In the beginning..

[Falconius]

I found this article rather interesting and thought I would share to get some other opinions:

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/apr/25-3-theories-that-might-blow-up-the-big-bang

 

I found the last one to be the most hilarious, the idea that time doesn't exist. What the obvious resistance from the science community to other theories that challenge the "big bang" theory indicate, is a general unwillingness to think outside the box. Also, if you read carefully you can't help but spot some carefully voiced problems with the big bang. The most prominent of those has always been "the beginning" issue. Many of these new theories try and avoid that question entirely by using a "no beginning" clause as part of the theory.

Personally I wish the science community would just come clean for a change and let the public know the truth: cosmologists and physicists can explain many phenomena in the universe but the question of it's creation is still a work in progress.

[Nyerguds]

All of science is always a work in progress, by definition. Gravity is also "just a theory", but that sadly doesn't cause people so intent on saying "it's just a theory" to stop obeying gravity and just float the heck away already, does it?

The point of science is to uncover more facts, to understand the universe better. What more would you ask? Sure, you can 'disprove' science, if you want. Just find solid facts to disprove the standing ones. The current "theories" of evolution, gravity, big bang, all stand upright because of the overwhelming amount of research facts supporting them.

So please, do find a better idea, and show where the faults in the current theories lie. You won't be disproving science, you'll be doing science.

[MrFlibble]

I found the last one to be the most hilarious, the idea that time doesn't exist.

Actually, time doesn't exist, or rather, it only "exists" as a concept within the human mind. How do you measure which phenomena "exist" and which do not? Does anything "exist" without an observer? Does it "exist" if an observer doesn't have the word "to exist" in their vocabulary?

These are some of the problems the physicists of the 20th century like Einstein and Niels Bohr had addressed, and indeed one of the achievements of the natural sciences in the 20th century was this awareness of how much depends on the idiosyncrasies of the human cognitive apparatus in the field of scientific enquiry.

The observations made by Kurt Goedel, Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper among others do not undermine scientific thought. Science has always been a product of human mind, a very organized way of learning about the world. It's just that the classical philosophy that goes back to Plato and Aristotle implicitly suggested that "true" knowledge was objective and existed outside the mind of individuals who merely uncover it by using proper ways of thinking.

The advent of the cognitive framework in the 20th century gave us the understanding that no knowledge is absolute, and we certainly are living within the realm of human knowledge, being humans and all. Being aware of this does not suddenly make science implausible or wrong, it just gives us a better idea of how scientific thought should be developed in the future.

The theory of a cyclic universe is by no means new. Frankly I have never had any particular interest in this field but I certainly have heard about this before.

Sure, you can 'disprove' science, if you want. Just find solid facts to disprove the standing ones.

And that would perfectly fit into the Popperian falsification framework within which science operates.

[Nyerguds]

And that would perfectly fit into the Popperian falsification framework within which science operates.

Exactly as I said :)

So please, do find a better idea, and show where the faults in the current theories lie. You won't be disproving science, you'll be doing science.

[X3M]

..And now for something completely different...

 

The BB theory isn't the only one that is just a theory. There are many other theories that are competing.

 

(Warning, enter at own risk)

 

And some sort of other answer to that.

[Falconius]

All of science is always a work in progress, by definition. Gravity is also "just a theory", but that sadly doesn't cause people so intent on saying "it's just a theory" to stop obeying gravity and just float the heck away already, does it?

The point of science is to uncover more facts, to understand the universe better. What more would you ask? Sure, you can 'disprove' science, if you want. Just find solid facts to disprove the standing ones. The current "theories" of evolution, gravity, big bang, all stand upright because of the overwhelming amount of research facts supporting them.

So please, do find a better idea, and show where the faults in the current theories lie. You won't be disproving science, you'll be doing science.

 

I have no idea how to answer this. You seem to be stridently and aggressively disagreeing with something I said. But I can't see what it was.

Might I suggest a way to steer the conversation away from an unnecessary argument?

Why not write down your own alternative theory of creation, either in the name of science or simply fun?

(I'm feeling a bit adventurous; I honestly did not expect any reply for at least a week or so).

Actually, time doesn't exist, or rather, it only "exists" as a concept within the human mind. How do you measure which phenomena "exist" and which do not? Does anything "exist" without an observer? Does it "exist" if an observer doesn't have the word "to exist" in their vocabulary?

If you follow that line of reasoning you end up in a very strange place. Is energy also just a concept that only "exists" in the human mind? Can energy exist without time? I hope you are beginning to see why I found that theory amusing. That said, I do appreciate some of its merits. Time might end up being a property of energy almost in the same way the colour blue is a property of the sky: we understand why the sky is blue but we still need to find out why or how energy emits time.

What you said about perception and science I do appreciate: our lives are full of beginnings and endings and so it is only natural to look for similar patterns in the cosmos. I certainly find it very difficult to try and conceptualize the idea of a universe that always was and had no beginning, as some of the alternative theories postulate.

 

Thanks for the vids X3M.

[MrFlibble]

If you follow that line of reasoning you end up in a very strange place. Is energy also just a concept that only "exists" in the human mind? Can energy exist without time? I hope you are beginning to see why I found that theory amusing. That said, I do appreciate some of its merits. Time might end up being a property of energy almost in the same way the colour blue is a property of the sky: we understand why the sky is blue but we still need to find out why or how energy emits time.

You have provided a very good example with the colours. Do you know that languages exist where there is no word for "blue"? (for example, just two words for colours, one for dark colours and another for bright colours). It is quite possible to imagine a language with no word for time (can't tell if any such language actually exists ATM). And very certainly many existing languages lack the word for "energy".

All these notions, and corresponding phenomena that can be observed, only exist as far as there is an observer (a human observer who can name that which is observed, and therefore think about it). Unless you're and Objectivist that is, of course.

[Tatar Khan]

 It is quite possible to imagine a language with no word for time (can't tell if any such language actually exists ATM).

 

Actually there is such a language, I saw a CBC documentary that focused on the group of people who live in South America who have no words for time such as week, month, season, year. They also do not count their age even.

[MrFlibble]

Actually there is such a language, I saw a CBC documentary that focused on the group of people who live in South America who have no words for time such as week, month, season, year. They also do not count their age even.

Wasn't that perchance the Pirahã?