In “Why physicists can’t avoid a creation event” (New Scientist, January 11, 2012), we learn (and V. J. Torley discusses here),
While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. “A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God,” Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.
For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.
However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.
It’s interesting that Vilenkin would be bearing this news. A trip through the files turned up:
“Welcome to the Multiverse: in Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark, “The Case for Parallel Universes: Why the multiverse, crazy as it sounds, is a solid scientific idea” (July 19, 2011).
Also A. Vilenkin, “Birth of Inflationary Universes,” Physical Review D 27 (1983): 2854, and A. Vilenkin, “Creation of the Universe from Nothing,” Physical Letters 117B (1982): 25–8.
Change of mind, it seems.
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This begrudging foot dragging and pouting when confronted with the evidence for t=0 goes back nearly a century. Starting with Monsignor Lemaître, the catholic priest that first introduced the idea of “a beginning” in a scientific framework. He was accused of trying to smuggle religion into science. He was later vindicated by the observations from the hubble telescope.
(Wiki):
However, despite reluctantly accepting big bang cosmology, the craving to smudge t=0 never eroded. As Hawking admits:
(Hawking himself later in the same book attempts to smudge the singularity point using the mathematical trick of imaginary time.)
Hawking’s ‘worst birthday present’ from Vilenkin, for his 70th birthday, is reminiscent of the ‘worst birthday present’ that Godel gave Einstein for his 70th birthday:
The ‘undermining of the Eisenstein worldview’ is now complete:
The falsification for local realism (materialism) was recently greatly strengthened:
This following study also added to Alain Aspect’s work in Quantum Mechanics and solidly refutes the ‘hidden variable’ argument, put forth by Einstein and company, that had been used by materialists to try to get around the Theistic implications of the instantaneous ‘spooky action at a distance’, as Einstein termed entanglement, found in quantum mechanics.
(of note: hidden variables were postulated to remove the need for ‘spooky’ forces, as Einstein termed them — forces that act instantaneously at great distances, thereby breaking the most cherished rule of relativity theory, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.)
Quantum Mechanics has now been extended by Anton Zeilinger, and team, to falsify local realism (reductive materialism) without even using quantum entanglement to do it:
Hi bornagain77,
Thanks very much for the link to the article in First Things on Godel: The God of the Mathematicians . It was well worth reading, and contained lots of really good food for thought. Thanks again.
Vilenkin has not had a change of heart. He still holds to a a ‘tunneling from nothing’ view, and a Level II Tegmark multiverse. I believe his work in showing that the universe has a beginning is in keeping arguing for the continued relevancy of his original research.
He seems to take no side with regard to who or what is responsible for creation. In his popular level book “Many Worlds from One”, he suggests that creation is an unsolvable paradox.
“He seems to take no side with regard to who or what is responsible for creation. In his popular level book “Many Worlds from One”, he suggests that creation is an unsolvable paradox.”
What other side – other than an omnipotent God – is there to take, with regard to who or what is responsible for Creation, sinclairjd? He seems to be just eschewing metaphysics, perhaps for fear of offending against the secular-fundamentalist, scientism zeitgeist.
Moreover, Creation is an unsolvable paradox from the sole viewpoint of the analytical intelligence. The more fundamental spiritual truths, like their empirical counterparts, are paradoxes, which latter, by definition, are all absolutely imponderable, whatever the sphere of knowledge. If they were untrue, of course, they would be simply oxymorons.
The primary means of accessing spiritual truths was described by Aldous Huxley in his essay on comparative religion, as the ‘unitive intelligence’, in some measure, achievable by modifying ones goals and behaviour.
I doubt, however, its applicability, at least proximately, to the paradoxes of physics, which physicists are nevertheless able to accept as part of their world-view in relation to their field, using them as staging posts towards further discoveries.