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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (70239)	1/2/2000 8:36:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Very, very interesting, Dan. Cosmology is always a lot of fun -- even when I don't really understand it, which is 99% of the time. That said, there are, I think, at least a couple of problems with the exposition you have quoted. First of all, as I (mis?)understand it, time and space were never "non-existent," in that they existed in potentia. They may have been all scrunched up in that "singularity," but they were waiting to be born, as it were. So, as far as I am concerned we are right back where we started -- that is, with the question Why? Quantum physics is probably not the last word. What do you know about superstring theory? According to my youngest son, who dotes on this stuff, if the superstringers are proved right, a lot of quantum physics will have to be dumped. Einstein would have been happy. Joan

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (70239)	1/2/2000 8:39:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Wow, fascinating post. I love this relativity stuff, even though I seem to be all alone in agreeing with Time that Einstein is the man of the century!

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (70239)	1/2/2000 11:25:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

I can't do the math, and never will be able to, but the question can be phrased without mathematics. If something exists, then either it always existed, or it came into existence. If it came into existence, where from? The harder question to even comprehend is, what if it always existed? How? It's simple to explain why we have these questions as human beings. We see that things have beginnings and they have ends. A day begins with sunrise and ends with sunset. A plant begins with a seed and ends in decay. We see individual living things come into existence, and die. We even see, using sophisticated astronomy, solar systems and galaxies come into existence and die. So it's natural to extrapolate that the Universe is "like" a solar system or a galaxy, it "came into existence" and will "die." But for every existence we must post a non-existence. For every day we must posit night. For every star we must posit a gaseous cloud before the star, and a black hole after the star. Perhaps it's a failure of our imaginations. I admit I am absolutely unable to comprehend existence without non-existence, and if we admit non-existence, then the question must be, what overcame non-existence? It doesn't have to be God, but what was it?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (70239)	1/3/2000 1:01:00 AM
From: Krowbar	Respond to of 108807

I also suspect that scientists can't explain the ultimate origin of the Universe. I don't fault them for this. Neither can I, nor have I heard a plausible explanation from anybody else? I don't like the analogy with radioactive decay. Potassium 42, for example, has a half life of about 12 hours. If you had a billion K42 atoms, about 500 million will have decayed. After another 12 hours, 250 million, and so on. But if we select any one beforehand to watch, we can not tell in advance when it will decay. It might be a few seconds, or it could be a few years. It doesn't matter if you make the sample hot, or cool it to absolute zero. But the potassium already existed, and there was something for the probability laws to act on. How can the laws of probability be acting on nothingness in the absence of time? Can the laws of quantum mechanics exist in this timeless non-existence? Or do the laws come into existence with the matter, and apply retroactively? It always seems to wind up not making sense. Del