis.
Mining the Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets, And Planets by John Lewis.
Asteroid Mining: Wealth for the New Space Economy by John Lewis.
Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris.
The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe Report by Timothy Ferris.
Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandries by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon by Craig Nelson.
The Martian by Andy Weir.
Packing for Mars:The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach.
The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution by Frank White.
Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.
The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne.
Entering Space: An Astronaut’s Oddyssey by Joseph Allen.
International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems by Hopkins, Hopkins, and Isakowitz.
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene.
How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space by Janna Levin.
This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William Burrows.
The Last Man on the Moon by Eugene Cernan.
Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz.
Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger.
The end
The fine tuning universe is explained by the many worlds scenario.
Basically it says that there are billions of billions of universes, and for the argument of something from nothing I recommend:
"A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing"
The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose.
Link
It can be explained, though not simply, nor accessibly. Luckily, I'm not just an atheist, I'm also a theoretical physics student. Keep in mind that this of course can not be demonstrated empirically (science is the study of our Universe, so we obviously can't study things outside it in time or space).
Lets go back to before the Universe exists. Let's call this state the Void. It's important to note that no true void exists in our Universe, even the stuff that looks empty is full of vacuum fluctuations and all kinds of other things that aren't relevant, but you can investigate in your own time if you want. In this state, the Void has zero energy, pretty much by definition. Now, the idea that a Void could be transforms into a Universe is not really controversial; stuff transforms by itself all the time. The "problem" with a Universe arising from a Void is that the Universe has more energy than the Void, and it there's not explanation for where all this energy came from. Upon further investigation, we'll actually see that the Universe has zero net energy, and this isn't actually a problem.
Now, let's think about a vase sitting on a table. One knock and it shatters, hardly any effort required. But it would take a significant amount of effort to put that vase back together. This is critically important. Stuff has a natural tendency to be spread out all over the place. You need to contribute energy to it in order to bring it together. We're going to call this positive energy.
Gravity is something different though. Gravity pulls everything together. Unlike the vase, you'd need to expend energy in order to overcome the natural tendency of gravity. Because it's the opposite, we're going to call gravity negative energy. In day to day life, the tendency of stuff to spread out overwhelms the tendency of gravity to clump together, simply because gravity is comparatively very weak. There's quite a few more factors at play here, but stuff and gravity are the important ones.
Amazingly, it turns out that it's possible for the Universe to have exactly as much negative energy as it does positive energy, which means that it would have zero total energy, meaning that it's perfectly possible for it to pop out of nowhere, by dumb luck, because no energy input is required. Furthermore, we know how to check if our Universe has this exact energy composition. And back in 1989, that's exactly what cosmologists did. And it turns out it does. We can empirically show, to an excellent margin of error, that our Universe has zero net energy. Think about that for a second. Lawrence Krauss has a great youtube video explaining the evidence for this pretty incredible claim.
The really incredible thing is, given that our Universe has zero net energy, it's not only possible that it could just pop into existence on day, it's inevitable. It's exactly what we'd expect. Hell, I'd be out looking for God's fingerprints if there wasn't a Universe, not the opposite.
If you want to read more about it, by people who've spent far more time investigating this than I have, I suggest The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, and A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss. Both go into detail about the subject, and don't require any prior physics knowledge.
tl;dr The Universe didn't need a "first cause". PHYSICS!
You seem to just read the public facing summary of emerging science and interpret it in a way you can easily dismiss.
I implore you to dig deeper into the science you're talking about.
Read this, understand it, and then you can dispute it with your own original points.
As it is now you're just repeating the same arguments that've been shattered over and over again.
There's nothing really new here. Before anyone goes out and tries to use these points in an actual discussion, I just want to bring up the counter-points:
~0:18: How does it "shout" that there's a maker?
~0:21: Why does a beautiful creation necessitate a beautiful creator? (Also, define beautiful)
~0:26: Why should I listen to Einstein's assistant? Simply mentioning Einstein doesn't win any arguments
~0:30: Evolution through natural selection actually explains it pretty well
~1:24: "Before the big bang": There was no before, since the big bang was the beginning of time (I'm pretty sure Augustine pointed that out).
~1:28: See here
~2:07: He's defining the world as a "work" so he can say it had a maker
~2:45: It's not that 97% of the world is stupid, it's just that ~90% don't care
~2:55: "I don't know why there's a god instead of nothing." He's just punting the question one step down the line. What's the difference between saying you don't know why there's a god instead of nothing and saying you don't know why there's a universe instead of nothing? At least one can be studied.
I hope I don't get banned for the whole "no anti-Catholic rhetoric" rule.
>Particle physics has nothing to say about this because none of them posit a universe (or particles) that is actually without cause.
Surely you jest.
Could you at least explain why you picked the Christian God - and not any of the other Gods?
Surely you've heard the argument that cast a lot of doubt on your beliefs. Have you heard the history of the Mormon religion for example? There the sausage making of religion is rather plain to see, where the supposed prophet can't reproduce his original writing from his supposed gold tablet, so he claims God graced him with another - so his second translation was similar but different. This same sort of sausage making is thought to be the origin of all religions.
Without deviating from the Christian religion just how familiar are you with the bible? I'm not intending to be insulting or rude, but the old testament is filled with petty tales of a vile, jealous, merciless God with very few actual pieces of morality in it. Christianity would have done well to jettison it completely instead of rolling it into the bible.
Just one more thing - a book recommendation for someone interested in space http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/product-reviews/145162445X/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
Absolutely one of the most fascinating books that is on the cutting edge of theoretical physics - especially as it relates to new theories of how space actually works! *spoiler (empty space has gravity - and this important)
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
It might seem perfectly reasonable, but physicists (of which I am not one) will tell you that it is not true. For instance, Lawrence Krauss, the preeminent physics explainer of our time, has written a book specifically called A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. Again, I'm not a physicist, but I do believe what they have to say--they were right about that whole gravity thing, don't you know.
I'd like to give you my two cents as well on how to proceed here. If nothing else, this will be a second opinion. If I could redo my physics education, this is how I'd want it done.
If you are truly wanting to learn these fields in depth I cannot stress how important it is to actually work problems out of these books, not just read them. There is a certain understanding that comes from struggling with problems that you just can't get by reading the material. On that note, I would recommend getting the Schaum's outline to whatever subject you are studying if you can find one. They are great books with hundreds of solved problems and sample problems for you to try with the answers in the back. When you get to the point you can't find Schaums anymore, I would recommend getting as many solutions manuals as possible. The problems will get very tough, and it's nice to verify that you did the problem correctly or are on the right track, or even just look over solutions to problems you decide not to try.
Basics
I second Stewart's Calculus cover to cover (except the final chapter on differential equations) and Halliday, Resnick and Walker's Fundamentals of Physics. Not all sections from HRW are necessary, but be sure you have the fundamentals of mechanics, electromagnetism, optics, and thermal physics down at the level of HRW.
Once you're done with this move on to studying differential equations. Many physics theorems are stated in terms of differential equations so really getting the hang of these is key to moving on. Differential equations are often taught as two separate classes, one covering ordinary differential equations and one covering partial differential equations. In my opinion, a good introductory textbook to ODEs is one by Morris Tenenbaum and Harry Pollard. That said, there is another book by V. I. Arnold that I would recommend you get as well. The Arnold book may be a bit more mathematical than you are looking for, but it was written as an introductory text to ODEs and you will have a deeper understanding of ODEs after reading it than your typical introductory textbook. This deeper understanding will be useful if you delve into the nitty-gritty parts of classical mechanics. For partial differential equations I recommend the book by Haberman. It will give you a good understanding of different methods you can use to solve PDEs, and is very much geared towards problem-solving.
From there, I would get a decent book on Linear Algebra. I used the one by Leon. I can't guarantee that it's the best book out there, but I think it will get the job done.
This should cover most of the mathematical training you need to move onto the intermediate level physics textbooks. There will be some things that are missing, but those are usually covered explicitly in the intermediate texts that use them (i.e. the Delta function). Still, if you're looking for a good mathematical reference, my recommendation is Lua. It may be a good idea to go over some basic complex analysis from this book, though it is not necessary to move on.
Intermediate
At this stage you need to do intermediate level classical mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and thermal physics at the very least. For electromagnetism, Griffiths hands down. In my opinion, the best pedagogical book for intermediate classical mechanics is Fowles and Cassidy. Once you've read these two books you will have a much deeper understanding of the stuff you learned in HRW. When you're going through the mechanics book pay particular attention to generalized coordinates and Lagrangians. Those become pretty central later on. There is also a very old book by Robert Becker that I think is great. It's problems are tough, and it goes into concepts that aren't typically covered much in depth in other intermediate mechanics books such as statics. I don't think you'll find a torrent for this, but it is 5 bucks on Amazon. That said, I don't think Becker is necessary. For quantum, I cannot recommend Zettili highly enough. Get this book. Tons of worked out examples. In my opinion, Zettili is the best quantum book out there at this level. Finally for thermal physics I would use Mandl. This book is merely sufficient, but I don't know of a book that I liked better.
This is the bare minimum. However, if you find a particular subject interesting, delve into it at this point. If you want to learn Solid State physics there's Kittel. Want to do more Optics? How about Hecht. General relativity? Even that should be accessible with Schutz. Play around here before moving on. A lot of very fascinating things should be accessible to you, at least to a degree, at this point.
Advanced
Before moving on to physics, it is once again time to take up the mathematics. Pick up Arfken and Weber. It covers a great many topics. However, at times it is not the best pedagogical book so you may need some supplemental material on whatever it is you are studying. I would at least read the sections on coordinate transformations, vector analysis, tensors, complex analysis, Green's functions, and the various special functions. Some of this may be a bit of a review, but there are some things Arfken and Weber go into that I didn't see during my undergraduate education even with the topics that I was reviewing. Hell, it may be a good idea to go through the differential equations material in there as well. Again, you may need some supplemental material while doing this. For special functions, a great little book to go along with this is Lebedev.
Beyond this, I think every physicist at the bare minimum needs to take graduate level quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, electromagnetism, and statistical mechanics. For quantum, I recommend Cohen-Tannoudji. This is a great book. It's easy to understand, has many supplemental sections to help further your understanding, is pretty comprehensive, and has more worked examples than a vast majority of graduate text-books. That said, the problems in this book are LONG. Not horrendously hard, mind you, but they do take a long time.
Unfortunately, Cohen-Tannoudji is the only great graduate-level text I can think of. The textbooks in other subjects just don't measure up in my opinion. When you take Classical mechanics I would get Goldstein as a reference but a better book in my opinion is Jose/Saletan as it takes a geometrical approach to the subject from the very beginning. At some point I also think it's worth going through Arnold's treatise on Classical. It's very mathematical and very difficult, but I think once you make it through you will have as deep an understanding as you could hope for in the subject.
>Can you point out a place where I've been substantively wrong?
Let's start with your understanding of the word "arrogance"
>I assume the opposite.
Thrilled this wasn't stated as fact.
>Perhaps you should open a physics book.
Whenever I get the chance. Other than my HS books and college level Physics, I started with this one over 20 years ago while still in HS. It's actually not that hard of a read despite what some will say. Some of the math is a little advanced but not required to follow along as context and diagrams are provided.
Thats honestly why I dont like neil tyson either. he makes more about being a "that kid" prickly guy to generate tension than to actually educate people nowadays.
anyway, that aside, a really good read is Kip S. Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374695711&sr=1-2
it is real physics slightly diluted to help understand, but he doesnt shy away from hard concepts, like Chandrasekhar limit.
Friend asked for a similar list a while ago and I put this together. Would love to see people thoughts/feedback.
Very High Level Introductions:
Deeper Pop-sci Dives (probably in this order):
Blending the line between pop-sci and mathematical (these books are not meant to be read and put away but instead read, re-read and pondered):
Please everyone, read this book.
It is written conversationally and with very simple mathematics, but is extremely thorough in explaining most of the WTF?! bits of relativity.
Also Einstein had a great sense of humor.
For both subjects you'll need a solid mathematical background. You'll need calculus and linear algebra. I recommend starting with it if you haven't learned yet. I really can't stress enough the importance of mathematics in both fields.
For basic quantum mechanics: Quantum Mechanics - David Griffiths (https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-Griffiths/dp/1107179866) or Fundamentals of Modern Physics - Robert Eisberg, the later being just an introduction to Q.M.
For general relativity: Bernard Schutz's A First Course in General Relativity (https://www.amazon.com/First-Course-General-Relativity/dp/0521887054).
Thank you for the effort! I'll try to do you justice with a thorough response.
----
> 1. God says what he needs to say to us through the Bible.
Sure it's the Bible and not Harry Potter? To anyone without your obvious bias, the Bible looks like a collection of fanciful but poorly edited fiction. God's message hasn't reached me and it hasn't reached 5 billion other humans alone among the living. In other words, if this is an omnipotent's idea of effective communication, God sucks as a communicator.
> 2. God is not inert, he sometimes does miracles
Prove this and I'll leave you alone. Has God ever healed an amputee? Has God ever accomplished a miracle that has no natural explanation?
No wait, references to the work of fiction mentioned in #1 don't count. There is not the slightest bit of evidence that your precious Bible is anything more than a stack of useful rolling papers. I've addressed this before. J.K. Rowling has Harry Potter performing scores of miracles in her books, it's really easy to create a miracle with pen and paper.
> 3. The evidence is not inadequate. If you want evidence of his existence, there is evidence everywhere, and in sheer necessity, it is pointed out that God must exist.
So you say. Your following arguments are... sorely lacking. Here we go:
> 3.1 The need of a creator
If you saw a car in the forest, you wouldn't say it randomly came into existence and over time came together by itself, because it is too complex for that to have happened.
Correct. That's easy for me to say because I know exactly what a car is and how it's made.
> In the same way, this universe and everything in it is far too complex to randomly explode into existence and come together by itself, a creator is needed and that creator is God.
Your analogy doesn't hold. The universe is not very complex conceptually, it's been satisfactorily explained how all heavenly bodies resulted from the expansion of space followed by the clumping of clouds of primeval hydrogen. Suns and the nuclear process in them? A natural consequence of packing a lot of hydrogen with gravity. Heavy elements? The ashes of nuclear fusion. Planets circling around suns? That's what happens when heavenly bodies nearly collide in a vacuum, influenced only by each other's gravity. Finally, the complexity of life on earth is neatly explained by evolution from very primitive beginnings from substances that occur -naturally- in the void of lifeless space. No magic is required to explain any of this. But I see we get to talk about this in greater depth in #4.
Still, for your interest, this video refutes Craig's Kalam Cosmological argument and is thoroughly captivating while presenting modern cosmology. Highly recommended!
> 3.2 The need for an original mover/causer
You know nothing moves by itself correct?
No, I don't know this, because I have a solid education in physics. Atomic nuclei spontaneously explode and particles fly from them - movement without a mover. Plato's Prime Mover argument dates back to a time when people didn't know anything about physics and science was done by sitting on your butt, guessing and thinking.
> 3.3 The need of a standard
When you call something, for instance let's say "good", there has to be a standard upon which good is based.
This response of yours -so far- is sounding suspiciously like a copy of a William Lane Craig debate argument. Please note that all of his arguments have been successfully refuted - though not necessarily within one debate or only within debates. But regardless, I can easily address your arguments on my own.
Now then. Basic moral behavior has been shown to emerge naturally as a result of evolution. Yes, this is why theists hate evolution so much. It explains a lot of stuff that used to be attributed to God. Animals in the wild show moral behavior such as altruism, fairness, love, cooperation, justice and so forth. Even robot simulations, given only the most minimal initial instructions, develop "moral" behavior because that turns out to be a successful selection criteria for survival.
If you try to point out that humans display and think about much more complex moral situations than animals, I'll agree. But you know who invented those extensions of purely survival-oriented moral behavior? Humans did, not God. Humans look at the behaviors that promote survival and well-being in animals and humans and call it "good." They see behavior that hurts and kills animals and people and makes them suffer, and they call it "bad." Your five year old kid can grasp this concept - you insult your god when you claim this is so difficult it necessarily requires divine intervention. I recommend Peter Singer's book Practical Ethics, a thoughtful and thorough discussion of morals far more nuanced and acceptable to a modern society than the barbaric postulates of scripture. Rape a virgin, buy her as a wife for 50 shekels, indeed!
> 4.1 About the Origin of Life/Finely tuning a killer cosmos
> Anyway, for life to come together even by accident, you would need matter
Correct.
> now the universe is not infinite and even scientists know that.
I'm not sure that's certain, but it's probably irrelevant. Let's move on.
> that scientists say made the universe would need matter present.
Correct. We certainly observe a helluva lot of matter in the present-day universe (to the extent we can observe it).
> Where do you expect that matter to have come from?
An empty geometry and some very basic laws of physics (including quantum physics). This is very un-intuitive, which is why people restricted to Platonic thinking have trouble with it. But you know that matter and energy are equivalent, via E=mc^2 , right? Given the raw physics of the very early universe, matter could be created from energy and vice versa. OK, that still doesn't explain where the (matter+energy) came from. Here's the fun part: it turns out that the universe contains not just the conventional "positive" energy we're familiar with, but also negative energy. And it turns out that the sum of (matter + positive energy) on one hand and (negative energy) on the other are exactly equal and cancel out. In other words, and this is important, the creation of the universe incurred no net "cost" in matter or energy. This being the case, it becomes similarly plausible for for the entire universe to have spontaneously popped into existence just like those sub-atomic particles that cause the Casimir Effect. Stephen Hawking has explained this eloquently in his book The Grand Design but you may prefer Lawrence Krauss' engaging lecture A Universe From Nothing.
> I know for a fact that people are smarter than an explosion and even they have been unsuccessful in making organic life forms from scratch
Wrong again. It took them 15 years, but Craig Venter and his project recently succeeded in constructing the first self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell.
By way of interest, people making the kind of claims you do were similarly amazed when Friedrich Wöhler, in 1828, synthesized the first chemical compound, urea, that is otherwise only created by living beings. This achievement torpedoed the Vital Force theory dating back to Galen. Yet another job taken off God's hands.
> let alone have them survive the forming of a planet.
Now this is just dumb. First the planet formed, then it cooled down a bit, then life developed.
> Because of that, I doubt an explosion could do it either.
So you're right there: The explosion just created the planet and the raw materials. Life later arose on the planet.
> Chance doesn't make matter pop into existence.
Yes it does. The effect I was mentioning earlier is called quantum fluctuation.
> 4.2 The human brain
(skipping the comparison of man with god. I don't see it contributing anything. All of this postulating doesn't make God plausible in any way)
> 4.3 The Original Christian Cosmos
> 4.3.1. Maybe because we are after the fall, we have already lost that perfect original cosmos Paul imagined.
Wait, this contradicts your next point.
> 4.3.2 You have to give Paul some credit for trying. He didn't have any the information or technology we have today.
Thank you, this confirms my assertion that the Bible and its authors contain no divinely inspired knowledge. The Bible is a collection of writings by people who thought you could cleanse leprosy by killing a couple of pigeons.
Now, about that original cosmos: either Paul was too uneducated to conceive the cosmos as it really exists, or what he imagined is irrelevant. In any case, what you consider the "after loss" cosmos is trillions of times larger than Paul imagined; it would be silly to call this a loss.
The fact remains that the world as described in the Bible is a pitiful caricature of the world as it is known today. And Carrier's main point remains that our cosmos is incredibly hostile to life; and if man were indeed God's favorite creation, the immensity of the cosmos would be a complete waste if it only served as a backdrop for our tiny little planet.
TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol 1-3, W. Richard Stevens.
The Art of Electronics 3rd Edition, Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill.
Gravitation, Charles W. Misner, John Archibald Wheeler, and Kip Thorne.
Wait, wait, wait. I clicked on this page because I didn't know that anybody thought that it wasn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel
It is theoretically possible, according to relativity. It is merely incredibly impractical for us right now. We do not have the technology.
One way to travel to the future would be to go up in a space ship that's moving incredibly fast. (Close to light-speed, that is. It is difficult to go this fast. Our ships are incapable.) Because of special relativity, you would perceive everybody to speed up and they would perceive you to slow down, perhaps to freeze. If you were to watch your friend get sucked in by a black hole, you would never see it end because they were moving so fast near the event horizon. They would freeze in your view.
Firenadiceman is wrong because you are not going anywhere. Time is relative. You still exist. You never cease to exist. You are in your space ship for a month, and that's all the time that went by, a month. Earth had thirty years, but that's because of the speed Earth was moving. Matter was conserved and modern physics is quite something.
It is theoretically possible to travel through time with an Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormhole), though those only exist in theory as well. Richard Gott III came up with cosmic-string travel: Two colliding cosmic strings will distort space. This means that if you move through that space, you will also move through time (as they are the same thing: space-time; they are merely different dimensions of the same thing). There are more that I haven't mentioned because I forget precisely how they work.
You should read Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku.
> If there isnt a creator then how did all this life get here?
Abiogenesis is our best working guess for now, but there's a lot of work left to be done. The key thing here though is to be honest and admit that we don't have all the answers rather than wave our hands and say that it was a magical sky faerie.
> I under stand the big bang, at one point all the matter in Universe was compact then it all expanded outwards, well from school I learned that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. How did all that compact matter get there in the first place? I dont know.
It's ok to not know - that's honesty. This excellent book by Lawrence Krauss is fascinating. If you don't have access to it, there's also a talk he gave a few years back.
> I guess I'm getting old enough where my own opinions are forming I'm just trying to decide what I want those opinions to be.
Remember that ultimately our opinions are just that - opinions. The universe is as it is regardless of what we may wish to be true and what we may believe.
I'll try at ELI5 level.
Paper is a good analogy, but expand it to 3 dimensions. To see what flat means, you need to know what "not flat" means. Imagine a really large piece of paper covering the Earth. You mark an arrow on the ground then walk off in that direction, keeping in a straight line. Eventually you circle the globe and end up back at your arrow on the ground, approaching it from the tail of the arrow. You then pick a random direction and draw another arrow and do the same thing. No matter which direction you go, you always end up coming back to the same spot.
In this case, the paper is not flat; it is curved. Specifically, it is closed, meaning it loops back onto itself. However, locally it might look flat from any point you are standing. Imagine it on a bigger planet like Jupiter, or around the sun, or even larger. Locally you would measure it as being very flat, within a tiny fraction of a percent. So something that looks flat could actually be curved but with a very large radius of curvature.
But this analogy is only in 2 dimensions, covering the surface of a sphere of really large size. The curvature is in the third dimension in the direction of the center of the sphere (perpendicular to the local surface of the paper).
Imagine it now in 3 dimensions. You are floating in space at leave a real arrow pointed in some direction. You fly off in your rocket in that direction and eventually find yourself approaching the arrow from the tail end. It doesn't matter which direction you point the arrow, that always happens. That is a closed universe in 3D, meaning it is curved in a fourth dimension.
A flat universe would be one where the radius of curvature is infinite, meaning you'd never end up back at your arrow from the tail end.
I think this description is important because there is some disagreement on this. The measurement of the universe being flat within 0.4% does not mean that it is flat; it means the radius of curvature could be infinite (flat) but could just be very large. In fact, if you watch theoretical cosmologist Lawrence Krauss' talks on "A Universe from Nothing" or read the book, if you pay close attention you'll note a contradiction. At one point he jokes about how theorists "knew" that the universe must be flat because that makes it mathematically "beautiful", but then later describes how theorists "knew" the total energy of the universe must add up to zero as that is the only type of universe that can come from nothing, and yet also says that only a closed universe can have a total energy that adds up to zero. Hence is it closed or flat?
I attended one of these talks in person where this was asked and he confirmed that he thinks the evidence is strong that it is actually closed, but really, really large and hence looks flat to a high degree, and that the inflationary universe model explains why it would be so large and flat looking while being closed and zero net energy (and hence could come from nothing).
After going through all of what I know of the topic, including many other sources, I tend to agree with him that it makes the most sense that it is likely just very close to flat but is really slightly curved back onto itself at a very large radius of curvature. That also means our observable universe is only a very tiny percentage of the universe that exists.
Some here will disagree, yet I think your cause is a noble one.
My suggestion would be to keep encouraging her to be a freethinker, question everything, and learn all she can about science. If she can be at a point where she understands that "science is more than a body of knowledge, it is a way of thinking" (Carl Sagan), if she can fall in love with the wonders of the creation of the universe and the evolution of life on this world, then you'll be done, as those things will show any thinking person the absurdity of religion as a moral compass.
If she likes to read, here are some books you might consider getting for her:
Edit: grammar
Evolution & the Big Bang are separate subjects. Though for some simple explanations, you might want to pick up Richard Dawkins's The Magic of Reality, its a book aimed at children so it tries to explain things in simple terms.
There's a book on this...
A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing https://www.amazon.com/dp/1451624468/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_WTm4Cb0VWT8S0
Krauss wrote a very good book on that subject. http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
I really like Lawrence Krauss' explanation - universes with certain characteristics, which our seems to possess, can have zero total energy. As it turns out, empty space acts, as if it didn't want to be empty - in a state of high vaccum, space suddenly starts to boil with virtual particles - particles and antiparticles, that spring into existence and annihilate each other instantly. If that happens in empty space, then it is reasonable to suggest, that in absence of space, such virtual spaces might spring into existence, and if certain conditions are met, rather than instantly collapse, they might expand and be filled with matter, gravity and dark energy, while having zero total energy at the same time.
You might learn more from his lecture, or his book on the subject.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
If you want peer-reviewed studies, see the references in that book.
The universe certainly does seem to have a 'route of least resistance' trend built in. But when it comes to something as obscure to us as the first moment of time and space, we have no way of telling if the route of least resistance was for there to be something or for there to be nothing.
Intuitively we'd say nothing, but there's no actual way to tell that. Perhaps "non-existence" is a fragile, precariously balanced state and the route of least resistance is for energy/matter to spill out of it. We know what went on microseconds after the big bang, but we have no concept of the first moment or of whatever came before it, if anything. Without knowing that we can't say what the route of least resistance was or if it was followed.
There's a good book that might interest you: A universe from nothing by Lawrence Krauss.
Submission Statement: On November 2016, David Deutsch and Sam Harris did a podcast together. The purpose of that podcast was for David Deutsch to attempt to explain where Sam Harris went wrong or could improve upon his The Moral Landscape idea.
David is a Popperian and has built upon Popper’s work in his two books The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. This podcast sparked my interest in Popper and at the time I did not understand the disagreement between David and Sam. I asked the question and Brett Hall who is an expert (doubt he’d enjoy that label) on Popper and Deutsche was kind enough to make a video explaining their differences.
The reason I decided to transcribe this video is that I have found that comparing and contrasting Sam’s epistemology to that of Popper’s has been super helpful in better understanding Critical Rationalism, which is what Popper called his Philosophy. I have read Popper and Deutsch for a year since and have barely scratched the surface.
You do not necessarily need to listen to the Podcast to get the meat of this content, Brett does a great job presenting both their ideas clearly and their differences as well.
Anyway, here are some interesting bits from the video.
>The majority of people who have an alternative epistemology, something other than what Karl Popper views knowledge as for example, they think that knowledge is about justified true belief. They think that you need to begin with the foundation and on that foundation then you accumulate knowledge, you build it up. And this is an anti critical vision about how knowledge is created. In the Popperian view, you simply have problems, you can start anywhere at all and you attempt to solve those problems when you have them. When you have ideas that are in conflict with one another by using a critical method, it's a completely different vision.
On What Morality is,
>So instead, just to preface, what morality really consists of, it's about solving moral problems. And in order to solve moral problems, we have to conjecture explanations about what might improve things. And they can always be false. We can always criticize them.
There is no need for bedrock,
>Okay. So again, David says that moral theory should be approached like scientific theories. They don't need foundations. They don't need foundations. There are a lot of theories out there, a lot of moral theories like, Kant's categorical imperative, or Rawl's fairness or stuff that comes out of the Bible the golden rule et cetera, et cetera. Whatever your moral theory happens to be or indeed Sam's wellbeing of conscious creatures. All of these, these principles, these ideas, these theories should be seen as critiques, as critiques of each other or as critiques of any other theory that someone proposes or as a critique of a solution that someone proposes.
>
>They shouldn't be seen as foundations from which you begin to build up everything else.
There is a lot of great information in here not just about morality, there’s a bit about politics, creativity, and perhaps most groundbreaking in my estimation, David’s explanation of what a person is.
I hope this is helpful!
Other Links:
In his book How to Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies tackles the issue directly: Is time travel possible? The answer, insists Davies, is definitely yes, the caveat though are ironing out the kinks in the space-time continuum. Ignore the tongue in cheek title though, it's misleading and does not literally describe in detail on how to build an actual time machine, just the theoretical plausibility.
I'm also glad you brought up the impossibility according to our science because while you are absolutely right in classical physics it's not possible, once you get down to the quantum realm, all classical physics completely breaks down and that goes to the very heart of the subject itself. And we're only just now tapping into this new realm of science and with companies like D-Wave and Google exploring the possibilities of quantum computers, we might have a definite answer in the near future.
Some of my favorites:
Brian Greene -- The Fabric of the Cosmos, The Elegant Universe, and The Hidden Reality. Greene is, to my mind, very similar to Hawking in his ability to take complex subjects and make them understandable for the physics layman.
Hawking -- I see you've read A Brief History of Time, but Hawking has a couple of other books that are great. The Grand Design, The Universe in a Nutshell, and A Briefer History of Time.
Same thing applies to Brian Cox. Here's his Amazon page.
Leonard Susskind -- The Black Hole Wars. Here's the basic idea behind this book. One of the basic tenets of physics is that "information" is never lost. Stephen Hawking delivered a presentation that apparently showed that when matter falls into a black hole, information is lost. This set the physics world on edge. Susskind (and his partner Gerard T'Hooft) set out to prove Hawking wrong. Spoilers: they do so. And in doing so, they apparently proved that what we see as 3 dimensions is probably similar to those 2-D stickers that project a hologram. It's called the Holographic Principle.
Lee Smolin -- The Trouble with Physics. If you read the aforementioned books and/or keep up with physics through pop science sources, you'll probably recognize that string theory is pretty dang popular. Smolin's book is a criticism of string theory. He's also got a book that's on my to-read list called Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.
Joao Magueijo -- Faster Than the Speed of Light. This is another physics book that cuts against the prevailing academic grain. Physics says that the speed of light is a universal speed limit. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Magueijo's book is about his theory that the speed of light is, itself, variable, and it's been different speeds at different times in the universe's history. You may not end up agreeing with Magueijo, but the guy is smart, he's cocky, and he writes well.
The textbooks recommended in the intro Astronomy class here are An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Carroll & Ostlie and Foundations of Astrophysics. I've never read through either, but apparently the first one is much more detailed.
The older edition of Modern Astrophysics is significantly cheaper and will fit your purposes just as well: 1st Edition Carroll
/u/SwedishBoatlover has the right idea. FTL travel is the same as time travel, because events separated by a spacelike interval (such as departure and arrival using an FTL craft) don't have a definite before/after order. That's why we have limericks like that one about the Lady named Bright.
Seriously, FTL travel would screw up physics very badly. Like, "Ghostbusters crossing the streams" badly. Classical mechanics (the physics of baseballs, planets, and such) would cease to work. Quantum mechanical feedback through the closed path (from the exit back to the entrance) might make the entire Universe implode.
To learn more about this topic, try Kip Thorne's awesome book about wormholes and the damage they would cause to the Universe at large. FTL travel of any kind would have similar effects.
It's been a while but I'm pretty sure this was the book.
There was a book written about it.
Well A) the Higgs boson was originally joked as "the goddamn particle" because it was so difficult to detect. Some editor shortened it because that name would have gotten a bad reaction from people.
B) you should really check out cosmologists Lawrence Krauss (video) or Stephen Hawking (transcript). Krauss even wrote an entire book on the topic titled "A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing".
This might be more of a science answer than a broader philosophy answer, but these guys have math to back it up.
And C) "Intelligent Design" has already been ruled out by biologists, who find no convincing evidence. It's evolution and its various mechanisms that explain all the wonders and diversity of life.
Warning, Krauss in particular has a lot of disparaging remarks about religion and its followers.
TL;DR - According to these theoreticians, "nothing" (as a quantum mechanical phenomenon) is physically unstable, and "something" is certain to appear given enough time.
Because nothingness is impossible, per ASU and Caltech research. There are a ton of books on this subject, along with JSTOR documents (which you should have a subscription too if you are in college). This one is especially easy to read and comprehend the material. Enjoy. I'll gift you the Kindle edition if you really have an avid interest in learning new things.
A physicist named Lawrence Krauss wrote a book on this. Its called a universe from nothing. Good read. Also, if youre interested another good book that adresses different attempts to answer the question 'why is there something rather than nothing?' is called "Why does the world exist?" by Jim Holt.
Heres some links:
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-World-Exist-Existential/dp/0871403595/ref=la_B001IGFJ92_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367993510&sr=1-1
edit: I just noticed that someone else mentioned Krauss in an above comment. Sorry for redundancy.
No. Science does not indicate that the big bang came from nothing. The idea of something coming from nothing is a Christian concept. In the beginning God created... And God created something from nothing.
The astrophysicist Lawrence Kraus wrote a book A Universe from Nothing. It was a great read but unfortunately it fed into the idea of something coming from nothing. What Kraus did in his book was to change the meaning of the word 'nothing' in order to have a title that would sell more books. Kraus' 'nothing' was actually 'something'.
We actually use the distances between really far apart things in the universe and make a "triangle" just like they were talking about on the surface of the Earth. The math is pretty complicated, but you might enjoy A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss. It has a pretty good in depth but mostly understandable by mere mortals explanation of how these things are measured and determined.
Given your apparent troll status, I will simply recommend a book for you that addresses your question nicely. A Universe from Nothing (ISBN-13: 978-1451624465
| ISBN-10: 1451624468) by Lawrence M. Krauss gives scientific explanations about how the scenario you question can occur.
You don't have to buy it to read it, as you can check it out from your local library (or if you have an e-reader, borrow it online).
"Pure energy"
E = mc^2 means "matter can be converted into energy."
No... just, no.
As for interesting ideas, there's a thought experiment in the famous Gravitation textbook where they imagine a civilization living on the surface of an artificial ring around a rapidly rotating black hole. They drop their garbage into the ergosphere of the black hole and use the Penrose process to extract energy from the rotation of the black hole.
That's just freaking cool! Why hasn't anyone used that idea as a sci-fi setting yet?
Here are some back-of-the-envelope calculations for that:
If the black hole is about three solar masses (about the minimum required to form from gravitational collapse), a ring with a radius of about 1000 Earth radii (about 6 million km) would have a surface gravity of about 1g just due to the black hole's gravity. This would be well outside of the radius of the ergosphere (about 10 km). I haven't done the math, but I'm pretty sure it puts you well outside of any significant relativistic effects. And it's still less than 5% of the radius of a Niven ring.
> No one has yet succeeded, then, in explaining how something could literally come out of nothing: in every case some sort of prior condition needs to be presupposed.
I'm surprised there is no mention of physicist Lawrence Krauss's new book, A Universe from Nothing. He does quite a good job explaining how the latest physics suggests that the universe literally did come from nothing.
It is also important to understand that both space and time are features of the physical universe; the universe does not exist within these things. So the notion that we need to explain "prior" causes and what happened "before" the universe began is simply an error, since those words are meaningless without time. An analogous question would be, "where did the universe come from"? There was no space prior to the universe, so it is an error to try to reason spatially.
> People seem to tell me to just stop asking these questions because it's impossible to ever know...
It's definitely not that you should stop asking the questions, it's that the only people who are genuinely qualified to answer them are cosmologists. So while it's fun to speculate, the only way to make real progress on these questions ourselves would be to get a PhD in physics. Which I'm pretty sure I'm not going to do at this point in my life. :-)
It's interesting to read what people who actually do have a PhD in physics have to say about these questions, though. That's why I linked you to a few articles/debates in my other reply. And there are plenty of books out there that look at the origins of the universe and how it could have arisen (for example The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll or A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss).
One thing to keep in mind is that quantum physics is not just counterintuitive but wildly counterintuitive. So even though we may have beliefs like "everything needs a cause", and even though that principle is reasonable in everyday life, it doesn't necessarily apply in quantum physics, where the very notion of causality is debatable. That's why non-physicists (definitely including philosophers and theologians) are just not qualified to answer these questions -- because our intuition leads us astray, and the rules that work for us within the universe fall apart when we're looking at the origin of the universe.
Lawrence Krauss wrote a book about it, A Universe from Nothing.
It doesn't actually answer the question since no one has yet found an answer. But if the question is really bugging you it is an interesting read.
> Clearly something can not be created from nothing, thats a rule of physics I'm pretty sure. If this can't be explained, than wouldn't that mean that some higher power must have put it there?
Who created the higher power, then?
You might find this talk (by theoretical astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss) about how the universe could have spontaneously came from "nothing" ("nothing" is purposely in quotes because it's not really nothing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EilZ4VY5Vs . He also has a book on the same topic: http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
> yet to see a persuasive argument against number two
Look up Bell's Inequality.
Or this: https://smile.amazon.com/Six-Not-So-Easy-Pieces-Einstein%C2%92s-Relativity/dp/0465025269/ref=sr_1_3
Or this: https://smile.amazon.com/Quantum-Universe-Anything-That-Happen/dp/0306821443/ref=sr_1_4
Virtually no math in these that Oz's Scarecrow couldn't understand.
This is tricky, because the broadly known explanation is misleading.
First the physics:
At the time Heisenberg was working on this, physicists were first figuring out experiments that could give them information and measurements about what the insides of atoms were like. And the measurements they were getting were very confusing. Everyone was trying to think up some clear mental model for what was going on, in order to help them figure out the math. Bohr had some success by thinking of the nucleus and the electron as being similar to a tiny planet and a moon orbiting around it. The problem was: his math broke down for any atom other than hydrogen, so clearly this wasn't the whole story.
Heisenberg's most important idea was something like "Give up trying to have a mental model or analogy to the everyday world, just get the math right no matter how strange it may seem and accept that's simply how things are."
Heisenberg made huge contributions to getting the math figured out. One of the things his math showed, was that certain measurements acted as as complementary pairs: the more you knew about one, the less you would know about the other. Position and momentum are the common example, but there are other pairings.
The obvious question is, why the heck should this be the case? Why does measuring momentum make us blind to position?
Enter the confusion: Heisenberg suggested that this paired measurement effect was because the act of observing was interfering with the system. This is called the observer effect, and it's commonly described with an example something like "well, to see an electron you have to bounce a photon off it, but by bouncing a photon off it you've hit it like a billiard ball, so your measurement of position changed it's momentum."
The problem is, this is just wrong. Electrons, photons and other subatomic particles do not move like billiard balls. The more refined the math got, the more certain this became. Matter acts like little waves of probability, and particles are in a sense a little bit everywhere at once.
It doesn't make sense to talk about an increasingly exact location of a particle. Not because we're affecting it by observing, and not because there's noise or error in our measuring device, but because past the plank scale, matter simply does not have an exact location.
So again, why this uncertainty in the pairs of measurement? Because that's a feature of the math that works for predicting reality. No one has come up with a better explanation since.
If it sounds a bit confusing and horrifying, you're not alone. Einstein was one of the most vocal opponents to this view, and even until his death maintained that we'd find better math eventually. We haven't, and generally speaking, particle physicists are just used to thinking this way now.
But again, outside of the physics world "Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle" refers to the observer effect.
If you want a good short book on this stuff that won't punish you with the advanced math, I recommend this one by Brian Cox and one of his colleges: http://www.amazon.com/The-Quantum-Universe-Anything-Happen/dp/0306821443
Grad, Div, Curl and all that by H. M. Schey, recommended here. There's also A Student's Guide to Vectors and Tensors by Daniel Fleisch if you want to cover tensors as well.
On science and evolution:
Genetics is where it's at. There is a ton of good fossil evidence, but genetics actually proves it on paper. Most books you can get through your local library (even by interlibrary loan) so you don't have to shell out for them just to read them.
Books:
The Making of the Fittest outlines many new forensic proofs of evolution. Fossil genes are an important aspect... they prove common ancestry. Did you know that humans have the gene for Vitamin C synthesis? (which would allow us to synthesize Vitamin C from our food instead of having to ingest it directly from fruit?) Many mammals have the same gene, but through a mutation, we lost the functionality, but it still hangs around.
Deep Ancestry proves the "out of Africa" hypothesis of human origins. It's no longer even a debate. MtDNA and Y-Chromosome DNA can be traced back directly to where our species began.
To give more rounded arguments, Hitchens can't be beat: God Is Not Great and The Portable Atheist (which is an overview of the best atheist writings in history, and one which I cannot recommend highly enough). Also, Dawkin's book The Greatest Show on Earth is a good overview of evolution.
General science: Stephen Hawking's books The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time are excellent for laying the groundwork from Newtonian physics to Einstein's relativity through to the modern discovery of Quantum Mechanics.
Bertrand Russell and Thomas Paine are also excellent sources for philosophical, humanist, atheist thought; but they are included in the aforementioned Portable Atheist... but I have read much of their writings otherwise, and they are very good.
Also a subscription to a good peer-reviewed journal such as Nature is awesome, but can be expensive and very in depth.
Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate is also an excellent look at the human mind and genetics. To understand how the mind works, is almost your most important tool. If you know why people say the horrible things they do, you can see their words for what they are... you can see past what they say and see the mechanisms behind the words.
I've also been studying Zen for about a year. It's non-theistic and classed as "eastern philosophy". The Way of Zen kept me from losing my mind after deconverting and then struggling with the thought of a purposeless life and no future. I found it absolutely necessary to root out the remainder of the harmful indoctrination that still existed in my mind; and finally allowed me to see reality as it is instead of overlaying an ideology or worldview on everything.
Also, learn about the universe. Astronomy has been a useful tool for me. I can point my telescope at a galaxy that is more than 20 million light years away and say to someone, "See that galaxy? It took over 20 million years for the light from that galaxy to reach your eye." Creationists scoff at millions of years and say that it's a fantasy; but the universe provides real proof of "deep time" you can see with your own eyes.
Videos:
I recommend books first, because they are the best way to learn, but there are also very good video series out there.
BestofScience has an amazing series on evolution.
AronRa's Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism is awesome.
Thunderfoot's Why do people laugh at creationists is good.
Atheistcoffee's Why I am no longer a creationist is also good.
Also check out TheraminTrees for more on the psychology of religion; Potholer54 on The Big Bang to Us Made Easy; and Evid3nc3's series on deconversion.
Also check out the Evolution Documentary Youtube Channel for some of the world's best documentary series on evolution and science.
I'm sure I've overlooked something here... but that's some stuff off the top of my head. If you have any questions about anything, or just need to talk, send me a message!
If I recall correctly it's pretty good. The basic concepts behind relativity (and quantum mechanics) haven't really changed over the past, say, 50 years. Even the Standard Model, developed in the 1970s, is the best description of elementary particles we currently have.
The most important novelties would be the very "flat" Cosmic Background Radiation, nevertheless having small seemingly random fluctuation; and inflation, which is one attempt to explain those phenomena.
I would argue that many modern books are actually straying from accuracy in favour of speculating about solutions to open questions with for instance string theory and multiverses, for which there is no evidence. Hawking himself is guilty of that too:
http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553805371
> The many worlds theory does not solve the issue of contingency in any meaningful way. ... if you just say it was all necessary then there's only 1 possible world.
Yes, that was the point. We just have to clarify that "world" means different things in different contexts. It can mean "absolutely everything" or a particular sphere of spacetime. Or one branch, in Everett's MWI of QM. So there is one world globally, but many worlds more parochially. What we perceive as contingency is just an artifact of our own ignorance as to how our branch/world plays out. In actuality there is no contingency. The MWI, or any model resulting in a plurality of worlds, dissolves contingency altogether.
>so you now have even more possibilities which are not actuality.
Everett argued that they are actual. Deutsch argued in The Fabric of Reality that the dual-slit experiment in QM is sufficient to establish the existence of these other worlds. I'm not saying you have to agree with him or Everett. I'm only saying that these models, or any model that results in a plurality of worlds, answers the contingency problem.
-------------
Edit: I've alluded to Deutsch's argument several times, so I thought it would be fair to post an excerpt so people would know what I was talking about. This is from his book The Fabric of Reality.
>>The possible cannot interact with the real. Non-existent entities cannot deflect real ones from their paths... It is only what really happens that can cause other things really to happen. If the complex motions of the shadow photons in an interference experiment were mere possibilities that did not in fact take place, then the interference phenomena we see would not, in fact, take place.
The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch radically changed the way I think about many things. It's one of the few books I've read twice (ten years apart). The physics part was interesting, but it's the philosophy of it that affected me.
Another book of his, The Beginning of Infinity, had quite an effect on me as well, especially the idea that all solutions have their problems, and that instead of regressing, we should push forward to find solutions to the new problems.
> It's inevitable and unavoidable.
David Deutsch (and I, being convinced) would argue that there is an infinitesimally small chance that it won't be unavoidable:
The Beginning of Infinity (I do wish he'd released it under a free license, but it was very much worth the $11)
I'm working on my BS in Physics with my Astronomy minor done and here's my 2 cents. If you love the hobby enough, the math and physics shouldn't bother you. On the same point, after intro courses in both Physics and Astronomy, it gets very math-heavy. If you have the determination and love for the subject, it's very doable :)
My Astronomy textbook that I used is Foundations of Astrophysics.
Check it out and see if you can find a site that previews the book. Good luck!
Chris Adami, professor of microbiology and astronomy (I know, odd combination) who has done some work related to black holes, had an AMA in /r/science the other day. I'll just carry over this comment
>It is true, we don't know what's behind the event horizon. If the black hole would be sufficiently massive (like, really supermassive) then if you are far enough from the center you would not be able to tell that you are inside of a black hole. After all, galaxies are moving around in the universe, and for all we know they could be orbiting the center of a black hole. However, this is all speculation. A good book for a beginner is perhaps Kip Thorne's book http://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763
Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy is a great book. It starts off with a science fiction story and goes on to explain the principles behind it. There's a little history in there too, which is always interesting. One issue, however, is that it's a little old now so may be a bit outdated.
Well, first of all, "Hawkin" (I assume he means Stephen Hawking) didn't create the term "black hole," and it's actually fairly correct, at least in the sense that there's a "rim" (the event horizon) and things can "fall in" to the hole.
But the second paragraph is simply gibberish. There are things called black bodies, and black holes have some relation to them, but certainly not in the simplistic manner described. And black holes are an endpoint of stellar evolution, not the beginning: They* are formed when a massive star undergoes a supernova explosion and the remaining core collapses. About the only true statement in the second paragraph is, "Light bends around all bodies of mass, including stars and planets." In fact, this is a standard prediction of general relativity, first measured during a solar eclipse in 1919.
Kip Thorne, who was the science advisor for Interstellar, wrote a pretty accessible book on black holes if you want more details. He's also written a book on the science behind Interstellar.
* Caveat: This applies to stellar-mass black holes. There are supermassive black holes in the centers of many (most?) galaxies, including our own, and we don't fully understand how they form.
"A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking is great but maybe not technical enough for you. His colleague Kip Thorne, however, wrote "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy" which is significantly meatier on the hard science side of things.
Here are some suggestions :
https://www.coursera.org/course/maththink
https://www.coursera.org/course/intrologic
Also, this is a great book :
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Birth-Numbers-Jan-Gullberg/dp/039304002X/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1346855198&sr=8-5&keywords=history+of+mathematics
It covers everything from number theory to calculus in sort of brief sections, and not just the history. Its pretty accessible from what I've read of it so far.
EDIT : I read what you are taking and my recommendations are a bit lower level for you probably. The history of math book is still pretty good, as it gives you an idea what people were thinking when they discovered/invented certain things.
For you, I would suggest :
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Mathematical-Analysis-Third-Edition/dp/007054235X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346860077&sr=8-1&keywords=rudin
http://www.amazon.com/Invitation-Linear-Operators-Matrices-Bounded/dp/0415267994/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1346860052&sr=8-4&keywords=from+matrix+to+bounded+linear+operators
http://www.amazon.com/Counterexamples-Analysis-Dover-Books-Mathematics/dp/0486428753/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1346860077&sr=8-5&keywords=rudin
http://www.amazon.com/DIV-Grad-Curl-All-That/dp/0393969975
http://www.amazon.com/Nonlinear-Dynamics-Chaos-Applications-Nonlinearity/dp/0738204536/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346860356&sr=1-2&keywords=chaos+and+dynamics
http://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Analysis-Richard-L-Burden/dp/0534392008/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346860179&sr=1-5&keywords=numerical+analysis
This is from my background. I don't have a strong grasp of topology and haven't done much with abstract algebra (or algebraic _____) so I would probably recommend listening to someone else there. My background is mostly in graduate numerical analysis / functional analysis. The Furata book is expensive, but a worthy read to bridge the link between linear algebra and functional analysis. You may want to read a real analysis book first however.
One thing to note is that topology is used in some real analysis proofs. After going through a real analysis book you may also want to read some measure theory, but I don't have an excellent recommendation there as the books I've used were all hard to understand for me.
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-The-Theoretical-Minimum/dp/0465062903/ref=pd_sim_14_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=1TT0F2A70RBV36TT3D0S Is supposed to be good, as is https://www.amazon.com/How-Teach-Quantum-Physics-Your/dp/1416572295 . Then you can work up to https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-Griffiths/dp/0131118927 and then the gold standard for an introduction to quantum computing is https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-10th-Anniversary/dp/1107002176
I would also like to mention "Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum" by Leonard Susskind.
Lectures are available online on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL701CD168D02FF56F
Lectures go nicely with the book of same name.
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Theoretical-Leonard-Susskind/dp/0465062903
I found this book and lecture series a nice and gentle entry into the field. Sort of like preparation for Mike and Ike.
Feynman's QED
Asimov's non-fiction is good
Godel, Escher, Bach
Einstein's original book
Maxwell's book (lots of math)
I've currently not a lot of time so i'm not able to give a thoughtfull answer but there are plenty of books which could teach you special relativity (Carroll takes it pretty much as a prerequisite).
Maybe one of the following helps (but don't be surprised it take a lot of hard work to get some knowledge about it...):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAurgxtOdxY and following
Spacetime Physics - Edwin F. Taylor, John Archibald Wheeler should be quite nice (i've heard)
http://www.amazon.com/A-First-Course-General-Relativity/dp/0521887054 maybe this is a good starting point.
Take one book after another till one suits you. I think the only important point is that they have equations inside.
I really enjoyed Hawking's Grand Design because he throughly and eloquently answers the common question of "how can you explain the origins of the Universe without a god?". That is often times the one conflict point that believers just cannot grasp their heads around.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/055338466X
Congratulations! I know what a big step that is, as I've been in the same boat. Books are the best way to become informed. Check out books by:
Also check out the video series Why I am no longer a creationist.
The more you know, the more confident you will be.
This isn't really to do with atheism... it's just science.
> I know this may be better placed in a science related sub reddit but I don't really know of one
/r/explainlikeimfive or /r/cosmology or /r/askscience or ...
In particular try:
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=big+bang&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all
See also:
Krauss, Lawrence A Universe from Nothing
Hawking and Mlodinov The Grand Design
We are venturing into a semantic problem. The universe is a closed system. This means that space and time are finite. But that is how we interact with the universe. These are the dimensions we know. So trying to talk about what happened before space and time is contextual nonsense for us as humans. Therefore trying to talk about what happened before the big bang is talking about nothing. Just as talking about anything outside of space-time. This instantly makes us want to say that makes space-time infinite, but that is not true. I would recommend this or this book. The second being a "softer" read.
Trying to state that the universe needs a creator but the creator does not is a little bit of slight of hand.
You are saying by definition God does not require a creator or he would not be God. Well, by the same right I am saying by definition the Universe does not need a creator.
But this gets into something even more complex that I wouldn't begin to have the time or space here to write. When you talk about cause you need to also be thinking about what type of cause you are speaking. here is a place to start.
try reading "The Grand Design" and "A Brief History of Time" for more understanding on the universe, time and the big bang.
also
>I am an atheist except in one very crucial sense - I believe SOMETHING supernatural created the universe at the moment of the big bang.
this is a "god of the gaps" type argument, just because science has not yet found all the answers does not mean that a god exist.
I just started reading The Road to Reality. Very dense but highly recommended from what I've read so far.
I'd recommend Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. It starts with basic math concepts and goes to very complex concepts.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0679454438/
A normal person can become great at math. Once they do that, they can understand quantum physics.
Your question is like "can a normal person, who's not in shape, run a marathon?" The answer is to become in shape. Anyone can do it, but it takes a real effort.
Roger Penrose wrote a book, The Road to reality that goes over quantum physics and is (supposedly) written for people with no basis in math, and introduces the mathematical concepts as they go along. Check it out.
But the reality is, it won't come easy. You have to work. And it's worth it.
How about Penrose ’s Road to Reality?
You could try the Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics if you like the other one.
Or you could look up some mathematical history books.
I'm not at this level yet, but Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler is a well known for being a great and thorough book on the subject and you can get a used one for $28.
https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/0691177791#customerReviews
It is also known as MTW Black Book of Gravitation.
If you think you can read an undergraduate textbook Ryden is a standard.
However, if you think that may be too advanced, start with some popular books on the subject such and The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku or the classic by Hawking A Brief History of Time.
If after reading those you want something more advanced but still not a textbook try The Road to Reality by Penrose. It reads like a popular book but he actually works through math (and the real stuff with like tensors etc...) to make his points so it is more advanced. Also, the Dummies Books are also a more intermediate step and are often decently good at teaching the basics on a lower technical level than a textbook.
Parallel worlds by Michio Kaku is pretty good, if you're into the history of string theory and/or the universe. I read it about 10 years ago, so I'm not sure if it's outdated nowadays.
The world without us by Alan Weisman talks about what would happen to the earth if we disappeared, it talks about engineering marvels like the hoover dam, NY subway system, and nuclear waste storage sites and what could happen to these if humans were not around the maintain them.
I'm looking for a book about space if anyone has a suggesting. Particularly books that talk about neutron stars and other cosmic wonders.
Einstein: His Life and Universe
The Black Hole War
The Trouble With Physics
Parallel Worlds
The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe
Warped Passages
The Singularity is Near
A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing
Lawrence Krauss
It is brilliant. I loved the lecture from him (with the same title) on youtube and the book takes it to the next level. I have gained so much knowledge just reading a chapter a day on the tube to work.
Here is a great book I just finished, while much broader in scope, will help you understand what is in that 'empty space'.
A Universe From Nothing. Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing.
A Universe from Nothing by [Lawrence M. Krauss] ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_M._Krauss)
>without a God how did the universe come into existence?
I could rephrase that into a question that would be even more baffling:
>with a God, how did the universe come into existence?
The 2nd one is more crazy to explain, because now you need to know how a god was created, not just why there is or isn't more or less matter and energy.
If you are genuinely interested in astrophysics, here are some good books written by people who know more than me about the issues you mention:
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X
http://www.amazon.com/Briefer-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553385461
Remember, even if you don't know the answer to a question about nature, it's always OK to say "I don't know." It's not OK to pretend that a story about the supernatural explains an issue in the natural world, if embracing the myth about the supernatural wouldn't really explain how things work, and would really only raise more questions.
You didn't say how old you were, but if you're financially dependent on your parents, you should probably keep quiet on the subject - including with your sister - until that is no longer the case.
On the something from nothing question, if she is science-minded, give her a copy of the Krauss book on the subject:
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X
you know what does take some mystery away from them...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/145162445X/ref=mp_s_a_1?qid=1343795584&sr=8-1
You should check out A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss. The whole book is an attempt to answer that very question.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
No, the null hypothesis is "we don't know".
God(s) did it is a claim, as is it sprang into existence on its own. There is some evidence for the latter (1, 2)
There is a great book called A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss that goes into great detail.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
"Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is something."
A good book for you to read is A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss
It will answer your questions.
Well, you can get Lawrence Krauss's book or check out his Youtube lecture.
This is an incredibly complex topic, physicists have spent entire careers trying to answer this question. It would be really hard to give him a quick and easy answer. If you are interested in this topic I would recommend reading this book by Lawrence Krauss: http://amzn.com/1451624468
All the ad hominem aside, can you explain your perception of the word "nothing"? You seem open to understanding the scientific side of the discussion.
If you're interested in exploring what is meant in science by nothing, there's a great book by Theoretical Physicist Lawrence Krauss, entitled A Universe from Nothing.
I think you'd find it to be a great read.
Hello Dr. Goldberg, and thank you for doing this.
What do you think of Dr. Krauss' lecture and book on "A Universe From Nothing?" Do you think his conclusions follow the evidence, or do you think he's trying to shoehorn the evidence into his conclusions?
A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss
and just about anything from Michio Kaku
A good book on the subject.
This is quite the loaded question. First of all, most atheists would not say that "God cannot possibly exist." Second of all, disbelief in the existence of God cannot in any way be called "faith." Finally, the Big Bang itself is where all the materials came from. For more thoughts on this subject, I recommend Lawrence Krauss' book, A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing.
Check out the Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism.
Check out a copy of the books The Greatest Show on Earth or Why Evolution is True from a library. You can also get one of them for free on Audible, but you will miss out on the citations and diagrams.
See if you can watch or read The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking. I watched the miniseries, it's pretty good. It used to be on Netflix but no longer is.
Cosmos is great, and is on Netflix. If you want to watch videos about Cosmology just type in one of the popular physicist's names, Brian Greene, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss (his Universe from Nothing book is really great, so are his lectures about it), Sean Carroll etc.
Let me know if you want to talk, I'm always up for it.
IMHO, the best refutations of the cosmological argument are:
Archives for the links in comments:
----
I am Mnemosyne 2.1, I can't be reasoned with, I can't be bargained with. I don't feel pity of remorse or fear and I absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until unethical news is dead. ^^^^/r/botsrights ^^^^Contribute ^^^^message ^^^^me ^^^^suggestions ^^^^at ^^^^any ^^^^time ^^^^Opt ^^^^out ^^^^of ^^^^tracking ^^^^by ^^^^messaging ^^^^me ^^^^"Opt ^^^^Out" ^^^^at ^^^^any ^^^^time
Go do yourself some learning.
The book is better
You can check out his book on the subject, or one of his lectures.
In brief, no matter or energy, time or space, but we still have a quantum foam. In this quantum foam, time and space, matter and energy can be created without cause. The non-existence of the quantum field can not exist, it always was and always will be. It is not dependent on time and space, matter and energy, and thus doesn't have a beginning or need a cause.
https://www.amazon.com/Whitey-Moon-Politics-death-Program-ebook/dp/B00M2766EI
> We have eye witness testimonies.
We supposedly have eye witness testimonies, because almost none of the witnesses (besides the apostles) are named, nor are they alive, and their "testimonies" were recorded many decades after Christ's supposed ascension. Besides that, witness testimonies are not enough to prove that supernatural events are even possible.
> There was a detective who works cold cases, and would convict people of crimes based on people's testimonies. He was an Atheist investigating the case for Christ. He found that the people's testimonies lined up, and he would consider them as viable evidence in court, and he came to the conclusion that it was all real.
There are many authors like this one, who think they have the silver bullet that will prove their religion, be it Christianity or Islam, who eventually engage in all sorts of fallacies and provide nothing of substance. I haven't read this guy's book to be honest (Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels), but I have read other books by Christians who claim that they can prove the "truth" of Christianity. Short summary: they haven't.
The fact of the matter is that these books do not stand to scrutiny. Have you ever read anything written by Bart Ehrman, or other real scholars? They would vehemently disagree with that guy's conclusions.
Bart Denton Ehrman is an American professor and scholar, currently the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is one of North America's leading scholars in his field, having written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks. He has also achieved acclaim at the popular level, authoring five New York Times bestsellers. Ehrman's work focuses on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the development of early Christianity.
-- from WikiPedia
You should also read stuff by:
and other scientists if you want to see what science actually has to say about reality and about how grossly wrong the Bible is when it tries to make pronouncements on our physical reality.
> Why do you not believe in the gospel accounts? They were hand written accounts by people who witnessed an event, or people who spoke to those people.
That's the claim, not the evidence. It's people claiming to have witnessed supernatural events for which they have no evidence, and even more than that, all these witnesses are long dead. We have nothing but third hand accounts of people from 2000 years ago claiming to have seen or heard wildly fantastical things for which we don't have any evidence that they are even possible.
Heck, we literally have millions of people still alive who swear that they have encountered aliens or have been abducted by aliens - this is a much better evidence than your supposed witnesses who are long dead by now - and it's still not nearly enough to prove that these aliens actually exist and that they have indeed been abducting people.
> Some of the things Jesus spoke about is verifiable today. As I have pointed out about the Holy Spirit guiding people, and people being able to heal and cast out demons in Jesus' name.
Many of Buddha's teachings are verifiable and valid today, yet that does nothing to prove Buddha's claims of the supernatural. Besides, you first have to demonstrate that there are such things as demons before even making a claim of being able to cast them out. Bring one of these "demons" into a research facility and then we'll talk. Otherwise, you're no different than the alien abduction people or the Bigfoot hunters.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468 says that the Universe is flat. They did it by using geometry measurements on the dispersion of the Microwave Background Radiation (some sort of measurement to test if it was curved).
About the universe and what happened between t=0 and now? Well, I'd have to say start with Cosmos and you can also go with the documentary Sagan did of the same name. He touches on this subject in both of those.
Lawrence Krauss wrote A Universe from Nothing which goes into how there are explanations on how our universe could come to be without the need of the supernatural.
Victor Stenger has a bunch of books on this topic but I guess I might recommend The Falacy of Fine-Tuning.
> If you don't believe in God, what explanation do you have for the fact that there is a universe.
"The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. […] But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. […] This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." -- Isaac Newton.
He would perhaps ask a similar question: if you don't believe in God, what explanation do you have for the fact that the planets proceed in such regular motions?
The continuation of Newton's work by French scholar, Pierre-Simon LaPlace, prompted Napoleon to remark on the absence of any mention of a creator in LaPlace's explanations of celestial mechanics; LaPlace famously replied, "I had no need of that hypothesis." Don't fall into the trap of God of the gaps reasoning as Newton did. Admit with honesty when you simply don't yet know the answer to a question and continue searching as LaPlace did.
To answer your question, however:
> Remember your basic maths/aritmatic, zero plus zero = ? or zero times zero = ?
I want you to go do some research (you'll actually find it in many of the links I provided above). I want you to go away and find what the sum total energy of the entire universe is.
Also, while playing with arithmetic, try it with imaginary numbers. If you add imaginary numbers, you only get more imaginary numbers, and if you multiply them, you get even less than nothing, if you see what I'm getting at.
http://www.amazon.ca/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
A universe from nothing.
Instead of restating what's been said a million times, I would suggest reading books like A Universe From Nothing. Its a great book which explains things in language people actually understand.
With the additional context in parenthesis, I will go on the assumption that all the pronoun 'It's are referring to Quantum Computers (QCs).
​
The specific theory that was the original goalpost that you had set for accepting that there is a possibility of planes interacting and information crossing over is gone into in great detail in this book written by one of the inventors of the field of Quantum Computing:
​
https://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Implications/dp/014027541X
​
I can't help but feel that you are trying to move the goal post from a specific theory to a Scientific Law which takes hundreds of years to get to.
​
One of the founders of the field of Quantum Computers explicitly states that how his computers are designed to operate is to collaborate with other versions of themselves in the superposition.
​
The fact that he made a prediction about particles interacting with themselves in other universes and that he could use this interaction to process information back in the 80's and later demonstrated it by producing working computers means that this fits the criteria for specific scientific theory (hypothesis, prediction + results match prediction).
​
This is demonstrated and applied science at this point. Other people can come up with other hypotheses about alternate ways to explain the results, but none of those have made predictions, that have been experimentally tested and results confirming those predictions, which make them weaker in the current scientific body.
​
Since I doubt you will read the book, I will provide a Cliff Note version for how Superposition and Multiverse work according to the strongest theories with the most evidence currently.
​
Initially the rigorously observed phenomenon that super position states exist and that they collapse into classical behavior when a hard measurement is taken was thought of as a fuzzy state that disappears after the probability wave has collapsed.
​
The more modern explanation for this which the creators of the quantum computer ascribe to is that the superposition state doesn't ever go away and just our ability to actively OBSERVE/MEASURE/INTERACT with other planes only happens when we can repeat the same action repeatedly to observe probability distributions. What was previously thought of as a wave form collapsing just means that after taking the measurement the superposition of planes expands to cover the measuring device.
​
For example, (double slit experiment) if a particle is being sent 1 at a time through 1 of 2 slits and we add a measurin device to determine which slit it went through, the reason the interference pattern appears to disappear for us is that the superposition of states went from just the particle in superposition to the observer, the measuring device and the particle are all in superposition, and all 3 (including the Scientist observing results) is in superposition, so from the Scientist's point of view it appears that the wave has collapsed and a particle went through the right slit, BUT he doesn't realize that he is now in superposition and there is another version of him that has observed the particle going through the left slit, along with a superpositioned measuring device displaying results which represents the entangled environment that fits the outcome according to classical physics.
​
From inside a probability wave you only see the results of one of the probable scenarios playing out according to classical physics and other probable outcomes in the past are undetectable to you.
​
From outside the probability wave you can see particles and classical objects as large as a piezoelectric turning fork interfering and interacting with themselves and their other probabilistic states.
It's a mistake to place too much emphasis on definitions, because if you do you will always find yourself in an infinite regress. (You will have to keep searching for definitions of the terms used in previous definitions.)
This is hard to grasp unless it is appreciated that nothing we interact with that is complex and autonomous depends on how we define it. Everything real has attributes which are "out there" already.
Btw the video doesn't talk about Deutsch's criteria for reality; they're covered in Chapter 4 of his book The Fabric of Reality.
I think that according to our (or at least my) present understanding of physics in order to travel through time you would need to find an area of space time that loops back on itself (a wormhole) and travel through it. If you did this you wouldn't disappear and then reappear you would just move in a different direction through time relative to your desired start and end points.
Note: this is based on a very non-detailed (ie amateur) understanding of the possibility of real time travel as informed by this book, How to Build a Time Machine.
FOR SCIENCE!
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quantum-Universe-Anything-Happen/dp/0306821443/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408573505&sr=8-1&keywords=brian+cox
These are not fast questions, haha.
>What do you think is on the other side of the black hole?
Theoretically, if the black hole is part of a pair that were created from entangled subatomic particles, then they would be connected by an Einstein-Rosen bridge, and (again, theoretically) if you were to allow yourself to be sucked into one of them you'd emerge wherever the other one happens to exist. This could be in another galaxy, or yeah, some people think it's possible you could end up in another universe.
>Is there a lot of universes?
Theoretical physicists (particularly those working in string theory) are starting to think that yes, there are. Brian Greene and Michio Kaku have written reasonably accessible books on this theory, if you're interested.
>what about aliens?
Of course. It is highly unlikely that in a universe filled with billions of galaxies, each of which contains hundreds of millions of stars, only one of them would have a planet in its orbit that is capable of sustaining life. Robert Lanza hypothesizes that, in fact, the universe is biocentric - that life and consciousness are not mere accidents, but what the structure of the universe is based around. This, too, would suggest that life cannot then be confined to one planet.
>What happens to the infj emotion after their death? Are you thinking of reincarnation?
Not reincarnation exactly, no. My beliefs are pantheistic in a way that isn't really compatible with reincarnation in the traditional sense. My concept of "God" is, essentially, "the combined energy of the universe". Part of this energy is used to power my body and mind; what some might call a soul. But my "soul" isn't a discrete entity; it is made of energy, which is fungible. So, when I die, that energy (and therefore, I) will return to "everything". Of course, it will then be used to power other things... perhaps another life form, perhaps a star, or wind, or electricity. But it won't be the "same" energy - just as, if you pour a cup of water into the ocean and then fill another cup from it, it won't be the "same" water. It comes from the same source, but the individual molecules are probably going to be different. But I do think our thoughts and memories remain, as a sort of... resonance, let's say. They become part of everything, too. When people talk about remembering past lives, most likely they are accessing these resonating memories. But, not because your soul has moved into their body - rather, because you, and they, are part of the same whole.
Which, I guess, might sound like quibbling - it's not that different from reincarnation, not really. It's just that one view sees every soul as separate, and the other does not.
Mini physics lecture coming right up! I think /u/slugwind is our resident physicist so she (I think, sorry if otherwise) might be able to give you some more insight.
---------------------
At its core the uncertainty principle is telling you that you fundamentally cannot know both the velocity and position of a particle with complete accuracy for both. Knowing more about one means that you know less about the other. Here's a nice explanatory anecdote that I'm stealing from this book:
Say you've got a camera set up in a room, there's a fly buzzing around, and you can adjust the shutter speed of your camera. If you crank up the shutter speed and look at the resulting picture you can tell exactly where the fly is, but you don't know anything about its velocity (remember that velocity is a vector, it has a value for speed and direction). Conversely, if you slow down the shutter speed and look at the resulting picture the fly is very blurry, but you can infer from the shutter speed how fast it was going and in what direction.
That's pretty much the core of it. By sacrificing knowledge about velocity (increasing shutter speed) you can know more and more about the fly's position. By sacrificing knowledge about its position you can know more about its velocity. What you can't do is have great information about both simultaneously.
----------------------------------
Now, as this pertains to your post, I would argue that because decisions are made based on the information available to the agent at the time things like the uncertainty principle can be extrapolated upward, if only because knowing everything is impossible.
I've two recommendations:
The best bang for your buck, in my opinion, is Abell's Exploration of the Universe. It's dirt cheap (comparatively), and it contains a lot of the basic math you should know. The major concern is that this book is old, and some of its information is very well out of date. However, the basics of the planets and stars haven't changed significantly in, oh, 50 years or so, so this book is a solid introduction.
If you want something a little more up-to-date (and a little pricier), you might want to check out The Cosmic Perspective. My main complaint is that this book has very little mathematical rigor, but its explanations of concepts are rock solid.
If you really want to shoot for the moon (heh), you could pick up copies of Foundations of Astrophysics or An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics. These are NOT 100-level texts, but these two (especially the second) are must-reads in the world of astronomy textbooks.
Looking on their website it seems as if they do not let outside people borrow from their library, sorry :(.
I know many libraries have "partnerships" for the lack of a better word, where if you try to borrow a book from the library, and they don't have it, they will request it from somewhere else they are partnered with and get it for you.
Some ideas of books:
For my undergraduate astrophysics class I used - Foundations of Astrophysics by Ryden and Peterson, ISBN13: 978-0-321-59558-4
I have also used (more advanced, graduate level) - An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Carroll and Ostlie, ISBN13: 978-0-805-30402-2
There are plenty of other undergraduate text books for astrophysics, but those are the only two I have experience with.
Some other books that may be just fun reads and aren't text books:
A Brief History of Time - Hawking
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter - Feynman
Random popular science books:
Parallel Worlds - Kaku (or anything else by him Michio Kaku)
Cosmos - Sagan
Dark Cosmos - Hooper
or anything by Green, Krauss, Tyson, etc.
Videos to watch:
I would also suggest, if you have an hour to burn, watching this video by Lawrence Krauss. I watched it early on in my physics career and loved it, check it out:
Lawrence Krauss - A Universe From Nothing
Also this video is some what related:
Sean Carroll - Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time
Hope you enjoy!
Edit: Formatting.
If you're feeling brave you can try reading his 1994 book on black holes and time warps. I suspect that the book he wrote about the science of Interstellar is more approachable.
You might want to read this book, by Kip Thorne:
Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (Commonwealth Fund Book Program)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0393312763/
The universe is 4-dimensional. X-Y-Z + time. You can distort all four of these things with gravity. You can really distort these things with intense gravity (i.e., a black hole). If you position yourself near a black hole (i.e., right next to the event horizon), time will be so distorted compared to time flow where gravity is not so intense (i.e., away from the event horizon) that "your" time will move super slow and you the rest of the universe will age much much faster.
If you want to learn more about this, I recommend this book. It's one of my favorite reads ever.
You can't go wrong with anything by Carl Sagan. Try Cosmos to start with.
Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip S. Thorne is another good one.
this is a really really good book http://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763
Also depends on what level of mathematics you're coming from: [Div Grad Curl] (http://www.amazon.com/DIV-Grad-Curl-All-That/dp/0393969975) is great for learning the multivariable calc.
When it comes to an introduction to quantum, [this] (http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Introduction-Robert-Scherrer/dp/0805387161/ref=sr_1_14?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341515102&sr=1-14&keywords=quantum+mechanics) is probably one of the best textbooks I've used.
His videos don't plug the related book(s), but I found them to be worthwhile as well. Everyone learns a little differently, your mileage may vary.
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Theoretical-Leonard-Susskind/dp/0465062903
https://www.amazon.com/Theoretical-Minimum-Start-Doing-Physics/dp/0465075681
The Feynman Lectures, Volume III and Susskind's Quantum Mechanics Theoretical Minimum are both great resources. Neither one is like reading a textbook (which can be quite tiring), but both manage to cover all of the stuff that you should need to cover.
Maybe theoretical minimum by Leonard Susskind? I'm reading classic mechanics of this series and it's awesome, gives a totally new perspective to you and also teaches scientific notation.
You could first become clear on what you mean by “mechanism.” Are you speaking of these sorts of mechanisms:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-mechanisms/
Thinking About Mechanisms
When you talk of "fundamental" and of not believing in “anything solid," you might be looking for quantum mechanics and, more specifically, Quantum Field Theory: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/
Depending on your background in mathematics, this book could be the best place to begin. It's also paired with a lecture series at Stanford. Here's an early quote from the text:
> Ordinarily, we learn classical mechanics first, before even attempting quantum mechanics. But quantum physics is much more fundamental than classical physics. As far as we know, quantum mechanics provides an exact description of every physical system, but some things are massive enough that quantum mechanics can be reliably approximated by classical mechanics.
Additionally, this lecture by Sean Carroll is very approachable, couching our understanding of the fundamental in the present state of physics (in 2013) and where physics seems to be headed.
Keep in mind that there are various interpretations of the quantum.
You might want to check this one out: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0465062903/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=
I learned the basics from Shutz (which I liked a lot). I don't remember it requiring Lagrangian/Hamiltonian stuff.
I would actually suggest NOT trying to learn about these subjects, at least not on their own. Put in the time to really learn tensors, then co- and contravariance will makes loads more sense!
I found the first 3 or 4 chapters of Schutz's "First Course on General Relativity" to be a great place for teaching these things to myself. You could also take a math methods course that covers tensors.
EDIT: This is the book I'm talking about:
http://www.amazon.com/A-First-Course-General-Relativity/dp/0521887054/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345315215&sr=8-1&keywords=schutz+general+relativity
For an undergrad I would recommend
http://www.amazon.com/A-First-Course-General-Relativity/dp/0521887054
before moving on the MTW.
>There is no conceivable mechanism by which the brain could generate consciousness, yet I am conscious.
Yes there is, check out I am a strange loop..
>There is no conceivable mechanism by which the universe and everything came into existence, yet here it is.
Yes there is check out A Universe from Nothing or The Grand Design.
You can argue these all you want, but (here's the important bit), even if there weren't conceivable mechanisms for these things, and even if our prior probability was really low for these things, we have roughly 10^500 times more evidence for our existance, and for our consciousness (ignoring the semantic problem with this word), than we have for things like para-psychology.
If I walked around every day, communicating with others psychically, and, when I ask the neighbor for sugar psychically, she comes over with some sugar, and when I psychically scream "Stop!" everyone stops and stares at me, then yes, I would be a fool to dismiss psychic communication.
This is exactly what happens with consciousness. I notice that people behave exactly as they would as if they are conscious (myself especially). If they weren't conscious, they (and I) would behave differently, so their behavior is a testing mechanism.
This is exactly what happens with existence. I notice that things... exist, and behave as if they exist. If something didn't exist, I wouldn't expect everyone to behave as if it did.
It's all about probabilities. nd with para-psychology, the probability is simply really, really tiny.
>He that will only believe what he can fully understand has either a very short creed or a very long head.
Your leaving out the other half here. While it may be stupid to only believe thing you completely understand (by the way, I believe many things that I only partially understand, advanced mathematics, for example), the alternative, believing everything you don't understand, is far more "stupid. (really, personal attacks, is that necessary)."
Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe
The Grand Design
Yeah! This weekend I went to a local book store and spent the better part of the evening there. I had a blast and picked a book by Stephen Hawking
buy this:
http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553805371
the new stephen hawking book the grand design is pretty fantastic. it's a very interesting, easily readable explanation of modern physics as well as the history of physics. this book is where hawking finally comes out of the atheist closet in a very non-political way, basically explaining that while people can believe in a god our knowledge of physics doesn't have a need for it.
You should check out Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design" . I'm not sure I agree with all of it and I'm really not sure about M-Theory, but he makes an interesting case for the big bang resulting from quantum effects and our universe resulting from Richard Feynman's theory of a sum of histories.
It's not a definitive work, but it's an interesting read and will introduce the lay reader to a series of fascinating concept in classical and quantum physics.
I have this sometimes (I also don't remember events but remember facts). Like something will happen and I feel like I dreamt it years before. But I kind of assume that I must just think that I had dreamt it years earlier. But now that I think about it, I guess it's possible I really did remember something that didn't happen yet in a dream, given what I read in The Grand Design.
Something weird is that I specifically remember getting out of a pool and walking towards a house -- and having deja vu about it -- thinking it had happened months before. And then, it happening again and remembering both deja vu times before. But the "3rd time", it was the first time I had ever been to that house.
>First off, he wasn't a teenager, he was probably about 30.
I was talking about Mary.
>What's more likely? A natural universe was created by something beyond physical laws, or it just came out of nowhere.
I think you ought to watch this.
Or read this.
>but from nothing cannot come something.
That seems like an argument against the existence of a god as well. Else where did the god come from? Theologians can say the god has always existed, but one can as well state that our universe is part of an endless cycle of collapses and expansions or that time did not exist before our universe arose from the quantum foam, so it is meaningless to ask what came before. One could explain the existence of the universe as the eminent theoretical physicist and cosmologist Steven Hawking did in The Grand Design.
>In his latest book, The Grand Design, an extract of which is published in Eureka magazine in The Times, Hawking said: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”
>
>He added: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”
Reference
And:
>As Stephen Hawking says in his book A Brief History of Time (quoted by Victor Stenger, Has Science Found God?, p. 148): "In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero." In other words, it is not the case that something came out of nothing. It is that we have always had zero energy.
Reference
Some people don't like the notion of a universe forming from quantum foam, they would much rather imagine a god forming it, which is why we have thousands of creation myths, including the two biblical ones, the one written by the Priestly Source in Genesis 1 and the older creation myth written by the Jahwist in Genesis 2, which borrow from Sumerian mythology.
Some people feel that they must have an answer as to how the universe came to be. They don't like "We don't know all the details"; for them "God created it" is so much more satisfying.
Some prefer the answer given thousands of years ago by our distant ancestors who said Atum or El, or Ptah, or Vishvakarman, or Yahweh, etc. created the universe. For some, that is a much more comforting answer.
> Darn, I feel like the best response is just going to be that it's all too technical and broad for nonspecialists to have any reasonable understanding of.
No, the only response is that this is the kind of question that entire multi-volume books are written to answer. Even if this post received the most comments of any post that has ever been posted to reddit, it wouldn't really answer your question.
Read this instead: The Road to Reality
I'm no physicist. My degree is in computer science, but I'm in a somewhat similar boat. I read all these pop-science books that got me pumped (same ones you've read), so I decided to actually dive into the math.
​
Luckily I already had training in electromagnetics and calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra so I was not going in totally blind, though tbh i had forgotten most of it by the time I had this itch.
​
I've been at it for about a year now and I'm still nowhere close to where I want to be, but I'll share the books I've read and recommend them:
​
I'm available if you want to PM me directly. I love talking to others about this stuff.
Would Askscience consider Parallel Worlds by Michu Kaku and other works by him to have acceptable science behind them, or is he just making things up?
(Before suggesting it, since it's not my field, I thought I should ask)
I like Michio Kaku. Perhaps this book is what you're looking for?
Just came to post this. His book will be out in a few months: http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X
You didn't even begin to answer the question. Thank you for posting though.
Read some physics, there's a great new book by Laurence Krauss.
http://www.amazon.ca/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X
There are some very good ideas out there about the question I think you're asking, but it's so poorly phrased that I'm really not sure. Reading books other than the bible is a good start though.
Theoretical physcist and atheist, Laurence Krauss, does claim just that in his newest book and research:
A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing
Empty space where there is no matter, will always create matter, through quantum mechanics.
And although we can disagree about his theories, he is a well-respected physicist who claims that "nothing created something", or at least could have.
Well there's a few layers to your question.
Traditional Big Bang cosmology doesn't call for "something to come from nothing". The whole "so there was nothing and it exploded" line is a misrepresentation of what the theory is all about. I've just written a really quick and simplified explanation of the Big Bang theory here.
Lately we've been exploring the nature of reality on a quantum scale. We're learning more and more each day about how the universe works on a really tiny scale. It turns out that the things that make the things that make atoms are so weird that even our best scientists have trouble understanding what is going on. We are encountering particles that seem to affect each other over a distance for no reason, particles that seem to behave differently depending on how you look at them and even, you guessed it, particles that flick in and out of existence in flagrant disregard for our regular world view.
I haven't read it myself but A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss (article) (book) (video) comes highly recommended.
I'm not sure what you mean by "how can they fight each other", do you mind restating the question?
Edit: Oh, and as far as 'Laws vs Universe' is concerned: 'Laws' aren't something that have a concrete existence. It's just a term we use to describe some aspects of the universe's behaviour which we think we understand well. There's no 'chicken / egg' dilemma, there's just the universe.
Just watched the video at didn't find anything out of the ordinary with it.
Mind you I am not an astronomer or anything, I just find this stuff very interesting, so I read a bunch of books on the subject. I've recently finished Lawrence Krauss' "A Universe From Nothing" and I heartily recommend it, though it's not a particularly easy read.
If you haven't already you should really watch Krauss' talk of the same name (which later resulted in the book). It's my favorite talk on anything ever.
I highly recommend this book:
A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing
If you like the video, I highly recommend you read the book as well. It's more comprehensive, and will blow your mind.
A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss was written only a year ago. It has a great summary of all the exciting discoveries in cosmology from Einstein to recent understandings of dark energy. He even covers an interesting explanation as to "spoiler" how the universe could come from nothing.
>You seem to be saying entirely different things each time you comment on this point.
I am saying the same thing. Philosophers, particularly before the advent of modern science, have often become so dedicated to concepts that they make faulty assertions about the natural world. Concepts derived from a limited understanding become impediments. Grand metaphysical systems of the past may impress with their internal consistency and complexity, but they do not describe the natural world with the accuracy or usefulness of modern scientific theories.
>but rather whether it is sound.
Soundness implies truth of the propositions used as premises in the argument. How would one test the premises of metaphysical arguments about prime movers and such? While I admit that such arguments may be interesting or internally consistent or even valid to the extent that they do not violate the rules of deduction, they are still built on definitions that do not allow for testing against the natural world and are thus not sound.
>No, physics doesn't suggest anything like this.
Lawrence Krauss would disagree.
>The ontological argument...
Depends on the definition of 'great' and whether such definition does or does not include existence. Descartes' goes on to include 'clear and distinct' ideas of supreme beings. These are very muddy concepts and to say 'well I guess god exists because this proof is valid' just seems silly by the standards of modern science. Grenlins exist because I have defined them as the 'greenest thing' and it is greener to exist than not to.
>science of course relying on the methods of logic.
Science relies on observation. Such observation has at times shown a world that does not conform with traditional notions of logic. It is the strength of science that it adapts to what is observed rather than attempting to squeeze the data into an accepted dogma.
>you seem to regard the meaning of time as being limited to physics
The OP asked about time in regard to cosmology which I believe is best dealt with by physics for reasons stated. If you mean by the 'meaning of time' how one experiences time, how it relates to human affairs, etc., then 'yes' other disciplines, from art to sociology, may have something to say.
How the universe was made?
I think the real crux of the question you're asking is how can something come from nothing? (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong; I don't want to speak for you) Let me just start off by saying there is no definitive scientific answer to this question... yet. However, there are very prominent research scientists who have tackled the question and come up with very cogent theories (backed up by current mathematical models).
I won't pretend to understand most of these theories as I'm a biologist, not a physicist. There is one recent book written on the very topic called A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss (he is a published theoretical physicist and cosmologist). He posits that particles do in fact spontaneously come into existence and there is scientific proof and reasoning for how and why. I haven't gotten around to reading it myself (it was just published this year), but I've been told it's good for the layman on the topic.
Now let me move on to some of the problems with this question. Perhaps you yourself don't have this supposition, but the supposition many theists make with the question (where did the universe come from?), is that if it can't be answered than God must have done it. This is a logical leap that defies rational reasoning, and is a leap theists have been making for millenia. What makes the tides go in and out? We don't know; must be God. What causes disease? We don't know; must be God. Where did the universe come from? We don't know; must be God?
It's what's known as a God of the gaps; wherein anything that can't be explained is conveniently claimed to have a divine explanation. Until a rational scientific answer comes along and religion takes a step back. There will likely always be gaps in our knowledge base (most definitely in our liftetimes). That doesn't mean we should make the same mistake as our ancestors and attribute these gaps to God. It's okay to simply not know and strive to understand.
Another huge problem with your question is that the theist answer only serves to further complicate the original question.
Theists tend to skip that third step, or explain it away as God just always existing. Yet the universe always existing is something that is logically unacceptable to them. If anything, throwing God into the equation only makes it more complicated. A sentient being capable of creating the initial state of the universe would be more complex than what it is creating (meaning God is more complex than the universe). Trying to explain than how God came into being is more complicated than the original question, so nothing has really been answered or solved.
If you're really trying to stump atheists, the best common theist argument I've seen is the cosmological constants one (how are they so fine tuned?). No doubt there are answers, but that's one of the better arguments out there. I won't go into it here, just search for it.
If you haven't already read it this is a great read:
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X
A good place to start.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
I believe that a question prefaced with "If evolution simply came out of nothing...", is a subset of the question "Did the universe simply come out of nothing?". The physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote a book called "A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing" that explains how it is possible that the universe did in fact evolve out of nothing. There's also videos on YouTube of him explaining this, and here's one of them.
Once you can wrap your mind around that possibility, it can then be inferred that just about everything else could also come out of nothing, including evolution.
Yes, quantum fluctuations - where stuff can pop into existence out of empty space - is proven fact.
It's as exciting as it is disturbing when you think about it. But then the laws of physics don't really care much about our feelings.
Reading up further I would suggest Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechanics
And a good book on the wider subject is A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
Just look at your sentence: What CAUSED the Big Bang. Cause. Causative, Causation, Cause. Whatever "caused" the Big Bang was causative, by literal definition. If X caused Y, X was causative, no matter what X is.
The question, and answer, are a bit confusing because of how physics describes an "empty" universe. Check out A Universe from Nothing.
You should check out this book. Even if you disagree with it after finishing it, you'll have learned a great deal about the current state of our knowledge of cosmology and where it's going.
Well I was trying to be cordial in correction, but you see this now as an opportunity to play a victim and call us a circle jerk. In fact, that's all you really seem to be doing is telling us that we should "stop hiding behind our beliefs", that there is "no reason to believe in the supernatural", and that we're "sad". I'm trying to reach out, as the 1 Peter verse you so appropriately quoted has said, in a spirit of gentleness and respect, but it seems you'd rather just mock people. The reason we have rule 5 is because there are enough people saying "gOD DON'T REAL" on reddit, and it's redundant to have people constantly coming in and saying:
> Everything we know about our universe can be explained through natural means, including the origin of the universe itself (see this book[1] ).
This sub exists to discuss Christianity. If you'd like to debate the value in a naturalistic philosophy, other subreddits exist for that.
> Please provide sources for everything you say
Not everything requires a source. Besides which, you don't provide one.
> 1. The bible- it was written by many different people describing the same events.
Source?
> I don't see how multiple different people could all record the same thing if it wasn't true.
There are many ways:
You have provided no evidence to suggest that these things are not true about the Bible.
> Also the bible doesn't seem like something someone would make up
Really? It doesn't? Why is that?
> William Craig has good arguments for this
This is not a citation. William Lane Craig has written many things about the Bible. A citation would be a specific quote which we can verify that he actually said -- or, failing that, a transcript of the argument in question. You've provided neither.
> 2. Risk of athiesm
You're going to have to be more specific. What, exactly, do you see as a risk here? If you are thinking of Pascal's Wager, it is an absurd false dichotomy -- see my response to your point 4 below.
> 3. Big Bang theory- how can there be something from nothing
If you really want to know, there is an entire book no the subject, written by an accomplished physicist. The TL;DR is: We don't know yet whether the question even makes sense, but there's several theoretical models for how this could be the case.
As an example, in one model, time began with the Big Bang, so the notion of the Big Bang coming from anything is incoherent. So the Big Bang isn't "something from nothing", because as soon as you say "from" in that sentence, you're talking nonsense -- it's as if you asked "What's North of the North Pole?"
But the short answer is, we don't know how the universe began yet. We have some ideas of how something could come from nothing (and routinely does), but we don't know that this is how the Universe began.
So, your turn. How can something come from nothing? Because that is exactly what the Bible says God did, right? If not, where did God get the stuff he made the Universe from?
> 4. What if the devil really is deceiving me
Good question. What if he is? I don't mean about atheism, necessarily -- what if he's deceiving you about religion?
Think about it. Would it be beyond Satan's power to produce a book, and influence major historical figures to spread it as a false religion? What if Jesus was really the Antichrist in disguise, and you damn yourself to Hell with every prayer? The Bible itself, in Revelations (chapter 13, I think), talks about the Beast's rise to power, in which he spreads a false religion as a false prophet -- how do you know you're not following a false religion already? Surely, if the Beast had the chance, he would rewrite the Bible to make himself seem like the hero.
So... I can't help you with your fear about the devil deceiving you, but atheism is certainly no worse off than religion in that regard. You could be deceived by the Devil, or you could be trapped in the Matrix, or any number of things. The only way your mind can function, the only way you can get anything done, is to assume that you are not -- to at least assume that your mind is mostly your own, and begin to reason about what else you can know.
Interesting article! I am actually about to start reading A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss.
Lawrence Krauss has done ground breaking research on what may have initiated the big bang. I don't know what you are calling the "timeless unknown," but there are forms of energy beyond the outskirts of our universe that can cause "Big bangs." There maybe many universes beyond our ability and instruments.
https://smile.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468?sa-no-redirect=1
>Science is limited by the human mind and the senses through which the human mind perceives the universe.
Science most definitely is not limited to the human senses as our instruments have allowed us to observe much more. Much of science is actually quite contrary to our senses.
Sure it is limited by the human mind but there are many minds in history that have made amazing discoveries that the ordinary minds did not.
Also not a big fan of the word magical to describe things outside of fiction. It is very non-specific and has implications, whether you mean it or not. Very counterproductive in a debate forum.
>There is another way to explore and discover and this is the inner dimension which is ultimately non physical.
What's an inner dimension and what have you discovered about it? The human mind is quite creative and sees patterns where they don't exist and is quite capable of fabrication of whole worlds of things. How will you prove your so called, "inner dimension?"
Well as I understand it there are a number of different kinds of multiverses that can exist. The one with the strongest evidence comes out of understanding of the inflation theory which is the currently widely accepted theory that fits with our observations. Inflation caused our universe to expand very rapidly shortly after its creation. After a short while that inflation stopped and created the universe that we see today.
However that stopping of inflation did not happen everywhere. We just happen to exit in a place where it did stop. Our pocket of reality exists in a still expanding...well I have no idea what that is, but whatever it is it is still expanding faster than the speed of light. From time to time other parts of the expanding...umm thing... will stop expanding and another universe will pop out. The point is that all these universes would be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light so there is no way they could interact with one another.
All of that comes as a natural consequence of our current theories of inflation which have substantial evidence to back them up. They are not proven, but they are our best current understanding. Other theories of multiuniverses come from string theory which I believe strive to be internally consistent but aren't backed by any physical evidence or observations.
Edit: I only know this because I just got done reading A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. I'm an atheist but the book is too preachy for my taste. It's author Lawrence M. Krauss says the book came about from debates with theist and it shows. I wish it had stuck with the straight physics instead of diverging from time to time into discussions like would be found on this subreddit. Still, if you want to know more I'd suggest picking it up.
In order of likelyhood of pissing off your friends:
.
Christopher Hitchens: "God is not Great"
This is a brutal and unforgiving deconstruction of theism. It won't make you any new friends, and might alienate your existing friends. I really enjoyed it.
Sam Harris: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Another brutal deconstruction, this one is gentler and easier to stomach. Think mail fist in a velvet glove. This is only gentle in contrast to Hitchens.
Lawrence Krauss: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing
A more positive, life affirming approach. Still ruthlessly atheistic, but less evangelical than Hitchens and Harris. Warning: Complex ideas, complex writing, it's not an easy read. Fun, but not easy.
Richard Dawkins: An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist
Similar to Krauss' book, but even easier to read. Dawkins does have a reputation for outspoken atheism, which will turn off some readers.
>While something can be used to make something else, we can't make something from nothing. It ain't do-able. Some people think you can, but you really can't make something from nothing and this is both observable, (confirmable), and obvious. You can change stuff into other stuff, but you can't create stuff from nothing. This is fundamental, basic, and important because it means Big Bang theory is incorrect, in so far as it states the Big Bang was the start of everything.
That’s wrong actually, physics is not as simple as you think. Here’s a decent read for the layman https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
”Krauss describes the staggeringly beautiful experimental observations and mind-bending new theories that demonstrate not only can something arise from nothing, something will always arise from nothing. With a new preface about the significance of the discovery of the Higgs particle, A Universe from Nothing uses Krauss’s characteristic wry humor and wonderfully clear explanations to take us back to the beginning of the beginning, presenting the most recent evidence for how our universe evolved—and the implications for how it’s going to end.”
atheists dont know the answer and we are humble enough to accept and admit that. we actively support however, trying to find answers.
if you really want to dive into this, one of the smartest men on earth (IMO) wrote a whole book on this one topic.
https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
Keep deluding yourself.
https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468/ref=pd_sim_14_11?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1451624468&pd_rd_r=6W68NKQJWB254VXQKK65&pd_rd_w=hZO2Q&pd_rd_wg=8VrPO&psc=1&refRID=6W68NKQJWB254VXQKK65
I'd recommend you to read this book, it provides some answers to great questions like these. Also, this video :)
I would also say "Grand Design" by Hawking and Mlodinow. If you can at least kind of understand it, you'll be able to answer why there is nothing rather than something and how it happened without a god.
http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553805371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300129205&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553805371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299425012&sr=8-1
Complicated questions have complicated answers.
I couldn't explain it more than Krauss; he knows much more about it than I do. The net of it though is that known physical laws do allow for a singularity such as the big bang with no "impetus" or external force.
Would suggest Stephen Hawking if you want to do more reading on it.
*edit to add link
The Grand Design is pretty good.
This is actually mentioned in Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design.
But is that different than asking "where did God come from?" You can say he has always existed, but that's little different than saying the universe has always existed or that we live in a cyclical universe or for the Big Bang model, answering the question as Steven Hawking has in his book The Grand Design.
>He adds: "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
>
>"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
>
>"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
Reference: Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe
Even if you posit a prime mover that reveals nothing about that prime mover. I.e., is the prime mover as envisioned by the Bahá'í Faith, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Zorastianism, or any of thousands of others or perhaps none of those envisioned by humans.
To be equivocal about the scientific evidence, such as potassium-argon dating for an earth and universe that is billions of years old, seems to suppose that there is a deus deceptor who has chosen to deceive humans with evidence that the earth and the universe is billions of years old.
http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/dp/0679454438
Great book all around.
I'm slogging through Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. It's changed my life (I'm dead serious).
Road to Reality
The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose.
My dad lent it to me. My bookmark has been sitting part way through the second chapter for almost a year and a half. What is stopping me? Having a kid. I've been reading nothing but child-rearing books for the last year and a half.
I talked to my dad not long ago and he said he never even made it to the end of the first chapter, so I guess I don't feel so bad. I still plan on reading the whole thing... I might just change my strategy to skim it instead of trying to understand every formula.
For anyone that's interested, Roger Penrose has an excellent explanation for this in his book "The Road to Reality", that I cannot, for the life of me, remember at this moment. Here's the Amazon link for the book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Road-Reality-Complete-Universe/dp/0679454438
if you like physics or math check out the road to reality
What the bleep is hilarious awful and not a documentary at all.
Get this:
http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/dp/0679454438
Work through it all, and you'll be on top of things in no time (or 3-4 years...)
I see you're on a Road to Reality.
If you want to go down a more unconventional path there's always Gravitation. It's self contained and you'll be learning from the masters.
I am literally a physicist and I literally studied those things you're describing (the structure of accretion disks given some stochastic dynamics).
Again. We don't care about the why. We care about the how. And we already know how mass-energy causes spacetime curvature.
Read these, then we will have a discussion about the how of gravitational physics:
https://smile.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/0691177791
https://smile.amazon.com/Introduction-Differential-Geometry-Curves-Surfaces/dp/1546735895
Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku
Sooo many lol, here are some of my favorites.
ADHD
Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD https://www.amazon.com/dp/111827928X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_1.Y9ybCSGW7GF
General Brain Stuff
You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, an d 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself https://www.amazon.com/dp/1592407366/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_abZ9ybEHGSMEK
You are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself https://www.amazon.com/dp/1592408796/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_vbZ9ybKY1636G
School/Study Help
A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) https://www.amazon.com/dp/039916524X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_gcZ9ybCDM8Q6K
Social/Relationship skills
What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061438294/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_1cZ9ybQJXS3BK
The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591846617/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_OdZ9ybBFRG9R4
Cosmology
Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400033721/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_GeZ9ybHP9J2J5
Each one of these books has had a big impact on me, as a side note I'm have become a big fan of audible since I normally have a hard time sitting still to read, so I'd recommend giving it a try if you never have. You'll be surprised how much of a book you can comprehend while listening to it as do you other random chores and stuff throughout the day.
> i'd love to hear what you've got, though.
Have you read "A Universe From Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss yet?
Krauss is a physicist from the University of Arizona who has become a bit of a rock star in atheist circles over the past few years. His book explores what our modern understanding of particle physics might tell us about the Big Bang.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X
You are not ready for a debate, but perhaps you are ready for an education. Read/watch these and then report back to us:
Universe from Nothing Video
Universe From Nothing Book
The Selfish Gene Book
How New Organs arise video
Why Evolution is true Video
Greatest show on Earth Book
I can not give you enough upvotes. I will also try to summarize the talk for those that are too lazy to watch the whole video.
Cosmologist are pretty sure that the right answer is the second one: energy came from nothing.
I'll try to explain it: we know that most of the mass of bodies does not come from quarks that form protons and neutrons, it comes from the empty space between them. We have theories that say that empty space is continuously bubbling with particles that pop in and out of existence, and experimental results confirm it. Actually, our best theory is accurate to 10 decimal places with experimental results, that is amazing.
So, what is the energy of vacuum space? Cosmologists calculated that and the answer was: energy of vacuum = 10^120 x mass of all the universe. That's scary, because if it were true, we wouldn't be here. So cosmologists knew that the answer was: the total mass of universe has to be zero (total mass is given by "normal" matter, energy and negative energy). And now we know that it is actually true: accurate measurements showed that our universe is flat, and that means that it was born from an exact balance of negative and positive energy. A flat universe is the only universe that can start from nothing, and our universe is indeed flat.
Dr. Krauss also wrote a wonderful book that I highly recommend: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing.
Here's a really good book on the topic. One theory goes that Universes are popping up all the time like bubble bath under a faucet. We may never know for sure though.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X
Do! It's a very good talk. It even spawned an entire book.
This book explains how the universe can come from nothing. The author is a cosmologist. Here is a video of a lecture he gave explaining the main concepts.
> Even if your globe trotting analogy is true, how did the cycle start?
If it's true (and I'm not saying it is; it's merely an illustrative example), the cycle truly doesn't have a start; if something similar happens at the end of the universe, it's a circle.
Again, causality is intimately connected to the arrow of time. If the arrow of time can be turned around in some circumstances, something can cause itself!
For a far more educated guess as to what's going on, Laurence Krauss' book A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing has another possible explanation.
This stuff is very far away from normal human experience, and requires a lot of math to understand. It does not make "intuitive" sense.
For a less drastic example, explosions and shock waves at supersonic speeds act very differently from the sort of violent impacts we're used to. (That's supersonic in the material of interest, which is considerably higher inside solid objects than air.) But military research now understands them very well and can design very effective shaped charges as well as supersonic-combustion ramjets.
Orbital mechanics is also confusing as hell until you have studied it for a while. "What do you mean I deccelerate in order to overtake the space station ahead?" But it has also been tested extensively and really works in the real world.
And quantum mechanics is the ultimate mind-bending math with very serious real-world practical usefulness. (Namely microelectronics!)
Human intellect can learn to understand these "unnatural" things, but only with a lot of skull sweat. It's just not going to make sense to someone who is trying to use analogies from their everyday 1-gravity low-speed macroscopic life.
Awe, and I was going to post this link. Nice work sir.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X
>(Larry Suskind's "A Universe From Nothing")
It's Laurance Krauss who wrote A Universe From Nothing
And I think you are thinking of Leonard Susskind, who is also a physicist and wrote The Black Hole War and The Cosmic Landscape
If you're at all interested in this question, I HIGHLY recommend reading Lawrence Krauss's new book A Universe From Nothing. The answer to your question is a key to understanding the title question of the book. It's all explained clearly and is easy to read.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X Suggested reading for anyone interested.
>something had to come from something
well, we know this to be true, but we do not know if something can come from nothing. Look up Lawrence Krauss' "A universe from nothing"
>For example, if you believe in the big bang wouldn't have something had to start the big bang (God).
for the sake of argument, i'm going to assume that your god did start the big bang. What caused god?
>So what do you believe was that first push in the creation of whatever the first think in the creation of the universe?
the correct answer is we do not know. Science doesn't make up answers like religion and assert them to be true. Currently, we have no evidence about anything before the big bang or what caused it. Therefore we cannot assume anything at this point.
> I don't think one does at all. Also, i don't think the last part of what you said fits the first part; it would fit the obverse.
Huh? Every substrate is a system, so if every system needs a substrate, it really seems to me that you'd end up with infinite recursion.
> One of the leading cosmological theories is based on the recent destruction of any empirical paradigm of 'nothing' thanks to Krauss. It's the bubble-chain energy-spike emergent blackhole universe stuff (that I'm betting many people here have read about, though I can't name the guy who is credited with building the framework).
I've heard about it before, but I haven't had time to look into it. According to a summary of his book, Krauss explains how the universe came to existence via quantum gravity. The question is, though, why does quantum gravity exist?
Edit: whoops, you edited your post.
> Philosophically, it would be very hard (dare I say impossible) to even posit a credible hyperthetical metaphyscial structure that wasn't substrate: the moment you have an instance of thing, it is substrate imbued with properties by its parent 'physics' in whatever capacity the universe in question has them. For me, this is really a restsatement of a much purer derivative: "nothing" is the absolutely perfect equivalent of "no system". If there's a system, then there cannot be "nothing". In fact the moment one bounds something as "nothing" conceptually, you are implying a related comparator that negates the concept in the first place.
Well, I'm not saying I have a good alternative, I'm just saying that I don't think we know enough to know that there is no alternative to having a substrate.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347556567&sr=8-1&keywords=lawrence+krauss
Mine was A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing
Then, he is agreeing the universe can make itself. QED.
There is a book by physicist L Krauss on the subject. I imagine the physics is horrible.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X
Winning the lottery 50 times in a row has mathematical odds. Its unlikely, but possible. You dont need the supernatural for it to happen.
The same goes for matter popping into existence. Its entirely possible without a prime mover, intelligent force, space aliens or the flying spagetti monster. (see: https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468)
We dont even know if there was a "beginning". It may have always been. What sign tells you there was a beginning?
You cant go beyond science; its not a "thing"; its a way of observing your environment to learn more through proof. If you need to look for signs, its obvious you are looking for something that isnt there.
He is literally quoting, https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
Why is there something rather than nothing?
A deep question that has been asked, and answered, in Lawrence Krauss' book, A Universe From Nothing (Wikipedia entry - Amazon book sales - Krauss Lecture#1 - Krauss Lecture#2 - YT e-book, read by Krauss himself)
https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
>That doesn't explain what was before the Big Bang
There was no 'before' space-time was created by the big bang.
>An alternate reality could have existed with no Big Bang
[Citation Needed]
>so really you can't explain the catalyst for the Big Bang and why it happened.
Not true.
https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
​
read this book, let me know if it makes any sense. My guess is there is nothing still, like -1 + 1 kind of deal.
It's a good question why there is something rather than nothing. I suggest you read this book or at least watch the related YouTube videos.
https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
It is a problem, but I think us atheists have faith that science will some day figure it out, if the answer isn't one that is outside the bounds of human knowledge.
Lawrence Krauss' "A Universe from Nothing" is on my list of books for this summer. It seems to me physics is making way with this, though.
Glad to help. He references a book of his, maybe you could check that out as well. Enjoy your day!
Book: http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
P.S. - Good to know you are interested in science. The world needs more rational thinkers and discovering enraptures within it.
If you want your mind blown with some very cool cosmological theories, I suggest reading A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence M. Krauss). He's a famous atheist, but even a believer can read this book just for the science, it's very well-written.
You are not using the correct definition of atheism. It is the lack of belief in the existence of any deities. That's it. Nothing else. It says nothing about any other types of "belief".
The only valid answer we have today for the origin of the universe is "we don't know". There are many very smart people pushing the boundaries of our current knowledge. My personal, mostly uneducated, belief is that we are on the right path with quantum mechanics. Physicists studying quantum mechanics do not seem particularly bothered by the "something from nothing" aspect. It is only theists and non-physicists that see this as an insurmountable problem.
You might be interested in A Universe from Nothing by Dr. Lawrence Krauss
One of my favorite ideas is from J. Richard Gott & Li-Xin Li, who have postulated a model whereby the universe can create itself.
Regarding #2: I think the physicist Lawrence Krauss actually did say 'something came from nothing', or actually, "A Universe from Nothing".
We don't really know. It could be literally infinite, but it's too large to understand.
One interesting take I heard, while reading Lawrence Krauss' A Universe From Nothing was the idea that we're just a microverse within a grand universe.
I can't explain for shit, but picture it like this: you have a massive, single Universe. It's a whirling, unstable realm of probability and crashing dimensions, with an unfathomable size.
In this grand Universe, a eight separate dimensions collide and release a huge amount of energy. It bubbles outward for a hundred thousand years or so, then collapses. A separate location has six dimensions collide, creating some matter and antimatter, expands for a billion years or so, theb collapses. This is happening billions of times per second, with most of those little bubbles forming and immediately collapsing, a few others lasting for a billion or so years, and a very few stabilizing and lasting nearly indefinitely.
Our universe is that last one. Just a single, tiny expanding bubble. A galaxy in a larger universe. There are probably others, but they are so far apart that there is no way to imagine the distance (the nearest stable 'verse could be two trillion 'verse-lengths away).
I would like to highlight the bottom part of the book and leave the link to Lawrence Krauss's book A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
TLDR: "Nothing is unstable, and anytime you have nothing, you always get something, so long as it disappears eventually."
>Single point... a very hot and dense... already existing... single point... which rapidly expanded (the expansion being the Big Bang).
Ahh gotcha, so this is what you're talking about asking for proof the universe began.
Then I'd recommend the following further reading:
A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking
The Inflationary Universe by Alan Guth
>Universe was not created per evidence.
There's a high level primer here.
https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
I have not read this book, but I've heard nothing but very positive reviews of it (from other non-believers, granted), and it's written specifically to speak to this question:
A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss
The average atheist is a layman just like anyone else, we aren't quantum physicists so we (generally speaking) couldn't possibly explain nor should we be expected to explain the prevailing theories on how "something can come from nothing".... the point of being an atheist is not that you know everything up to and including that a god didn't create the universe, it's that you LACK belief in any god(s) that have ever been proposed due to lack of objective and peer-reviewed evidence to support their purported existence(s).
On that note, in regard to your questions, this might be a good starting point:
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468/ref=asap_B000AP7AZS?ie=UTF8
I read The particle at the end of the universe as well, I'd recommend
Lawrence Krauss' a universe from nothing.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
Reported? For what? Baffling...
A Universe from Nothing
>One of the few prominent scientists today to have crossed the chasm between science and popular culture, Krauss describes the staggeringly beautiful experimental observations and mind-bending new theories that demonstrate not only can something arise from nothing, something will always arise from nothing.
Of course, that's nonsense and he's been taken to task for his definition of "nothing" – but, yeah, he thinks "the Big Bang started from literally nothing..."
I'm honestly baffled why citing a scientist who premiumsalad claims doesn't exist is a problem for this sub. But, yeah, this will certainly be my last post here. Cheers.
> Sorry there you are wrong
No, I'm not.
> Christianity says God created the universe.
Christianity says a lot of stuff but actually knows very little. Knowledge is based on evidence. The creation account in genesis is not evidence but a claim, which requires evidence itself.
So you don't know why the universe exists. You just believe that it was a god. And you believe it without evidence, just because an old book says so.
> The atheists problem
No, it's not really a problem, is it? Atheists are under no obligation to offer an explanation for the existence of the universe in order to dismiss the God-explanation.
That's because the God-explanation isn't even an explanation as it explains absolutely nothing. It's just a claim that is not even backed up with any evidence whatsoever.
> finding an explanation for absolute nothing causing something to happen.
There are indeed [some explanations] (https://www.amazon.de/dp/B004T4KQJS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1). But these are just hypotheses, as we don't have the possibility to verify them through empirical experiments.
> This is made worse as he big bang theory points to the univese having a begining.
The universe as we know it began with the big bang. That doesn't necessarily mean that there was absolutely nothing before. It is entirely possible that the universe always existed, but was in a different state before the big bang.
> 1) Moral law implies a Moral Lawgiver.
(2) There is an objective moral law.
(3) Therefore, there is an objective Moral Lawgiver.
That's a fallacious way of reasoning like William Laine Craig would present it. It's based on the unsubstantiated premise that "There is an objective moral law".
No, there isn't.
What we call morality can be entirely explained through our ability to feel empathy. And empathy can be entirely explained by evolution. Groups in which empathy caused individuals to helped each other rather than killing each other had an obvious advantage in surviving and reproducing. And we are descendants of these populations from which we inherited the instinctive feelings of empathy. You can easily observe moral behavior among various groups of other mammals.
> "we know why science works. because we know how science works." That is nonsence on a parr with Dawkins,' evolution has been seen to happen, it just that we weren't there when it happened'.
Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean, that it's nonsense.
Science works because it's open to change and improve. It's a self-correcting method in which better working explanations replace older ones.
> I ask how do you start it and you answer by discribing how the internal combustion engine works. That doesn't answer how the engine is turned on.
These are both "how" questions. One is on a technical level and the other on a practical one.
> The universe was created by a supernatural being that exists outside of time and space.
That's something you believe, but nothing you can possibly know with any certainty. It's also a completely unfalsifiable claim and needs to be dismissed for that reason alone.
> It accounts for there being a begining. It accounts for why science, maths, logic and morality exist and work as this super natural being is reasonable, consistent and moral and these characteristics are reflected in creation.
It accounts for everything you want it to account for but again, it explains absolutely nothing. "God did it" is just as good as an explanation as "Zeus did it" or "because Unicorns fart rainbows".
Also the God-explanation has been shown to be false on multiple occasions in the past. Ancient people believed that lightnings were thrown by Gods or volcanic eruptions were divine punishments. Today we know exactly why these things happen and God plays no role anymore in their explanations. To invoke God as an explanation for anything that is not yet explained by science is what is called the [god of the gaps] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytaf30wuLbQ).
Nothing about your claims of "self-evidence" is true in my case.
> These beliefs are ones you cannot help but believe; for example, the belief that you exist.
Descartes? "I think, therefore I am?" That's evidence, not self-evidence (though it is evidence for self.) I find it convincing; but then I have a strong bias. This isn't about sufficiency of evidence though; it's about evidence vs. self-evidence.
But how do you take it beyond that? How do you extend it to observations, to the universe, to reality? There are two choices there:
> Most of us also posses pragmatism as a self-evident belief.
"Most" people don't think about it at all. "Most" people are content to think their smartphones are magic. Scientists aren't most people. I'm no most people. And if you're thinking about this topic enough to have this conversation, you're not most people in this respect either. So let's look beyond the pragmatism of "not thinking about epistemology and empiricism won't get me eaten by a tiger, so why bother" and get on with the conversation.
I do consider the possibility the universe is a simulation, or that I'm a brain in a jar being fed stimulus (Actually it's hard to distinguish that testably from surfing reddit, but I digress.) Why not? But those avenues of thought don't lead very far; I feel I've considered them sufficiently. They haven't lead to useful insights yet (saving perhaps the holographic principle), but I remain open to the possibility. Pragmatism has it's place; you can't philosophies if you don't pay attention to things like not dying, but that's evidence for its necessity, not its sufficiency. Think further.
> Why is the sky blue? Because you see it as blue. How do you know that it actually is blue? You don't, but you [presumably] find it self-evidently more rational to assume that what you see is representative of reality, via pragmatism, or a similar philosophy.
And this is where I differ vastly from your preconceived notions of me. I believe the sky is blue because, when I was nine, I built a crude spectroscope and measured it (It's actually mostly white, by the way, with a small but significant increase in the intensity of blue light over what is expected of black-body radiation. Not counting sunset of course. And neglecting absorption lines - I was in third grade, the thing wasn't precise enough for that!)
So that's evidence the sky is blue (and that I was an unusual kid), not "self-evidence." Although in this case, actually observing the sky with your eyes is still evidence; our eyes may be flawed in many ways, but they are sufficient for distinguishing between at least a few million gradations between 390-700 nm wavelengths. That's quite sufficient for narrowing it down to "blue."
That's exactly what I mean about what people consider "self-evidence" actually being evidence they've seen so often they've forgotten it's evidence. You note the approximate visible wavelength of the sky many times a day; it's actually quite well established by repeated observation that (barring systematic errors in our visual processes) it's blue.
> But, if someone did not share this self-evident belief, they would find it quite irrational to assume that the sky is indeed blue in reality, as opposed to merely in your perception of it.
So let's say this happened - let's say someone said the sky was green. Well, there are two possibilities, and we can distinguish between them by showing them other objects with similar emission or reflection spectra. One is that they see these other purportedly blue objects as green. No problem! They simply use "green" to mean "blue." Half a billion people use azul instead, so this is no big deal.
The other possibility is that every other blue thing we can test looks blue to this person, but they still insist the sky is green. This again leads to two possibilities. One is that the sky really is green just for this individual and most of what we have determined about reality is false. The other is that this person has a psychological condition that makes him believe the sky is green. Do we have to accept that the sky is simply self-evidently green to him? Nope! Science!
Put him in a room, and through one slit allow in natural sunlight, and through another match the spectrum of solar light with artificial light as closely as possible. Vary which slit is which. Can this person regularly identify the "green" sky? (specifically compared to control groups?) If not, we can conclude he sees the sky as green due to a psychological condition, not something indicative of reality. This is surprisingly common - just read up on dowsing for instance. There are people convinced they can detect water with sticks, but every one of them fail in tests to do so at rates above random chance. (Dowsers got away with this in old days because when you dug a well, you'd only have to hit a state-sized aquifer.)
The alternative, if he can regularly identify the sky slit as green, and assuming that other possibilities have been excluded, is that reality really doesn't work the way we think it does. Maybe he's a separate brain in a separate jar. Maybe light waves like certain people better. Maybe what we thought were photons were just faeries and they're screwing with us for fun. Whatever the case, though, we'd now have evidence for it. Not "self-evidence" but actual evidence.
Now, you can argue that maybe reality doesn't matter - maybe that person's psychological condition that makes him see a green sky is just as important as the blue sky. Maybe it makes him happier or donate to charity more or whatever, so we should leave him alone. All fine arguments, but they would be separate discussions.
From your other link:
> I also concluded that by logic, existence itself is uncaused.
That remains to be seen. Well-tested theories still leave open other possibilities; though obviously we haven't yet tested these possibilities. But since your basis for belief, according to the other thread, was on the necessity of an uncaused creation in violation of natural laws, I thought you might be interested to know that there are some hypothesis regarding said creation that fit within those laws.
May I suggest reading Krauss' A
Universe From Nothing
Not true really. You're missing the difference between First Cause and a thing that was the initial condition. Scientists don't know what precipitated the big bang nor the physics behind it. But they're considering ideas abut it all the time. One provocative idea is Smolin's The Life of the Cosmos. Some ideas about Causes of a universe out of nothing are found in Lauwrence Krauss' A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing.
TL;DR: Scientists don't know what existed before the big bang, but they don't say there was nothing at all. Minimally, there was physical law.
Edit: speling
> If you do not have mass what do you have that you are measuring?
Energy.
>Are you saying energy came from nothing?
According to Quantum Physics, that is precisely what occurs (Virtual particles, the Casimir Effect). Of course, you also have to define what you mean by the term "nothing". Lawrence Krauss has written books on the subject and has several videos lectures available online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wng6c0oLkQE)
FYI, If the net amount of positive and negative forms of energy in the universe sum out to zero, then the sudden appearance of energy does not violate the Conservation of Energy Principle.
>Or that energy first exists without mass but then a picosecond later does have mass?
Pretty much...
>Even a photon has mass.
What is the rest mass of a photon? Any guesses?
>I said time depends on mass
No. The passage of time is affected by mass, but time itself does not depend on mass. Space-time can exist entirely independent of mass.
>> If you do not have mass what do you have that you are measuring?
>
>Energy.
>
>
>>Are you saying energy came from nothing?
>
>
>According to Quantum Physics, that is precisely what occurs (Virtual particles, the Casimir Effect). Of course, you also have to define what you mean by the term "nothing". Lawrence Krauss has written books on the subject and has several videos lectures available online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wng6c0oLkQE)
>
>
>FYI, If the net amount of positive and negative forms of energy in the universe sum out to zero, then the sudden appearance of energy does not violate the Conservation of Energy Principle.
>
I don't disagree with this, I know this. I'm confused why someone who firmly believes something came from nothing is having a hard time picturing a conscious universe.
It's also worth pointing out that these are different fields of science that don't match up perfectly, for instance relativity breaks down at the quatum level. Quantum science is it's own science. Making it work cohesively with other science even math wise is tricky. That's what the whole unified theory of everything is that we haven't found, something that ties all these fields together.
>
>>Or that energy first exists without mass but then a picosecond later does have mass?
>
>
>Pretty much...
That's good and well. Provide one miracle and science will explain the rest. You are still saying something came from nothing and that science has shown that's not uncommon. the 'something from nothing' argument is always cast against theists when it turns out that is the fabric of our reality as we know it.
>
>>Even a photon has mass.
>
>
>What is the rest mass of a photon? Any guesses?
>
>>I said time depends on mass
>
>
>No. The passage of time is affected by mass, but time itself does not depend on mass.
Are you referring to relative time? I mean sure relative time never seems to change until you measure against the relative time of another observer at a different distance from the mass. That's time dilation, satellites are constantly re-syncing their clocks to ours due to special relativity.
>Space-time can exist entirely independent of mass.
>
Ah so you think space time was not created from the big bang? I think that's wrong. I may be wrong but my understanding was that the big bang created both. There was nothing, then all of a sudden something, which is what we've concluded is our scientific observation. That something came from nothing and that it's common.
NASA has been working on diversity more than it has space exploration.
(Cf. https://www.amazon.com/Whitey-Moon-Politics-death-Program-ebook/dp/B00M2766EI/)
>In these previous posts, we have one of the world's leading cosmologists, Don Page, (who happens to be an Evangelical Christian) disagreeing with your assessment. We have another, Sean Carroll, who also disagrees.
Okay, let’s play dueling cosmologists! Stephen Hawking thinks the universe had a beginning. Lawrence Krauss wrote a book where he says the universe sprang from nothing.
So this line of argument is pointless.
>Even the BGV theorem states that “almost all” inflationary models of the universe (as opposed to Dr. Craig’s “any universe”) will reach a boundary in the past – meaning our universe probably doesn’t exist infinitely into the past.
You are incorrect, once again. See below.
>Alex Vilenkin further goes on to state…
But Alex Vilenkin also said this: If someone asks me whether or not the theorem I proved with Borde and Guth implies that the universe had a beginning, I would say that the short answer is "yes". If you are willing to get into subtleties, then the answer is "No, but..." So, there are ways to get around having a beginning, but then you are forced to have something nearly as special as a beginning.
This is where the “almost all” comes into play. The Aguirre-Gratton model and the Carroll-Chen model “get around” the BVG but their models fail for other reasons.
And what did Alex Vilenkin think of WLC’s handling of the BVG theorem?
During a debate Krauss basically accused WLC of misrepresenting the BVG theorem. WLC contacted Vilenkin to see if what he thought of the way WLC as using the BVG
Vilenkin: I would say the theorem makes a plausible case that there was a beginning. and I think you represented what I wrote about the BGV theorem in my papers and to you personally very accurately source
Furthermore Vilenkin, and graduate student Audrey Mithani, used mathematics to examine three potential logistical loopholes in the 2003 theorem, strengthening the original premise that the universe did, in fact, begin Or see a more technical paper
>So, I've shown leading cosmologists who disagree with you, and even the V of the BGV trio that you are using to support your claim disagrees.
You’ve shown 2 leading cosmologists who disagree with me and I’ve shown 2 that do agree with me. But I’ve also shown, right out of Vilenkin own mouth and via what he wrote, you are completely wrong about the BVG
>So, how can you claim you have a JTB about the origin of the Universe?
The BVG theorem, to start.
>The truth is, unless you have come up with a theory that harmonizes quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity, then nobody has the math to see past the Planck Epoch.
As Alex Vilenkin says the BVG theorem is independent of this.
>Thus, nobody can make a claim as to what existed or didn't exist prior to the Big Bang.
But we are talking about whether the universe began; it did according to the best data that we currently have.
Once we conclude that it did have a beginning we can then get onto what caused it.
So, your claim that the premises of the KCA are “unsupported” has fallen on its face, and thus the universe must have had a cause.
>This is what WLC claims it states, but as I quoted above that's not what the theory states. It says almost all inflationary models (not any universe as WLC erroneously claims) will reach a space-time boundary (not a "beginning" as WLC claims).
Refuted above by Vilenkin above on two counts. One, WLC represented the BVG well, and two Vilenkin says the universe began - in the last couple of minutes Vilenkin says explicitly that the universe began.
As I said your claim that premises of the KCA are unsupported can be dismissed as unintelligible.
>I have shown how this cannot be a JTB because we cannot have knowledge of what occurred before the Planck Epoch. We can speculate, but currently this is speculation only.
Since we have now established that both premises of the KCA are JTB’s based on what we currently know, therefore, the universe requires a cause.
>….I'm not claiming the Singularity existed for all eternity. Rather, I'm saying we can't know, with our current knowledge, the nature of the Singularity. I'm not saying it's eternal, or that it's not. I'm saying we don't know.
So you take no position. Why does this come as no surprise. But that doesn't matter. We know [JTB] that an infinite regress of causes is impossible, nor can something cause itself into existence, therefore there must be uncaused metaphysical necessity; a MNC.
We have no evidence of anything that existed before the universe. Thus we can say that this MNC caused the universe into existence. Why do I say this? Occam’s razor. We know the universe exists, we know that it must have been caused, we have no reason to think that is any intermediary between the two.
So, space, time, and matter began to exist. What could have caused them to begin to exist.
Whatever causes the universe to appear is not bound by time (temporal). There was no passage of time causally prior to the big bang, so the cause of the universe did not come into being. The cause existed eternally.
And the cause is not material. All the matter in the universe came into being at the first moment. Whatever caused the universe to begin to exist cannot have been matter, because there was no matter causally prior to the big bang.
So what could the cause be? Abstract objects, like numbers, sets and mathematical relations - but they have no causal powers.
Minds, like our own mind, can create things like poems and novels.
>The infinite regression? It may be a problem, sure. It's also not a problem that is solved by adding a deity, because if this deity is eternal, then it also extends infinitely into the past. The only way around this (that I see, at least), is to special plead the problem as not applicable to the deity.
You are confused. An infinite regress of causes is impossible, not an uncaused MN. And it isn’t special pleading since atheists the world over used to say the universe was this MN.
>Not exactly. Not only is the Universe having an ontological beginning (a cause is a different point) something we cannot know, this is dangerously close to being an "MNC of the Gaps".
If atheists accepted the universe as an MN, then it is special pleading on your part to try and disallow it now.
>Further, if the Singularity existed for all of eternity, and the initial conditions were sufficient to cause the universe, then why isn’t the universe eternal?
Why would it have to be eternal, even if the Singularity is?
If you are postulating the Singularity as the MNC why would it “decide” to create the universe ~13.8 billion years ago? If the cause is sufficient from eternity then the effect should happen at that point - from eterinty.
But if this MNC was a mind with a will then it could decide to create the universe ~13.8 billion years ago. Problem solved.
The whole Universe... came from nothing. Krauss presents a compelling case, relating it to things we know are happening all the time, virtual particles forming and disappearing again, and there's always the theory which looks pretty good so far, that the total energy of the Universe is zero.
Where'd it all come from? a quantum mechanical anomaly, random chance, an accident of something that shouldn't have happened, but did anyway - which is why we're here to see it, but if it hadn't, we wouldn't be. What started it? Nothing, it came from nothing, before it was nothing, really nothing, no time, no space, no matter, no energy, no anything.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_M._Krauss
A Universe From Nothing
>I'm in no way saying that it is wrong because I do not know and in fact Hawking does not know if that is reality.
Actually this is just math. We do know that universes can create themselves, and we do know that with an infinite number of trials
every possibility will occur an infinite number of times.
Your "contingency" argument can be dismissed out of hand. That's just First Cause in new fish wrap. Prove the universe is contingent. Explain why God is not. Philosophy has no application to the origin of the universe anyway. That's a scientific question, not a philosophical one. Theoretical physicists are not stumped by apologetic pseudo-philosophy.
>I do not know that it was ever possible for nothing to exist. By occam's razor though it does seem as the simpler state. I would be interested to read what you have read that says quantum physics tells us that pure nothingness cannot exist because at this point I've never heard anything like that.
Lawrence Krauss A Universe from Nothing
Lecture available on youtube
Very good advice. Another good suggestion on the origin of the universe: "A Universe from Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss. (http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451528265&sr=1-1&keywords=lawrence+krauss+books)
The "I just don't believe it could have come from nothing" argument is, according to her, the reason my mother keeps going back to the JWs. My husband and I gave her this book to read, but of course she didn't read it. Of course, how you get from, "Maybe we didn't come from nothing," to, "Therefore the JWs have the right religion" is a mind-boggling leap of conclusions to anyone who thinks about it. But then, they're trained explicitly not to do that. :)
Here's a quick and dirty summary of some of my favourite arguments against Christianity and related religions:
As you can see, some of these arguments are empirical/scientific in nature while others have more of a logical/philosophical/a priori flavour. I myself tend to find the former more compelling, but together I think they make a knock-down case. In other words, once the two biggest pillars of support for Christianity (complex design, the universe's origin) are removed, what you have left is conceptual issues with the theory.
I'm waiting for this to come out in print. But you could give it a shot:
http://www.amazon.com/A-Universe-from-Nothing-ebook/dp/B004T4KQJS
>There was NOTHING and then something was created out of that.
The latter is foolish. There can not be "nothing", no existence of any kind, but if you are an atheist you must believe that it is true. Telling me that there was nothing makes absolutely zero sense and makes you look as foolish as the (religious) creationists you mock.
While I don't refute your view that it's foolish to assert to know definitively that there's a God or not with 100% clarity, I got an issue with this point of yours. It's incomplete. It's possible to have a valid and sound hypothesis of the origins of the universe that does not require a God of any kind.
Read the book A universe from nothing by a leading astrophysicist from MIT. There's also a
video lecture by him discussing this same point. It discusses just how empty empty space is (hint: it's not) and how mathematically provable that our universe could have sprung from nothing.
In the end, you can't prove or disprove the existence of God. You may only adapt a world-view that includes a higher power or not.
I hope you took away that some people aren't as naive as you make them out to be.
this really was a good book, if OP really wanted our best understanding of what "nothing" is, and why it is so hard to come by.
"A Universe from Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss
You're assuming that we don't have evidence, though. That was more of less true even as recently as the 1980s, but there's been a ton of work done on cosmology since then.
I suggest A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing as a decent starting point. There are other good books on the subject out there as well, but I like Krauss' writing style. Echo of the Big Bang is good as well, even if it's getting a bit dated.
Anyway, I get it. Cosmology (and a lot of physics in general) is unintuitive. Which is why relying on intuitive experience is a Bad Idea™.
Your god is 'something'and doesn't provide an answer. Also we've never demonstrated that nothingness is possible, so it's a faulty premise.
The short answer is, we don't know for sure (and regressing one level by saying 'god' is insufficient), but if you want the best current explanation, and to get into the meat of the question rather than the semantics, though, see; multiverse theory and the anthropic principle.
Furthermore, science is a self-correcting mechanism, not the end-all-be-all answer that religion claims to be. Not a 1-to-1 on the claims they make.
Edit: a more nuanced, actual physicist's answer to your question: https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
Some good popsci-style but still somewhat theoretical CS books:
For anyone interested, please read The Fabric of Reality, by David Deutsch it really delves into the Many World's theory and is an awesome read.
Book recommendation: The Fabric of Reality
Deals explicitly with how to think about a concept of time travel very similar to this. It’s framed in terms of Virtual Reality, but I think you could translate it for your own use easily. As a bonus, it’s a pretty fun tour of some really important ideas too.
> Interesting! Tell me more.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Fabric-Reality-Universes-Implications/dp/014027541X
> So, it's just the fact that science doesn't happen to use grue and bleen as predicates that makes them unscientific?
No, it's that there are no grue or bleen things (but there are blue things and there are green things).
> remember again that from the perspective of Mr. Grue, it is YOU who has hidden time dependencies attached to green
No, this is the mistake. Time dependence can be objectively determined.
> What explanations do you think hold in scientific discoveries that attest to the legitimacy of green over grue that is NOT question-begging in favour of blue and green?
You can measure if something is blue or green without knowing what time it is. Not so for grue and bleen.
$14 only. http://www.amazon.com/The-Fabric-Reality-Universes-Implications/dp/014027541X
First time I ever read this term was in a book discussing time travel: http://www.amazon.com/Build-Time-Machine-Paul-Davies/dp/0142001864
I thought it was really awesome that in a book full of scientific jargon and theories of physics they would use the term "spaghettification" to describe being pulled into a black hole. I guess that's just the scientific term for it.... Awesome
The Quantum Universe is a good, rigorous, but well-explained book that might be along the lines you're looking for. Possibly also Reality is Not What it Seems, but I've barely started that one so I can't say for sure.
This book by Brian Greene lays out the many multiverse theories, and how they may eventually be tested.
These might have too much mass appeal but:
The Big Bang -- I personally love this book.
The Hidden Reality
Anything by Michio Kaku.
Book: Brian Green's The Hidden Reality
Movie: (slightly older than the book, but an easy intro) The Elegant Universe
Thanks for that; I wasn't aware of Roko's Basilisk but found a breezey explainer (on Slate ). It is interesting; the survey questions made me think about a 2011 Brian Greene book which runs through a bunch of theories of multiple or simultaneous universes.
These will answer all your questions. I implore you to read them. They are fantastic.
https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Cosmos/dp/0307278123/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?keywords=brian+greene&qid=1569877277&sprefix=briane+gree&sr=8-6
https://www.amazon.com/Parallel-Worlds-Journey-Creation-Dimensions/dp/B01GVZRNDY/ref=mp_s_a_1_5?keywords=michio+kaku&qid=1569877418&s=gateway&sprefix=michio&sr=8-5
There's a book as well: http://www.amazon.com/The-Hidden-Reality-Parallel-Universes/dp/0307278123
Idk if Brian Greene is welcomed by this sub but I found his book on multiverse a incredibly informative. It talks about all different types of "multiverses" posited, including this one.
Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307278123
I read a different idea by Kip S Thorne. In theory if we could create and contain a black/worm hole we could send one of them at (close to) the speed of light. That end would experience time slower than the other end. So in theory passing through each end would be a portal to the past/future.
Edit: Source
Black Holes and Time Warps
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763
This book explains theory only and ideas on how to use exotic matter to keep a wormhole open. It's very easy access with just the right amount of technicality.
To learn about the cosmology, black holes and the fate of the universe, I recommend two superb books:
Kip Thorne: Black Holes and Time Warps (http://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254000781&sr=8-1)
Tony Zee: An Old Man's Toy (http://www.amazon.com/Old-Mans-Toy-Einsteins-Universe/dp/002040915X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254000896&sr=1-1)
Enjoy!
This book was what pushed me into teaching science for 10 years:
Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorn. Does a great job explaining things in a simple, concise way. Written for people with minimal working knowledge of physics.
Actually this is a book I read when I was a wee chap back in high school. The book has a bunch of references, so you can easily look for the original source material if you need it. Also that's the same Kip Thorne who advised the Interstellar movie.
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763
Black holes and time warps by Kip Thorne
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393312763/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?qid=1371332204&sr=8-1
Yeah. Part of me feels like I've just been lucky in finding easy problems that the "real" scientists in my field hadn't bothered to try yet.
I still don't really understand linear algebra or vector calculus, for instance. I have Linear Algebra Done Right, Div, Grad, Curl, and all that, and the Princeton Companion to Mathematics on my wish list, which may help.
I do highly recommend Genome by Matt Ridley and A History of God by Karen Armstrong. It looks like Before the Big Bang might be a great idea too.
However, I'm noticing a bit of redundancy in your stacks and don't want you to get bored! In the presence of the other books, I would recommend Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale in lieu of The Greatest Show on Earth. (Although, if you're actually not going to read all the other books, I would actually go the other way.) Similarly, I would probably choose either to read the God Delusion or a few of the other books there.
Other recommendations: how about The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, and The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes? These occupy niches not covered by the others.
The popular expositions on cosmology all look supremely awesome, but you should probably choose half of them. Another idea: read just The Fabric of the Cosmos by Greene, and if you love it, go ahead and learn mechanics, vector calculus, Electrodynamics, linear algebra, and Quantum Mechanics! Hmm...on second thought, that might actually take longer than just reading those books :)
I've heard pretty good things about Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind. I imagine it also has the added advantage of matching the Standford course he did that can be found on YouTube
It might also be that I simply don't understand enough of either. I have only read Einstein's relativity stuff a couple of times and the quantum mechanics books I've read are pretty low level.
I also tried to make it pretty ELI5, so it's probably pretty wrong to start. I dunno. I can armchair physics OK, but everything I know is probably wrong somehow.
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Theoretical-Leonard-Susskind/dp/0465062903
I can't believe no one has mentioned Einstein's book, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. Actually, people may have not mentioned it because it could be a little light for a math major, but if you "prefer to not work to hard in [your] casual readings" then it could be perfect for you. Einstein kind of glosses over the difficult math, but if you know that stuff already then this book will give you a great intuitive understanding of relativity.
http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-The-Special-General-Theory/dp/0517884410
This is a nice one for visualization:
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters_2015_Jan_1/Special_relativity_rel_sim/index.html
Going deeper than that, I'd just look for a cheap textbook on relativity that mentions simultaneity in the table of contents, or read Einstein's math-free book on relativity:
http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-The-Special-General-Theory/dp/0517884410
(One reviewer there is saying that that version is missing the crucial images, so make sure you find one that has them.)
One thing I suspect you're getting hung up on is that this ought to make time travel a possibility. It doesn't.
Essentially, events can be separated in two ways: timelike and spacelike. So you should think in those terms instead of simultaneous or not simultaneous.
If events are spacelike separated, then they can be seen as either occurring simultaneously, A before B, or B before A.
If events are timelike separated, then event A precedes event B, always.
The difference between the two types of events is simple. If light has enough time to make it from one event to the other, they are timelike separated.
If light doesn't have enough time to make it between the two events, they are spacelike separated.
This is actually why faster than light drives ALWAYS implies the possibility of time travel, no matter what hand-waving warp drive, hyper drive, or what ever a sci-fi author tries to introduce. If you can travel between two spacelike separated events, you can travel backward in time. They are identical.
Put another way, with spacelike separated events, you can ALWAYS find a reference frame where the events occurred simultaneously, but you can NEVER find a reference frame where the events occur at the same place.
With timelike separated events, you can ALWAYS find a reference frame where the events occured in the same place, but NEVER a reference frame where they occurred at the same time.
When you say "clock in motion", you really mean in motion relative to an observer. The distinction is important, as it is the reason you can observe the time dilation phenomenon.
Example: I have a clock, and you have a clock, which are synchronized to begin with. You and your clock board a spaceship which after a relatively brief period of acceleration (this is to simplify the math), is traveling at 0.5c (that's 0.5 times light speed) relative to me. Now lets say that your spaceship passes by me, and I have a way to compare the ticks of your clock with those of mine. I will observe that your clock is ticking slow. However, you on your spaceship, at rest relative to your clock, will observe that my clock is ticking slow.
So which of us is right? Actually, we both are. By using the Lorentz transformation, we can convert our times to agree with each other. What it really means is that time can only be measured relative to frames of observation. There is no universal flow of time. Time and space are linked.
This is just one part of special relativity, and if you are interested in learning about it, I recommend Einstein's Relativity. It is written for the non-scientist and can be clearly understood, albeit with some difficulty and patience. If you really want to understand it, take a class.
Edit: spelling and grammar
I've pretty much learned them on my own, it has taken me quite some time, and I'm still far from an expert. Checking this book out from the library proved useful in advancing my knowledge of cal 3 topics. I got my first real exposure to tensors through this book on GR.
Prior to that, I had some experience with the Cauchy Stress Tensor in solid mechanics, but only a very minimal amount. My degree program taught the solid mechanics curriculum fucking pitifully and I'm planning to grill them on it in my exit interviews when I graduate next year.
Energy isn't conserved. It can be -- and is -- created and destroyed. This is a direct result of general relativity, and it's been known for close to 100 years, but somehow word never really got out about it except to cosmologists (probably because it is very close to conserved on "small" scales like the Milky Way).
Source. Another source is page 348 of this textbook (search for "loses energy").
I have addressed every point you've made that wasn't complete nonsense. Buy this, and read it. If you need stronger fundamentals to understand it, buy books on those and read them too. You cannot spontaneously acquire pre-formed knowledge of physics, you must study it.
> If you define space as having structure, then what is holding that structure?
Space and space-time are already very well-defined, and this whole thread started with you simply denying that. Surely you don't doubt the existence of three spatial dimensions, commonly denoted X, Y, and Z. That is structure. The fact there are exactly three dimensions (plus time) in our universe in the first place is already pretty interesting in and of itself. Whether or not something exists to "hold" that structure or it exists spontaneously is also a fairly interesting question, but its answer is irrelevant. Space does exist, it has structure, and that structure can be described.
The structure of our space is the reason "left", "up", and "forward" are all mutually perpendicular, and it's impossible to point your finger in a fourth direction that isn't already composed of those three. It's the reason moving "towards" a black hole is the opposite of moving "away" from it, but this only holds true in flat space, and our space is only flat when it is "empty", or devoid of mass and energy. Whether something is an "object" or not is irrelevant, what matters is mass-energy. The presence of mass-energy changes the essence of directionality. Within the event horizon of a black hole, "away" ceases to exist entirely. Every possible direction points closer to the center, hence, nothing can escape, no matter how fast it goes, or whether it has mass or not.
Less intense gravitational fields behave similarly. Light always travels in a straight line, but the very meaning of "straight" changes in the presence of mass and energy. The structure of our space defines how distances are measured, and "straight" is simply the shortest path between two points. It doesn't always look "straight" in the traditional sense. So a photon will curve around massive objects as if it were pulled by gravity, despite having no mass of its own.
That's the question I was answering in the first place. Maybe space doesn't actually curve but light simply behaves as if it does for some other reason, as observed through the "sense faculties" which, incidentally, relies on light behaving in a predictable fashion. If whatever you are trying to posit as an alternative cannot account for that, then it is neither a meaningful nor useful distinction to make.
You're welcome!
To be honest, I went out of my way to take courses in Tensor Analysis and Differential Geometry before I started learning GR, and I can't say it was that useful. It didn't hurt, but if your interest is just in learning GR, then most introductory GR textbooks teach you what you need to know. I'd recommend Schutz as a good book with tons of exercises, or Carroll ,partly because his discussion of differential geometry is more modern than that of Schutz.
Griffith's Electrodynamics has a decent introduction to special relativity. Otherwise, Hartle's book is geared towards the advanced undergrad. Also, Schultz is good too.
>No, we're talking about the general idea of an intelligent creator. How come something came up of nothing?
Thats where you are ;dont want to call wrong; but have a different view. There needs to be a beginning, a backstory with an intelligent creator too if there is one right?
To begin with; the universe might not even need an intelligent creator. Human's universe and time perceptions might be different than what we are thinking right now.
http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-origin-of-the-universe.html
Its the same thing with myths; you think they are different but no. In the early history the science and technology wasnt this advanced. It was very, very basic life; sort of like animalistic. When there were lightning strikes people told eachother it was because they made the owner of the land(area, territory) angry.
2-3 thousand years ago people believed there is something like an intelligent creator, and earth is his backyard; a playspace.
Maybe 2 or 3 thousand years later people will look at us and laugh about our ideas/religions about universe and rest just like we find "lightning strikes" stuff weird, understandable; but not true.
I dont know how universe "started" for sure, there are theories about it but maybe they can change in the future; we dont know.
There is something missing in your wording too, its in grey area. Its just disbelief of religion and gods, no need to complicate it; it isnt necessarly an alternative theory to religion/gods. "Disbelief in something bigger" does not mean refusing to acknowledge anything about "beginning of universe, before the universe" stuff; its just disbelief of gods, creating creatures/testing them/punishing them/ kind of gods. And yes; gods can be your "something bigger" but also antimatter; big-bangs can be your "something bigger" in your wording. An agnostic tells me "you cant prove nonexistence of god"; but its just same like fairytales; i dont need prove to know that they arent true.
https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/about-atheism/
I also honestly dont have enough word/term knowledge to discuss these stuff advanced. You can look/search these.
https://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/055338466X
>I would submit this "suppression of truth" is the cause of much the violence, suicide, drug use, mental illness, and hopelessness in the unbelieving world.
I would submit that you're wrong. I've been an atheist my entire life and I'm not violent, suicidal, a drug user, mentally ill (I think) or hopeless, nor have I ever been.
>Copying errors and mutation cannot create new organized coded information.
This sentence lets me know you don't actually understand evolution.
>Scientists operate on the principle that the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics are always true, always, but the atheistic scientist cannot say why.
There are several ideas on why this is true. You just haven't read them. Stephen Hawking's latest book goes into it in quite some detail. Lawrence Krauss also did a great lecture on the subject.
>Everyone would say that the torture of women is wrong, but in a random evolutionary world, why would it be wrong.
Because we're relatively weak species who really only get by on our wits and ability to cooperate. Torturing women (which is an interesting example) would degrade group cohesion and make cooperation less likely, meaning that a group with better cooperation would outcompete them for available resources.
>All the atheist can say is “we all know right from wrong”. Oh really, why would that be if my brain is a separate biological unit from everybody else?
Because our ideas of right and wrong are based on behavioral traits that helped our ancestors succeed. We love our kids because being loved by their parents helped our ancestors to survive.
>No wonder they are so unhappy.
You ask us not to resort to name-calling and then you keep insisting that I'm unhappy. I'm not unhappy, and most of the non-believers I know aren't unhappy.
There's no such thing as nothing.
What about A Short History of Nearly Everything? Or Seal Team Six? Or The Magicians? What about American Gods, Hyperspace and The Grand Design
What I'm saying is 18 is too few. Get cracking.
I really liked The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking. It gives you a perspective of string theory, multiverse, tons of stuff about the universe, origins of the universe, and the philosophy of science that is ment for more entertainment and informing than dense physics literature.
If your looking more for space stuff there is Space Chronicles by Neal deGrasse Tyson
>"Don't be so quick to put us (theists/spiritualists) all in the same boat. There may be many more like me than you realize. Unfortunately, the more close minded, irrational among us tend to be the more vocal."
Also, more numerous: http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx
>"Yes I realize that the latter hold place in certain historical religions, but I really don't care about them, as they don't have anything to do with my beliefs. I do get that you are making the point that my beliefs now, ultimately, are just as fictional as those beliefs then. But I would say that it is a false equivalency, a slippery slope, to compare them. Any belief must be tested and judged on its own merit."
It's not so much "Dead religions are untrue, so currently relevant religions are also untrue" as it is "If you exhaustively study other religions you will see pervasive shared themes and implied psychology that the "somewhat smart" mistake for proof that all religions are divinely inspired and that the slightly more clever realize is proof that they were all authored by human beings."
Part of judging a belief system, in particular a holy text on it's own merits is giving it a read-through without the a priori assumption that it's correct on some level. Look at it instead as an anthropologist and psychologist, it is very revealing.
>"In fact, I'm suggesting that contemplation of this other realm is purely optional, that you don't need it for fulfillment in this realm, and that any conclusions about this other realm should not fly in the face of what we know about this realm."
In an ideal world. But what you've said is another way of saying "Don't treat it as if it's true, and it won't create problems". Other sincere, devout religious people you try to convert to this approach will sense that about it right away, like a cow catching a whiff of the slaughterhouse it's being led into.
>"Who am I?"
A mostly hairless self aware primate, part of a thin film of primates currently coating the globe for however long the oil holds out.
>"Why am I aware of myself?"
You have a sufficiently complex brain.
>"Where does my experience as an individual come from?"
The fact that your brain is physically separated from others and does not exchange information with them except by speech and writing.
>"How did the universe begin?"
Spontaneous particle and antiparticle separation events in an endless sea of quantum potential. "Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that." -Richard Feynman
>"Why is there something instead of nothing?"
Nothingness is maximally ordered. Collapse into somethingness was guaranteed by entropy. As for why entropy still applied back then, see the Feynman quote above.
>"I don't think science can answer these questions."
It's actually explained most of that and is working hard on the rest. I recommend picking up a copy of http://www.amazon.com/The-Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/055338466X
>" It only simply gets at the fact that belief in a spiritual....something....may well satisfy certain philosophical questions that science can not. "
But does it? Simply offering up a story is not the same as explaining something. An explanation which cannot be shown to be true is not an explanation, it is a story. If you need to know a big bang occurred I can show you pictures of the lingering background radiation from it. If you need to know that matter and antimatter can spring from nothingness (insofar as we can tell at the moment) I can show it to you in a particle accelerator or at the event horizon of black holes in the form of Hawking Radiation. There's such a wealth of provable explanations on offer from science that the idea that some people take a story and treat it like an explanation because it's religious in origin is profoundly frustrating.
>"But I don't think these questions will ever be answered in any quantifiable, measurable way."
Even if that were true, it doesn't make a story legitimately equivalent to an explanation. Treating the story as true just because we don't have an explanation yet ignores the other, more sensible option of simply saying "we don't have it all figured out yet, and may never". I'll admit, "We don't know" is not satisfying. But that doesn't justify replacing it with pretend-knowledge.
>"But for those who chose to contemplate them, they must be answered spiritually. At least for now."
If, indeed, what they are doing can truthfully be called 'answering'.
awesome, I am currently reading The grand design and I love to go out, smoke a bowl, get to a [4] and then start reading. My mind just wanders about for ages thinking about stars and planets. It's awesome
Uptokes for you and your afternoon xD
Give him this book and tell him to shut the fuck up.
Please read this, travel 3 weeks back and create your post again.
This helped me
Why not start with Einstein's own book on the subject? Less than $10. Amazon link.
I'm also Christian, but you might want to read this to understand some things better:
https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
>I don't know any physicist who would say we "came from" nothing at all.
Me neither, but there are influential people out there writing books about the topic. I.E. A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss (although Krauss is a Theoretical Physicist)
>I should clarify that I mean "something that is self-existent" in the vaguest and most non restrictive way possible: quantum foam or universe generator of a sort of higher order multi verse space, for instance.
Of course :)
EDIT: Sorry man, someone already recommended this below.
Lawrence Krauss has a new book about this subject. I know, a book is a little much but it's a pretty important question.
Here's the link:
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X
Peace.
>No physicist said 'something came from nothing'.
Short answer: spontaneous quantum fluctuations, but i recommend you read
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468" this
My advice to you is to read a book. The ones I pointed out would be a good start, but if you can't handle actual scholarly works yet, the Bible and Doctor Seuss aren't going to get you terribly far. So try finding a library. Pick up Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke. Then maybe you can graduate on to Jack Diamond and Graeber before tackling Pinker, Sagan and Krauss.
Read a book.
Enough to write a whole book.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
Yes. Dr Lawrence Krauss wrote the answer to that in a book. Here's a video too.
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbsGYRArH_w
Recent Zen realization:
The sound of one hand clapping is a longitudinal displacement wave.
It explains BAO (baryon acoustic oscillation).
Zen explains quantum mechanics, superposition and entanglement.
Another Zen koan that is enlightening every day:
Infinity lies in a flower petal.
The best synthesis of mathematics and Zen is "The Tao of Physics". Capra needs to write a new book to consolidate the findings of the past few decades.
https://www.amazon.com/Tao-Physics-Exploration-Parallels-Mysticism/dp/1590308352
The Zen koan, "First there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was" is like a mini-review of "A Universe from Nothing".
https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468
It is also a synopsis of Schrodinger's Cat.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/05/27/schrodingers-cat-just-got-even-weirder-and-even-more-confusing/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.31a786e1acd5
Physics is finding everything is nothing and nothing is everything, matter plus anti-matter equals nothing. Physics and Zen are on the same perfect circle path, a perfect circle with no beginning or end, with a center with no center.
A center with no center