Quote:
Originally Posted by Eldrick
All true, also true that our models require faster than the speed of light expansion.
Bottom line is, no true theory of a respectable physicist says that the Universe came from nothing, which kind of defeats the title of this thread "something from nothing".
If you change it to "can something come from incredibly little?" your argument breaks down. All sciences break down when anything truly asymptotic is added to an equation.
As soon as we say, "we don't know, so God (or Jesus)" then why have a thirst for knowledge? Why improve as a species?
I'm only halfway being rhetorical, would love to hear your opinion. (no sarcasm)
I pretty much agree with you entirely. FTL spatial expansion is not really an issue with relativity. Relativity does not say that NOTHING can travel faster than light, only that energy transfers cannot occur FTL. Think about it; it’s very easy to generate FTL velocities. Just rotate your whole body 360 degrees in one second. In your rotating reference frame, the velocity of any star would be greater than light. There is no energy transfer at that speed though; it’s essentially a geometric point moving FTL, which is allowed.
Other than that, you are perfectly correct; there is no model of cosmology that would require something from nothing. As I posted above, the standard cosmological model is tht all the observable matter and radiation in the universe came from a field that drives an exponential expansion of the universe, usually referred to as the inflation field (note lack of an “i” is not a typo; it isn’t inflation). This most certainly is not nothing.
There are facets of the universe that remain unknown, and the state of our universe prior to inflation is one of them. If it was an eternal inflation, then what happened when the universe was smaller than the Planck length also is unknown. Even if inflation wasn’t eternal, we know from various observations that there are upper limits on the energy of the universe as it inflated. Hence it did not start from a singularity, which by definition would have no such upper limit ti energy.
Certainly though going from “This is unknown” to “God, Jesus, Vishnu, Thor, or Zeus did it” is completely unproductive. At the very least, even if some deity did create everything, we still should be wondering HOW he, she or it did it. How were the atoms moved about? What processes occurred during creation? The theists’ god of the gaps argument is really just a cop out to avoid the hard work of studying the universe and actually learning something.