A Proposed Proof That The Origin of The Universe Cannot Be Scientifically Explained

Not so. Imagine a universe where an object lives for one second before dying and creating the next object. I can label each object with an integer and I'll choose to call one of the objects "0". The list of objects now runs like this is time:..............,-3,-2,-1,0,1,2,3,............................You can even set up universes like this consistent with special relativity and having complicated dynamical laws, which are mathematically and logically consistent.You'll notice that there is neither a first object, nor is there an object that has always been there.
Hence proposition 2 is false, there are logically consistent realities where it is broken. I can set up a universe where time only lasts for, let us say, one hundred years, but it loops around on itself, t = 100 and t = 0 being the same point. I could place a gas in this toy universe that evolves as time continues. The state of the gas at t = 56 is caused by the state at t = 55. The state at t = 99 causes the state at t = 0.
Hence this gas is "always there" and yet each state has a unique cause. There are quantum mechanical predictions which make no use of cause and effect (as well as simpler observational theories like Stile mentioned). These predictions have been verified using the scientific method.Without 2., 4. and 6. I do not see how the conclusion can be reached.Edited by Son Goku, : No reason given.Edited by Son Goku, : No reason given.

This would be true in the sense that the existence of our particular universe is not logically necessary. There are mathematically and logically consistent universes which are not our own. Example: A world with a few fermions fields and force fields living in flat spacetime, such a world could even have complex chemistry. In fact why not a universe based on Conway's game of life or some generalisation. So you'll never be able to say "This is why it is this particular mathematical structure".In Hawking and Hartle's no boundary proposal, quantum gravity demands that eventually a universe will come into existence from absolutely nothing. So here you do have an origin of the universe, being produced from nothing. Although you could still ask why is "nothing" governed by quantum mechanical laws.So you can have a scientific explanation for the origin of the universe from nothing, it's the presence of the laws you can't explain.

(Also a response to Dr. Adequate)My problem is I don't know how to articulate that there is nothing but the laws, which allow a material "nothing" to develop into a material "something". It's hard to picture only "laws" existing.

Well this is actually the "nothing" used in the analysis of Hawking and Hartle. Under their model of quantum gravity there is a chance to quantum mechanically jump from the empty set (no matter, no spacetime) to a large universe filled with matter.

No there isn't. You can set up universes like this, which although fictional, they are mathematically consistent. There is no first object, nor does any object live forever. They're not the real world, but they there is nothing logically inconsistent about them. No, the difference between something being acausal and causal is not just semantics, its completely different behaviour. An acausal object has no definite future.

Apologies to others for the technical interlude, I will stop if it is annoying! Is it a vacuum state? What I'm talking about is the fact that you can compute a non-zero amplitude to propagate from the null set to a three-manifold with a given metric. I wouldn't see that null set as the quantum mechanical ground state of such a theory, but perhaps I'm wrong.

In quantum mechanics for example, if you fire an electron from a electron gun toward a screen that will detect the electron, then the electron will strike the screen at a random point. All the laws of quantum mechanics do is control/govern the probability distribution which describes how likely the electron is to strike an individual point on the screen. Nothing governs or controls where it actually strikes however.

Quantum Mechanical laws govern the probabilities of various outcomes, they do not govern the outcomes themselves. I don't know if this will just mess with your head, but it's not that the forces, e.t.c. are unknowable, it's simply that there is nothing to know. For example if I measure an electron's spin and let's say quantum mechanics says there is a 1/4 chance of measuring spin-up and a 3/4 chance of measuring spin-down. These probabilities don't represent my lack of knowledge about the electron's spin, the electron has no definitive spin, all it "has", i.e. the only properties it possesses are probabilities to return results to measuring equipment (or other physical systems it doesn't have to be human measuring equipment). The electron "is" this collection of probabilities, not an object with some unknown spin/momentum/position, e.t.c.This is all a consequence of the Kochen-Specker theorem and other deep results in quantum mechanics. Well I'm not sure what various versions of Materialism say, but I wouldn't say quantum mechanics says that nature isn't described by physical laws, it just says that matter "is" a collection of probabilities on the smallest scales. In this sense though you are no different from a stone, everything at the deepest level is quantum mechanical. However your mind does not receive contributions from quantum effects. Due to decoherence, large objects do have determined physical states, so there is no quantum randomness to your mental states. I've a post somewhere on the forum dealing with the papers which calculated this. Again, they are not unknowable, there is nothing to know. Think of a dice role. Six possible numbers, each with a certain probability (all equal if the dice is fair). In normal probability those numbers stand in for my lack of information (I can't predict the exact trajectory of the dice in advance). In Quantum Mechanics, the electron actually is those numbers! They are its properties.Not that this makes any sense to the human mind, or at least my mind.

I just realised that the Kochen Specker theorem can be proved in a reasonably comprehensible way way, so I'll give it a try.The system I'm going to look at for the theorem is a system composed of two particles with spin-1/2 and I'm only concerned about their spin and nothing else, not momentum, position, e.t.c.There are four possible basic states this system can be in:
Particle 1 is spin up, Particle 2 is spin up
Particle 1 is spin up, Particle 2 is spin down
Particle 1 is spin down, Particle 2 is spin up
Particle 1 is spin down, Particle 2 is spin downUp here means spinning anticlockwise around the z-axis, down is spinning clockwise around the z-axis.This means there are four basic binary measurements I can perform. A binary measurement is an experimental test with only a yes/no answer. These are:
Is particle 1 spin up? (P1)
Is particle 2 spin up? (P2)
Is particle 1 spin down? (P3)
Is particle 2 spin down? (P4)The answers to all of these are either yes or no, which I will model mathematically with 0 or 1. So if I measured particle 1 to be spin down, I'd have P3 = 1. If particle 2 was measured to not be spin up, I'd have P2 = 0.However Quantum Mechanics say that the sum of all these answers must be 1:P1 + P2 + P3 + P4 = 1.This basically means that all of them, must have the value 0, except for one.So I have four pieces of equipment which each measure one of P1,P2,P3 and P4.This is the basic set up.

Now the particular P1, P2, P3, P4 measurements I gave above are not the only possible yes/no measurements. For instance I could ask if particle 1 and particle 2 were spin up. This would be P5, let's say.Cabello has found that there are nine sets of four measurements you can make (he didn't include P1) where quantum mechanics predicts the answers must sum up to 1.These are:
P4 + P3 + P5 + P6 = 1
P4 + P2 + P7 + P8 = 1
P9 + P10 + P5 + P11 = 1
P9 + P12 + P8 + P13 = 1
P3 + P2 + P14 + P15 = 1
P10 + P12 + P15 + P16 = 1
P17 + P18 + P6 + P11 = 1
P17 + P19 + P7 + P13 = 1
P18 + P19 + P14 + P16 = 1It doesn't matter what each of these measurements are especially just that:
(i) Quantum Mechanics that if you take one set and measure each P with a piece of equipment, then the answers must sum up to 1. This means only one of the P's you pick will be measured to be 1.
(ii) Each particular P measurement appears in two of the sets.So, now the weird part.If particles have real actual properties, something underneath the randomness of quantum mechanics, you would be able to predict whether you would get 0 or 1 for each P if you knew those properties.So assume particles have real properties. Then we have:
(i) Those properties, to match the predictions of quantum mechanics, confirmed by experiment, must only predict one of the P-measurements in each set to be 1 and the rest to be 0.
(ii) Since the particles do not know which experiment you are going to perform and they are supposed to have properties independent of your measurements, then if they predict P4 = 0 in the first list, they must also predict P4 = 0 if you choose the second list. They don't know which set of P-measurements you are going to choose to make.Condition (i) says then that the real properties will predict one of the P values in each list to be 1. If you Mark this value this means there are nine marked values, an odd number.Condition (ii) says that if you mark a value in one list, it must be marked in the other list it appears in. This means there must be an even number of marks.Hence assuming particles have real properties implies that you must mark an even number of entries and an odd number of entries.This is impossible/contradictory, hence the existence of real properties is logically refuted. Particle do not possess definite independent properties. QED.

Well in quantum mechanics what we call a single electron is actually just a collection of probabilities that always returns 1/2 when you measure the "total spin". There is even some ambiguity in defining a state with two electrons.The conclusions are pretty strong, experimental results are not decided in advance by the pre-existing "objective" properties of particles, since particles do not possess such things.

I will explain what happens in the Hawking-Hartle no-boundary proposal, otherwise the whole discussion might just revolve around a failure of my approximation of the effect in normal English.Basically quantum mechanics has a device, the path integral, which takes in two different states and outputs the chance to go from one to the other. These states could be "Electron at location x at time t1" and "electron at location y at time t2". This path-integral is one way of encoding the laws of quantum physics.People had started to apply this idea to gravity in the early 1980s. Hawking and Hartle found the pretty strange result that if you input the following two states:1. The Null Set
2. Expanding universe containing matterThe path-integral gave a non-zero probability to go from one to the other, hence quantum laws can produce a universe from the null set.Perhaps there are better way of describing this than "nothing but laws". However I should say the null set above is genuinely the null set of mathematics.

You are probably right, but I don't know how to really see what those properties are. Your next sentence provides a possible clue. Yes indeed, this null set does have some origin. Basically standard Quantum Gravity gives you the probability for one three dimensional space to be produce from another. This is the analogue of normal quantum mechanics where you work out the probability to go from one position to another.So you have a three dimensional space and you compute the probability that that space will "jump" to being a different space , just as a particle may quantum tunnel from one point to another. This probability is worked out as follows:
(a) Take the set of all four dimensional spaces which have and as the boundaries on either side (I mean this in the sense that a cylinder has circles on either side.) An individual such space is .
(b) Compute the total curvature of each one of these spaces. This is . The contribution to the probability by a given space is (c) You know have a function giving the contribution of certain four dimensional space to the probability. Sum/Integrate this function over the space of all possible four dimensional spaces . the result is the probability that will jump to .What Hawking and Hartle considered was the choice:
A = Null Set
B = The three dimensional space describing the early universe at a given time.There are four-dimensional space which have this choice as boundaries, namely spaces with no boundary at one end, which is a null set boundary, hence the no-boundary proposal. If you work out the calculation (a)-(c) you get a non-zero number. So a null set can tunnel into a full three-dimensional space.However I suspect you are right and really this is "the null set in the context of Quantum Gravity Theory". What I don't know is how to express this null set as being a thing in terms of material objects.

Just to add to what Dr Adequate has said, there is strong experimental evidence that there is nothing going on underneath quantum mechanics, no "real" process of which the probabilities are only a description.In fact you candesign simple experiments whose results are logically inconsistent with the idea of cause and effect and the idea of subatomic particles possessing properties. This is the essence of the Kochen-Specker theorem.Edited by Son Goku, : No reason given.

I think you're selling yourself short, I really think most people can understand the main facts about quantum mechanics, the only problem might be us experts providing poor explanations, so if there are any questions please ask. That's natural, a lot of the concepts build on other concepts. Eventually you make it through though. I would say there is near universal consensus that we cannot recover our old picture of the world and that only something very bizarre like quantum mechanics can accurately describe experimental results.There are several theorems to this effect.What the particular brand of weirdness needs to be though is a little more debatable. The Kochen-Specker theorem combined with Bell's theorem tell you that to match experimental results, under certain assumptions, a theory has to break either:

(A) Value Definiteness.

That is, physics is about objects with definite real properties.

(b) Non-Contextuality.

Non-Contextuality is a statement the human mind considers so obvious that it might seem odd to explain it.
Basically non-contextuality assumes that physical parameters have no context, that when I decide to measure the spin of an electron, that measurement results are not influenced by other measurements I might perform.
For example if I decide to take two electrons and measure the spin of the first and either energy of the second or its charge, the spin measurement of the first is unaffected. It is not influenced by what other measurements I choose to do.

So, either (a) or (b) have to go. Quantum Mechanics chooses (a).People have designed theories where you get rid of (b), but they are full of problems. First of all, what if the second electron was located in Andromeda. To learn about the context of that electron, the first electron would have to send a faster-than-light signal to Andromeda. So if you drop (b) and keep (a) your theory has faster-than-light communication. In order not to break relativity, this communication must be undetectable physically, it's only used to access information without any influence.Secondly, any particle being measured will not just require information on a single other particle. Particles are constantly interacting, which counts as being measured, all over the universe. These all count as information the particle requires to know its "context". Hence the particle must be interacting with every other particle in the universe faster-than-light in order to have this information. These interactions are themselves physical properties of the particle and it turns out there are infinitely many of them, hence any particle has an infinite numbers of properties. This is Hardy's excess ontological baggage theorem.So either, under the assumptions of the theorems:(1) Objects do not possess definite properties.(2) They do, but it involves every particle in the universe communicating with every other faster than light, causing every particle to contain an infinite amount of information.That was the position we were in until 2011, when a major new paper showed that (2) is just flat out impossible.So with the assumptions of the theorems (Bell/Kochen Specker), only (1) is possible.So the only questions now are:
What does (1) mean?
What if the assumptions are false?The assumptions assume no retrocausal influence or relational properties.
No retro-causal influence means the particles are not influenced by their own futures, signals travelling back in time to influence the particle by telling it which measurements will be performed.
No relational properties means that individual systems or particles have a meaning in and of themselves. If properties were relational, there would be no "electron" and "equipment", but only "the electron and the equipment".What about the meaning of (1)? Particles might have no definite properties for only two reasons:
(i) They don't have definite properties, because there is no underlying reality, there is "just" probabilities.
(ii) They don't have definite properties because all histories play out, one where each value for a property occurred. This is the many-worlds picture.To sum up, there are only four possibilities consistent with the mathematics and experimental support of quantum mechanics. The world is either:

1. A collection of many-worlds, one where each possibility occurs.
   
2. The world is just probabilities, there are no real properties of particles, no actual spin or energy for example, just probabilities to produce a value at a random, which comes from nowhere, when an experiment is performed or an interaction takes place.
   
3. The world contains signals travelling backward in time, informing particles of their future.
   
4. Things only exist in relation to other things. "An electron" or "A water molecule" is not meaningful statement.
   

The only debate is which of the above is the physical picture underneath the mathematics, but it can only be these four.Take your pick.