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

I find it hard, yes. Perhaps you could elaborate on this. What would it mean for a law to exist?I have always been against reifying the laws of nature. If you asked me to explain what a law of nature is, I'd have answered something like this: "Laws of nature are essentially descriptive. Take the laws concerning electricity, for example. It is a fact that electrons and photons behave in certain ways. The laws summarize the ways in which they behave. They all behave like this simply because all electrons are electrons, and all photons are photons. There is not a third thing --- the law --- that interacts with the electrons and photons and tells them what to do. Rather, the law tells us what the photons and electrons do. If they all did something different, there would be a different law."What you are saying seems to conflict with this. It would seem that you're saying that a law can be a thing which can sit there (where?) before there's anything for it to be a law about. In fact, right now there could exist laws governing the interaction of squonons and thripons, only we don't notice it because those particular things don't happen to exist --- but the law does. That would be odd.So from my perspective, the correct account would not be to say that there are laws governing the behavior of nothing, but that this "nothing" has a tendency to behave in a certain way, in which case it has properties and is not nothing. Would this formulation of whatever you guys are talking about be acceptable? That is, instead of saying that there is nothing, and laws external to it, I would like to say that there is "nothing" and properties inherent in it. Would that actually be objectionable?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yes ... but ... the thing I'm worrying about ...I think that a "nothing" with laws applying to it is not actually nothing. Because it has qualities, in that it has a way in which it tends to behave. You say that it's the null set, but I think that the set of aardvarks which are elephants (a null set) does not have any tendency to create a universe. If every logical characterization of the null set had to make a universe, then we'd be knee-deep in them. It has to be a "null set" with the property of obeying certain laws.There may be an ambiguity here between what you mean by "null set" as a physicist and what I mean as a mathematician.I am most grateful to you for explaining the physics.

Mmm ... I don't completely follow the point that you're trying to make. I don't say that your point is wrong, but I think that you should express it sufficiently formally that I know whether I agree with it or I don't.

But "by definition" is a different sort of answer to a different sort of question. It's not the sort of answer you could give to a question about the causes of things. The "why" in "why is velocity distance over time?" is actually a different "why" to the "why" in the question (for example) "why did John Wilkes Booth kill Abraham Lincoln?"; and when we are answering it the "because" is a different "because". In the first case, it is because we have defined velocity to be distance over time, whereas in the second case it is not because we defined "John Wilkes Booth" as being "whatever killed Abraham Lincoln". To answer the second question, we'd have to talk about things like slavery and the Confederacy and the Civil War.

Quite so. But this statement, by virtue of being "basic" will itself lack any further explanation.

No, I didn't assume that the universe must have a cause. But if it doesn't, then that leaves it rather hard to explain. There's a reason for the cause in because.

Well, yes and no.It's probabilistic in nature, there's no saying whether it'll happen at some time or other. But we can say there are circumstances under which there is a non-zero probability of it happening. Now, if there were circumstances under which there was a non-zero probability of the universe happening, then we could ask: why did those circumstances exist, how did they come about?

Ah, she has hidden variables. But there is experimental evidence to say that in quantum mechanics there aren't any hidden variables. Well, yes and no.One of the exercises they give to people starting out in quantum mechanics is to calculate the probability that if you run hard at a brick wall you'll pass through it rather than breaking your nose. This probability is small but non-zero, and there would be no cause of you succeeding rather than failing in running through the wall.Because the probability is very very very small, you appear to live in a universe of cause and effect in which running at the wall causes you to break your nose.Now, you say "when we examine the universe we see that 99.9999...% of all things have a cause". Well, a physicist might retort that that depends on which aspects of the universe you examine. Because you spend your time looking at objects visible to the naked eye, the probability of something very unusual like someone walking through a wall is so tiny that you appear to live in a world of deterministic cause and effect. If you spent your time observing quarks and electrons, you be saying "when we examine the universe we see that 99.9999...% of all things don't have a cause", and I'd be writing you a post explaining how when you sit down and do the math, it turns out that they pretty much do.Now, the thing is this.If we suppose that on the smallest scale the world is acausal and non-deterministic, then we can explain why the universe could be born and die a trillion times over before you could have any expectation of observing, with the naked eye, some event which seemed acausal and non-deterministic. And we can also explain quantum mechanics.If instead we suppose that on the smallest scale the world is causal and deterministic, then we can explain why you would never ever observe, with the naked eye, some event which seemed acausal and non-deterministic. And we could not explain quantum mechanics.The first theory, therefore, embraces all the observations we make, including observations we make using special apparatus such as particle accelerators and stuff like that. The second theory only embraces all the observations that you make in your everyday life. Now, there is nothing special about the things we observe from day to day and the scale that we observe things on that makes the second theory so preferable that it means that we can discount all the evidence supporting the first theory.

There are three reasons you should not tell stupid lies about the content of my posts. The first is that doing this is dishonest. The second is that doing this is stupid. And the third is that doing this makes you look dishonest and stupid; and if the first two considerations don't sway you, which apparently they don't, then surely your immense overweening vanity would make you wish to avoid exposing yourself in public as a halfwitted liar.

What was the paper, please?

What happens is that as you look at larger and larger objects, they have a greater and greater probability of behaving in a more and more classical manner.Correspondence principle - WikipediaThere's no particular cutoff point between quantum physics and classical physics, classical physics is the limit of quantum physics as the things you're thinking about get bigger.If you are unfamiliar with the idea of a limit, one example is that a circle is the limit of a regular polygon as you increase the number of sides. No polygon, however many sides it has, is a circle; there is no cutoff point (say, a million sides) where we can say: "anything with fewer sides then that is a polygon, but anything with more sides is a circle", but we can say that as the number of sides increases the polygon gets more and more like a circle.

Yes it would. Trivially it would. Indeed, in infinite time it would produce it an infinite number of times. That's just basic math.

Well, that statement is strictly true, but in order that it not be misleading we should add the caveat that it's "considered mathematically impossible" by innumerate people rather than by mathematicians.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Better?

That's a funny way of saying "obvious fact". That's a funny way of saying "mathematicians". But not so demonstrable that it can be demonstrated.