After Krauss was riped appart from the scientific community for his notion that the universe can come out of nothing.

Even after Krauss's apology, I still see people who defend this irrational belief.

Why?

Does it matter to you where it comes from?

Why/not?

It matters if a scientist makes false claim to push his world view.
Is bad for science.

It is also strange because the intepretation of "nothing" is only one.
If you change the meaning of "nothing" and you give it a subjective interpretation, are you not going postmodern and saying that there is no objective reallity? How do you count as a scientist at this point?

I dunno to me it matters

It isn't irrational. It is just purely speculative nonsense, like all creation myths. Fun for some people to do some speculating over nonsense, I guess.

yeah, but it ignores the laws of logic, physics and metaphysics.
In the "religion" sub-forum they have a heated debate.
I actually self banned myself after seeing the thread.

Does it actually ignore the laws of logic? Which laws did it ignore?

Well it ignores the whole western philosophy tradition, including Aristotle the father of logic.

I think the first one was Parmenides. A Greek philosopher of the monist school, who argued that "nothing" cannot exist.

Also, I think that "particles popping in and out of existence" is a simple misunderstanding of quantum mechanics, but not a real phenomena.

Do not forget that he is from "the four horsemen". A group of evangelical new atheist, who hate religion with a passion. His argument seems to exist not as speculation, but as suggestion that a creator is not needed. He is not alone!

example (derail):



I don't see why we have to support sloppy science,popularization of scientific illiteracy and simple ignorance.
How is this "OK" with guys who like to put religion and science into dichotomy? I mean bad science is the biggest enemy of science!

We can't let it effect our logical discourse. It's a sleeping dragon, a potential tread to scientific progress (a total waste of energy and attention).

it's a ****ing "Click Bait". I can't respect this sort of approach, given that in the book itself, the meaning of "nothing" is totally fictional.

This is why it is illogical for a scientist to say: "the universe out of nothing".

There’s a flat earth thread in oot that is missing out on your intellect just FYI

more derail:

Krauss itt

LOL, ignoring Aristotle is the smartest thing any scientist can do.

I actually meant, "what specific rules of logic did it disobey?" I'm not seeing you mention any rules of logic that it disobeyed.

Just a couple of thoughts bec it's been years since I read the book:

It's a small book and would've been much smaller if Krauss had left out all of the 'lol, God' stuff, he mentions that many people really mean 'how' rather than 'why' and that's really what he's talking about and, finally, at the end he mentions 'processes' and 'the quantum haze from which our own existence may have begun.'

That last made me shake my head because those two seem a rather large something to me.

I recall in a Stephen Hawking book he discussed the idea of something coming out of nothing. But it was immediately apparent that what he meant by "nothing" was empty space that the layman would say was empty, but in actuality contains fields and quantum activity and was not nuthin atall.

Hawking had previously appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe.
-bestseller A Brief History Of Time, 1988.

"The Grand Design, an extract of which appears in the Times today, sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have been created out of chaos."

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," he writes. "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."

The Bolded part does not make sense to me.

I want to be fair with Krauss

I think that the statement "everything is nothing",does not obey the laws of logic.

Cheers.

Thank you for that comment.

Of course the something from nothing is meant in the way of total energy.

I have no personal terminally confident opinion on this but it is absolutely possible that you have negative energy and positive energy adding up to zero in some extreme systems.

Two stars in a binary or a solar system in total are examples of systems with total energy that is negative because the sum of kinetic and potential is negative for bound systems. It does however have also mc^2 energy, self binding energy, that is way higher than this gravitational negative part.


To give you an idea;

A system of 2 masses that orbit each other at constant distance D have both 2mc^2 total rest mass energy. In order for the 2 m to orbit say in a perfect circle around their common center of mass (imagine them in a circle in a diameter in opposite ends with center of mass the center of the circle) you need to have ;

centripetal acceleration times mass = gravitational attraction

so mv^2/(D/2)=m*m*G/D^2 or 1/2*mv^2=1/2*1/2*m^2*G/D

Their potential energy is -Gm^2/D and from the above their kinetic energies are;

2*1/2*m*v^2=1/2*m^2*G/D


So total energy potential plus kinetic is -Gm^2/2D < 0

Add to that the gravitational binding energy of each mass and you have

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravit...binding_energy )

-3.5*Gm^2/R each (radius R each)

for a total of -6/5*Gm^2/R-Gm^2/2D

Add to that Einstein rest mass energy of 2mc^2


And you have total energy roughly (not particularly wrong unless they orbit at relativistic speeds and even then its not that bad really until you reach levels that its already absurd to talk about stability as spherical systems) ;

2mc^2-6/5*Gm^2/R-Gm^2/2D


I offered the 2 masses for illustration of an example of a binary system that has clearly negative total energy.

If however one notices above the negative terms are dominated by the gravitational binding energy of each object one is left asking whether something like

mc^2-3/5*G*m^2/R can be near zero for some configuration.

That would require R=3/5GM/c^2 that is smaller than the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole of that mass m, rs=2GM/c^2

So you cannot have such a bound system that has net zero energy like this. It has already collapsed (plus better calculations needed then).

If you add other forms of energy though this may become possible in some cases. We need to explore these in detail but its premature to do so before the reframing of physics that is starting that is currently unavoidable.

I accuse Krauss and others moreover their intelligence and education for endless self promotion with all kinds of bs speculative theories that are not ever proven properly in their arguments but have some air of confidence that is audacious to reach book levels for wide audiences and endless lectures.

When reading such things just stay skeptic as much as you can unless the person actually takes it upon themselves to show you in detail what they are talking about and even the vulnerability of their own arguments.


You will have to imagine but not confidently claim so that indeed it may be possible that this universe is a quantum fluctuation of a greater system in which from our perspective it appears it lasts a great lifetime and from the other system it's just a fluctuation.

After all 10^-22 sec is a significant time for strong interactions (takes 3*10^-24 sec to travel the size of one proton with the speed of light) allowing an eternity of processes to exist in 1 sec whereas from out perspective the universe is only ~150 mil times older than the avg human lifetime (much less impressive eternity lol) or our lifetime 3 bil times that of a second.

So maybe under the right perspective we could be an "eternity" (as in long time frame) inside some short lived fluctuation if seen from another vantage point that makes it probable to emerge out of nothing.

It doesnt really emerge out of nothing though philosophically. It emerges out of the character of natural law or its self consistency that allows the process. You can only see it as nothing if the total energy is zero and as a zero total energy fluctuation if it doesnt persist for long in the greater system.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle

sigh.

I'm fairly certain that he never said that.

It also doesn't disobey the laws of logic. The statement you were quoting is about a sum of particulars as zero, while the particulars themselves are not zero. This isn't any more of a disobeying of logic than saying that 1 + (-1) = 0

Nonetheless, it is turtles the whole way down.

Yep!



Encore!

So you value science...

If something is bad for science, it matters.

What if bad ideas have tendency to lead to better ideas? What if the dialectic method: thesis, antithesis and synthesis IS best for science?

Nonsense cannot be speculative. DUCY?

Sure it can. We can speculate on the white rabbit all we want

My bad, I thought you were discussing what breaks logical rules, which don't apply to nonsense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-formed_formula

Happy Groundhog Day.