What is matter?

Cavediver, I do believe that science and God can co-exist. I do believe that science will prove that the Universe and life could have arisen by themselves. However there will always be that taste of “something wrong” in my mouth as it will still break the “cause and effect principle”. We’ll have an effect that can be explained fully by science(hopefully) but we won’t really have the cause and this is getting somewhat religious, as we don’t have a clear picture of what the future of science will bring us. At least we won’t know the initial cause of the start of the first self-organising set of variables and energies(be it the Big Bang or whatever event was before the BB). And I don’t really like the idea of eternity as it brings more unsolvable problems than it solves(I could be wrong though). In that sense, I do believe in an entity that hides behind the workings of Nature and I do believe there will always be something that will not make sense to the pathetic human brain. However I also believe it’s possible that we reach that entity “spiritually”(for lack of better word) as soon as we discover how to manipulate the fields to display if there is another "hidden" relity or anything that might be hidden as a message in those fields. Science is fascinating.For now, I’ll stick to my beliefs in as much as they are based on science, evidence and observation .
I know this will sound radical at first but I think i have a general idea what God might be and what he does to create a world like ours. And i think I can prove it with the help of some commonly available knowledge in physics. God is a DJ, yes a DJ(not quite literally but very close to a DJ that’s composing and playing music). And the music he plays is the vibrations and interactions of the fields that he's manipulating, that constitute what we perceive as matter and reality. In exactly the same way we produce music masterpieces by manipulating sound waves into oscillations of “seemingly"(to us only- and that's a very important link to our "reality") harmonious sequences of sounds, so is God manipulating(playing) the fields in highest levels of harmony that gives rise to the illusional perception of the miracle of reality and life. Life is pure music and harmony in every way I look at it and I think God is the ultimate "DJ". This indescribably intricate and complex harmony cannot be uncaused to the best of our knowledge yet. I don't think it will ever change as well, we know how fields work and interact, however it’s a complete mystery where they came from and the underlying reason beside the preset fundamental forces that govern them. IMO, our reality is pure music, a true Masterpiece at that. It’s weird how my thoughts are well reflected in a song by Faithless from 1999:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N9m_F8ryfc"God Is A DJ"This is my church
This is where I heal my hurt
It's a natural grace
Of watching young life shape
It's in minor keys
Solutions and remedies
Enemies becoming friends
When bitterness ends
This is my church [3x]

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This is my church
This is where I heal my hurt
It's in the world I become
Content in the hum
Between voice and drum
It's in change
The poetic justice of cause and effect
Respect, love, compassion
This is my church
This is where I heal my hurt
For tonight
God is a DJEven more bizarre is that Einstein was of the same opinion(about the utter harmony of the "dancing" fields - only calling them "the music of the spheres"), so maybe there is a remote chance(I hope) that i am following a similar path that he did to reach his conclusions and i think anyone following both reason, science and reality CAN hear and appreciate the beauty of the harmonious music that radiates from the fields and that Einstein heard(that being a metaphor for the harmonious dance of the quantum fields bringing about life). Here are some of the more noteworthy thoughts i could gather:- Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics, and it springs from the same source . . . They are creatures who can't hear the music of the spheres. (The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2000 p. 214)

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- A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. (Albert Einstein)

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- Einstein on Science and Religion: "But, on the other hand, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive." [As quoted in Dukas, Helen and Banesh Hoffman. (1979). Albert Einstein - The Human Side. Princeton University Press.]
- A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)

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- The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
( Albert Einstein - The Merging of Spirit and Science)

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- The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism. (Albert Einstein)

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- I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being. (Albert Einstein) String theory is also in accordance with these views that matter and life are similar to music that is discernible as music only to the highly specific apparatus for that(ears for musical sound waves and knowledge and imagination for the fields and branes(in as much as String theory is verifiable at this level) :
“Long light strings can vibrate at different resonant frequencies, and each resonant frequency describes a different type of particle.[7] So in string limits, any elementary particle should be thought of as a tiny vibrating line, rather than as a point. The string can vibrate in different modes just as a guitar string can produce different notes, and every mode appears as a different particle: electron, photon, gluon, etc.”
String theory - WikipediaMore about Einstein’s views of God here:Albert Einstein: Quotes on God, Religion, TheologyDisclaimer: By God I do not mean any religious kind of God in any conceivable way. You can substitute the word “God” with “Cause” or just “Entity” in any part of the message above. Maybe I am wrong, maybe Einstein is wrong as well, and sadly there is also the possibility that we might never know. Beauty and harmony are subjective human terms, but so is our reality and for as long as one is within it, one could see the utter harmony in the fields and “hear” the music that causes the fields to begin to “dance” and produce the magic of life and reality. I think whoever that Entity might be, he’s the Greatest DJ the universe could ever possibly have.
This is such a great discussion on the outskirts of physics, reality and nature, I think if Agobot was not suspended, he would thank you for your contribution.

Hi DJ, and welcome to EvC.I know the post was for cavediver but I'd like to jump in if I may... This seems to be the same 'bad taste' that has left physicist wanting more out of their current cosmological model of the BB. Cause and effect do need to be explained. This seems a bit presumptuous, to say that cause can't be found, and then assume it can only be defined as a spiritual, or Godly causal act...seems like a God of the Gaps line of thinking. However much it does satisfy as an answer, it no more answers the question of cause as does the current BB model. Sure we will. Most theoretical physicsist believe it will be found once a unifying theory is found.
Unified field theory - Wikipedia Neither do physicist, thus a need for a unifying theory. This is more of a philosophical PoV than a physics derived PoV. If there are eternal fields(note im assuming your definition of eternal as synonomous with 'infinite'), then those fields cannot just be manipulated, or conceptualized, to fit some sort of spiritual, or afterlife ideology. They will just be fields in reality, not in some outside of the universe realm, as I understand it. Have you ever heard of, or read anything on, Michio Kaku? The discriptiion you gave above sounds exactly like Michio's definition of String Theory.Here's a video you might enjoy, as it explains String Theory using your idea of music harmony. It's a 5 part video and I recommend watching all 5 starting with this one...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnQLsERqTIgHope you enjoy.--Oni

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"All great truths begin as blasphemies""I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky

Thanks for the video onifre, it was amazing. I think it should be a "Sticky" on a forum like this, for I think anyone coming to EvC MUST see it before he joins the debates. I have never seen it before and it strikes my mind that, as Michio Kaku puts it:"We(psysicists) believe the mind of God is music resonating through 10 dimensional hyperspace"That's just the same thing i was thinking this morning while driving to the post. I came to my owns conclusions about God being a "musician" after just a few posts on the previous page, but if the top scientists are working in the same direction that my pathetic mind is leading me, is pretty encouraging. Michio Kaku seems to be very popular in this field, pretty cool guy with neat and clean explanations of theoretical predictions that can probably easily spread over pages of mathematical equasions.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnQLsERqTIgEdited by DJ, : No reason given.Edited by DJ, : No reason given.

You're quite welcome, and welcome to EvCforum. Edited by onifre, : No reason given.Edited by onifre, : spelling, as always.

The Theory of Everything - how possible is it? How possible is it to combine the general relativity and quantum mechanics? How are scientists hoping to combine a perceived illusion to a collection of fields? Aren't all the theoretical models of multiple universes and hidden dimensions in string theory just a sign that there is a true wall between reality and the perceived one?
How could you combine a wave-like "particle", which does not necessarily have any physical meaning, with its manifestation - the set of laws so clearly defined in our "physical world"? To my limited understanding, it seems scientists are trying to describe "Miracle" with mathematical equasions. Or maybe it would be a better question - Is the miracle merely THE UNKNOWN?

OK - Between the efforts of Admin and me, your message format is now vastly improved.Previously I found it to be unreadable, and those long (to say the least) strings of zeros set off my bullshit detector so hard that I thought I heard a sonic boom.I'll now go to remove the suspension.Please try for better formatting in the future.AdminnemooseusEdited by Adminnemooseus, : Typo.

Thanks! I appreciate it that you put efforts into clearing the misunderstanding. However I'd like to see you try and explain the complex nature of reality in the Bulgarian language to a prejudiced Bulgarian auditorium. And mind you, our language is one of the hardest to learn.

If, as I said in the quoted post, the TOE is considered possible(although I don't see that happening in our lifetime), it would have to explain everything. How nothing existed before there was something, every possible interaction in the Universe, it's cause and effect. But if we, whatever obscure illusion lies behind this term, figure everything out, there will be no more unanswered questions and probably just a fraction of a remaining science. So my question remains - How possible is this?PS. Staying strictly on topic in a forum like this is practically impossible. I am doing my best to avoid offtopics, but if i have to choose between opening a thousand highly inter-related threads and going mildly offtopic, I'd go with the mild offtopics.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

No human conversation ever stays on topic for very long. As long as discussion revolves generally about the topic's main theme, the moderators will have no concerns.But there are a couple circumstances that moderators will pounce on right away, and to some observers it will appear like a reaction out of the blue with no provocation:

• Some members have a pet topic they are helpless to resist, and they will introduce this topic at the drop of a hat into any thread. Once moderators become aware of the pattern they will pounce on instances of it immediately. Randman used to introduce Haeckel into almost every thread. ICANT loves to talk about what came before the Big Bang. JohnFolton brings up everything everywhere.
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• Some topics are so hot that they tend to immediately divert a thread. For instance, it raises moderator alarm bells when someone while discussing something else drops in the comment that, "There's no such thing as God," or for another example, "Only intelligence can create complexity." Moderators tend to jump on these "topic diverters" pretty quickly.

Hope this helps.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I'd say not only is it possible, it will be easy. The ToE will explain the most simplest of forces and their interactions between each other. It's not dealing with complexity. I would say that theoetical physicist come up with the ToE, or the unifying theory, long before an consensus in Abiogenesis. Edited by onifre, : No reason given.

I take it you mean "I would say that theoetical physicist (WILL)come up with the ToE, or the unifying theory, long before an consensus in Abiogenesis".How do you think the preset values of the fundamental forces can be explained except with the usual:Infinity vs God?where infinity is any infinite number of worlds/universes(the so called string theory)?
My thoughts on the matter are on the previous page. Straight from Wikipedia on the Theory of Everything:"A speculative solution is that many or all of these possibilities are realised in one or another of a huge number of universes, but that only a small number of them are habitable, and hence the fundamental constants of the universe are ultimately the result of the anthropic principle rather than a consequence of the theory of everything. This anthropic approach is often criticised in that, because the theory is flexible enough to encompass almost any observation, it cannot make useful (as in original, falsifiable, and verifiable) predictions. In this view, string theory would be considered a pseudoscience, where an unfalsifiable theory is constantly adapted to fit the experimental results."Theory of everything - WikipediaI am running the risk of becoming boring but if i have to choose between infinity and God, I'd go with the latter. Infinity is a mathematical concept that does not make any sense to my human mind, and pretty much as the Wiki says I'd consider such a possibility "pseudo-science"(i can be wrong, but the whole idea of infinite number of worlds makes as much sense to me as diving 2 by 0).On the possibilty of ever developing a full theory of everything, i am with Einstein on that(from wikipedia):"Some physicists believe that it is therefore a mistake to confuse theoretical models with the true nature of reality, and hold that the series of approximations will never terminate in the "truth". Einstein himself expressed this view on occasions."Same source from Wikipedia:
"A theory of everything (TOE) is a putative theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena."
To me this pretty much equals finding and meeting God himself, so i wouldn't go so far as to say it will be easy or possible.
On the other hand, if scientists can find infinte(not just multiple) hidden dimensions, this will change my opinion and general ignorance quite a bit.But as Dan Quayle said - "If we don't succeed we run the risk of failure."Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Hi cavediver, I am mostly taking part in this discussion because i know you are reading this thread. If you had to make a personal prediction, would you say that scientists will eventually be able to combine QM with GR? Do you believe the missing link between GR and QM is the M-theory?
What does science think about Multiverse? It can explain how we got here in these favourable conditions, but if there is no god/mind behind all this, who created the Multiverse? Causuality can be broken at the quantum level and i can see how a universe can come out of the nothingness and break the "poetic justice of cause and effect" as the song goes(i described it on the previous page). So what we have is a good possibility that the "cause and effect" principle CAN be broken at our level of existence, but then we need to also explain who/what created the conditions and set the laws so that those particle could come out of the nothingness. This is where my understanding goes into a God/Mind mode(maybe i am just ignorant like most of us, or maybe we'll never know being constarined by our human capabilities).Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

I have a question about the BB and I don't feel like opening a new thread because I think the answer will either be a very simple one or there will simply be no answer. So the BB thoery says that there is no outside our Universe, or in layman's terms the outside of our world is not created yet. Then we have the spontaneous creation and annihilation of matter that was proven in an experiment ten years ago. This experiment however was done here, within the Universe or within what was already created. So my question is based on the following logic:
We don't have observational data from outside of our universe(that is not created yet). So if the singularity is to emerge according to the principle of "spontaneous creation and annihilation of matter"(that i wrote about on the previous page), it has to do it within an already created universe, as we only have evidence that matter can come from non matter in our 3d world. I have absolutely no problem with matter coming from non matter but it puzzles my mind that something could come up in an uncreated and unexisting spot and expand itself. So does that mean our singularity was likely born within another similar world/universe where the principle of "spontaneous creation and annihilation of matter" is valid? Because that makes so much sense to me(especially when viewed in the context of the post that won me a suspension), but then as we delve deeper, we start to see how pathetic human logic and our ability to comprehend really is. Is there a likely answer to this question?

Yeah sorry for my American slang use of words.Simply put physicist will understand the origin of the universe before there is a consensus in abiogenesis, IMO. I believe this is exactly what a unifying theory will cover, bringing the values into real numbers rather than infinite equations. A unifying theory will simply be the union of GR and QM with a final resulting Quantum Gravity Theory. Currently I like Loop Quantum Gravity as the leading theory,Loop quantum gravity - Wikipedia...but thats just personal preference.Also, the beauty of Loop QG is that it removes the Big Bang singularity and infinty from the equations, and proposes a Big Bounce, also a favorite of mine.Big Bounce - WikipediaThis is however, just an account of our universe and does not deal with a multiverse or String/M-Theory(which, in my opinion, hasn't shown much in the area of evidence). But, in Loop QG there is no more use of a singularity and as such there is no longer the concept of infinity, making God, or the need for one, as you put it, also irrelevant. I believe, even if Loop QG fails as a theory, that the unifying theory will have to eliminate the singularity, and thus infinity. Yes, but remember infinity in physics, and specifically at the BB singularity, is just the breakdown of GR into an infinite singularity. A unifying theory must take issue with an infinte singularity and make sense of it, as Loop QG does. Perhaps you have misunderstood the unifying theorys' purpose. I'd like for you to read up on Loop QG and see if any of your concepts have changed.I found an article in SciAm that covers it perfectly,
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=big-bang-or-big-bounceQuote from the article's heading,

quote:

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Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that the universe began with the big bang singularity, a moment when all the matter we see was concentrated at a single point of infinite density. But the theory does not capture the fine, quantum structure of spacetime, which limits how tightly matter can be concentrated and how strong gravity can become. To figure out what really happened, physicists need a quantum theory of gravity.

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According to one candidate for such a theory, loop quantum gravity, space is subdivided into “atoms” of volume and has a finite capacity to store matter and energy, thereby preventing true singularities from existing.

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If so, time may have extended before the bang. The prebang universe may have undergone a catastrophic implosion that reached a point of maximum density and then reversed. In short, a big crunch may have led to a big bounce and then to the big bang.

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The article explains the physics behind the theory. I'd also like to get cavediver's or son goku's take on this particular theory as a candidate for the ToE. I'll let the QM experts handle this question. I don't know enough about String or 11 Dementional physics to be able to answer with confidence.--Oni

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"All great truths begin as blasphemies""I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky

It removes the singularity at the expense of introducing infinity(infinte number of Big Bangs and consequent universes) but i'll look into this theory more closely. Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.