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Can science address singularities?

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Things like the beginning of time? This open access paper doesn’t fill us with confidence but the basic idea is fun:

One of the major issues in general relativity that separates it from other descriptions of the universe, like quantum physics, is the existence of singularities . Singularities are points that when mathematically described give an infinite value and suggest areas of the universe where the laws of physics would cease to exist — i.e. points at the beginning of the universe and at the center of black holes…

The authors used the tools of QFT to construct a mathematical object that can signal the presence of singularities in experimentally measurable quantities. This object, which they have named the “functional winding number” is non-zero in the presence of singularities and vanishes in their absence.

This approach has revealed that certain singularities predicted theoretically do not affect quantities that can in principle be measured experimentally, and therefore remain harmless mathematical constructs.

“If our formalism survived scientific scrutiny and turned out to be the correct approach, it would suggest the existence of a very deep physical principle, so the choices of physical variables are rather unimportant,” Casadio concludes. “This could be consequential for our understanding of physics, even beyond the subject of singularities.”

SciencePOD, “A quantum approach to a singularity problem” at Phys.org (December 10, 2021)

So, from their perspective, science can address singularities by invoking “a very deep physical principle.” Like God?

Certainly not randomness.

Comments
Since free will is necessary to create mathematical axioms, then it necessarily follows that It is impossible to reduce free will to some 'deterministic' mathematical axiom and/or equation. And although it is simply impossible to reduce the free will of an immaterial mind to some deterministic mathematical equation, it is also very interesting to note that, none-the-less, free will figures centrally in our understanding of quantum mechanics. As the late Steven Weinberg, who was an atheist, stated in the following article, "if we regard the whole process of measurement as being governed by the equations of quantum mechanics, and these equations are perfectly deterministic, how do probabilities get into quantum mechanics?,,, In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure,,, Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,”
The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics – Steven Weinberg – January 19, 2017 Excerpt: The trouble is that in quantum mechanics the way that wave functions change with time is governed by an equation, the Schrödinger equation, that does not involve probabilities. It is just as deterministic as Newton’s equations of motion and gravitation. That is, given the wave function at any moment, the Schrödinger equation will tell you precisely what the wave function will be at any future time. There is not even the possibility of chaos, the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions that is possible in Newtonian mechanics. So if we regard the whole process of measurement as being governed by the equations of quantum mechanics, and these equations are perfectly deterministic, how do probabilities get into quantum mechanics?,,, The instrumentalist approach,, (the) wave function,, is merely an instrument that provides predictions of the probabilities of various outcomes when measurements are made.,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11 Thus the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else. It is not that we object to thinking about humans. Rather, we want to understand the relation of humans to nature, not just assuming the character of this relation by incorporating it in what we suppose are nature’s fundamental laws, but rather by deduction from laws that make no explicit reference to humans. We may in the end have to give up this goal,,, Some physicists who adopt an instrumentalist approach argue that the probabilities we infer from the wave function are objective probabilities, independent of whether humans are making a measurement. I don’t find this tenable. In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure, such as the spin in one or another direction. Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,, http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf
In fact Weinberg, again an atheist, rejected the instrumentalist approach precisely because, via their free will, “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level” and because it undermined the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, regardless of how he and other atheists may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave. For prime example, Anton Zeilinger and company have recently, as of 2018, pushed the ‘freedom of choice’ loophole back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that the experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.
Cosmic Bell Test Using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars – Anton Zeilinger – 14 June 2018 Abstract: This experiment pushes back to at least approx. 7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the “freedom-of-choice” loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation, excluding any such mechanism from 96% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403
Thus regardless of how Steven Weinberg and other atheists may prefer the universe to behave, with the closing of the last remaining free will loophole in quantum mechanics, “humans are indeed brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”, and thus these recent findings from quantum mechanics directly undermine, as Weinberg himself stated, the “vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.” Moreover allowing free will and/or Agent causality into the laws of physics at their most fundamental level has some fairly profound implications for us personally. Specifically, when we rightly allow the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, (as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders,,,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), then rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead bridges the infinite mathematical divide that exists between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and provides us with an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything” December 2021 https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/in-time-for-american-thanksgiving-stephen-meyer-on-the-frailty-of-scientific-atheism/#comment-741599
Jesus Christ as the correct “Theory of Everything” – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpn2Vu8–eE Colossians 1:15-20 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
Of supplemental note, the free will of God, (and also, to a certain extent, the free will of humans), happened to be a necessary presupposition that lay at the founding of modern science in Medieval Christian Europe:
“Science in its modern form arose in the Western civilization alone, among all the cultures of the world”, because only the Christian West possessed the necessary “intellectual presuppositions”. – Ian Barbour Presupposition 1: The contingency of nature “In 1277, the Etienne Tempier, the bishop of Paris, writing with support of Pope John XXI, condemned “necessarian theology” and 219 separate theses influenced by Greek philosophy about what God could and couldn’t do.”,, “The order in nature could have been otherwise (therefore) the job of the natural philosopher, (i.e. scientist), was not to ask what God must have done but (to ask) what God actually did.” Presupposition 2: The intelligibility of nature “Modern science was inspired by the conviction that the universe is the product of a rational mind who designed it to be understood and who (also) designed the human mind to understand it.” (i.e. human exceptionalism), “God created us in his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts” – Johannes Kepler Presupposition 3: Human Fallibility “Humans are vulnerable to self-deception, flights of fancy, and jumping to conclusions.”, (i.e. original sin), Scientists must therefore employ “systematic experimental methods.” – Stephen Meyer on Intelligent Design and The Return of the God Hypothesis – Hoover Institution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_8PPO-cAlA “That was a huge concept. The historians of science call that ‘contingency’. The idea that nature has an order that is built into it. But it is an order that is contingent upon the will of the Creator. It could have been otherwise. Just as there are many ways to make a timepiece, or a clock,,, there are many different ways God could have ordered the universe. And it is up to us not to deduce that order from first principles, or from some intuitions that we have about how nature ought to be, but rather it is important to go out and see how nature actually is.” – Stephen Meyer – 5:00 minute mark – Andrew Klavan and Stephen Meyer Talk God and Science https://idthefuture.com/1530/
bornagain77
December 11, 2021
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As to: "so the choices of physical variables are rather unimportant,”
“If our formalism survived scientific scrutiny and turned out to be the correct approach, it would suggest the existence of a very deep physical principle, so the choices of physical variables are rather unimportant,” Casadio concludes. “This could be consequential for our understanding of physics, even beyond the subject of singularities.”
Very interesting mathematical conjecture. And not that I hold out too much hope that this very interesting mathematical conjecture will 'survive scientific scrutiny' and, (after decades of trying by the best mathematicians in the world), finally bridge the infinite mathematical divide that exists between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics,,,
Quantum Leaps – Jeremy Bernstein – October 19, 2018 Excerpt: Divergent series notwithstanding, quantum electrodynamics yielded results of remarkable accuracy. Consider the magnetic moment of the electron. This calculation, which has been calculated up to the fifth order in ?, agrees with experiment to ten parts in a billion. If one continued the calculation to higher and higher orders, at some point the series would begin to break down. There is no sign of that as yet. Why not carry out a similar program for gravitation? One can readily write down the Feynman graphs that represent the terms in the expansion. Yet there remains an irremediable difficulty. Every order reveals new types of infinities, and no finite number of renormalizations renders all the terms in the series finite. The theory is not renormalizable. https://inference-review.com/article/quantum-leaps Jeremy Bernstein is professor emeritus of physics at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Why Gravity Is Not Like the Other Forces We asked four physicists why gravity stands out among the forces of nature. We got four different answers. Excerpt: the quantum version of Einstein’s general relativity is “nonrenormalizable.”,,, In quantum theories, infinite terms appear when you try to calculate how very energetic particles scatter off each other and interact. In theories that are renormalizable — which include the theories describing all the forces of nature other than gravity — we can remove these infinities in a rigorous way by appropriately adding other quantities that effectively cancel them, so-called counterterms. This renormalization process leads to physically sensible answers that agree with experiments to a very high degree of accuracy. The problem with a quantum version of general relativity is that the calculations that would describe interactions of very energetic gravitons — the quantized units of gravity — would have infinitely many infinite terms. You would need to add infinitely many counterterms in a never-ending process. Renormalization would fail.,,, Sera Cremonini – theoretical physicist – Lehigh University https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-gravity-is-not-like-the-other-forces-20200615/ “Here is the problem (with black holes), right there, when ‘r’ (radius) is equal to zero, The point at which physics itself breaks down. So 1 over ‘r’ equals 1 over 0 equals infinity. To a mathematician infinity is simply a number without limit. To a physicist it is a monstrosity. It means first of all that gravity is infinite at the center of a black hole. That time stops. And what does that mean? Space makes no sense. It means the collapse of everything we know about the physical universe. In the real world there is no such thing as infinity. Therefore there is a fundamental flaw in the formulation of Einstein’s theory.” (And as Michio Kaku then notes when you try to combine General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics), “And when you do this integral, you get something which makes no sense whatsoever. An infinity. Total nonsense. In fact, you get an infinite sequence of infinities, (which is) infinitely worse than the divergences of Einstein’s original theory (i.e. General Relativity).” Quantum Mechanics & Relativity – Michio Kaku – The Collapse Of Physics As We Know It ? – video Science vs God Its The Collapse Of Physics As We Know it – video https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2jbd7x
,,,, And not that I hold out too much hope that this very interesting mathematical conjecture will 'survive scientific scrutiny' and, (after decades of trying by the best mathematicians in the world), finally bridge the infinite mathematical divide that exists between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, but what he left unstated after he stated, "so the choices of physical variables are rather unimportant”, is 'rather important' to take note of. Specifically, after he stated, "so the choices of physical variables are rather unimportant,” he should have continued his statement and stated, "but it is the choices of mathematical axioms that are rather important." And herein lies the the rub for Atheists Naturalists, the free will of an immaterial mind is necessary to choose and/or create new mathematical axioms,
Algorithmic Information Theory, Free Will and the Turing Test - Douglas S. Robertson Excerpt: Chaitin’s Algorithmic Information Theory shows that information is conserved under formal mathematical operations and, equivalently, under computer operations. This conservation law puts a new perspective on many familiar problems related to artificial intelligence. For example, the famous “Turing test” for artificial intelligence could be defeated by simply asking for a new axiom in mathematics. Human mathematicians are able to create axioms, but a computer program cannot do this without violating information conservation. Creating new axioms and free will are shown to be different aspects of the same phenomena: the creation of new information. http://cires.colorado.edu/~doug/philosophy/info8.pdf
As James Franklin challenged Atheistic Naturalists, “the intellect (is) immaterial and immortal. If today’s naturalists do not wish to agree with that, there is a challenge for them. ‘Don’t tell me, show me’: build an artificial intelligence system that imitates genuine mathematical insight. There seem to be no promising plans on the drawing board.,,”
The mathematical world – James Franklin – 7 April 2014 Excerpt: the intellect (is) immaterial and immortal. If today’s naturalists do not wish to agree with that, there is a challenge for them. ‘Don’t tell me, show me’: build an artificial intelligence system that imitates genuine mathematical insight. There seem to be no promising plans on the drawing board.,,, James Franklin is professor of mathematics at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/what-is-left-for-mathematics-to-be-about/ The danger of artificial stupidity – Saturday, 28 February 2015 Excerpt: “Computers lack mathematical insight: in his book The Emperor’s New Mind, the Oxford mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose deployed Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem to argue that, in general, the way mathematicians provide their “unassailable demonstrations” of the truth of certain mathematical assertions is fundamentally non-algorithmic and non-computational” http://machineslikeus.com/news/danger-artificial-stupidity
bornagain77
December 11, 2021
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This is so mind-numbingly obvious that I almost wonder if it's a hoax paper. Easy example: The tangent of an angle goes to infinity at 90 degrees. This doesn't bother shafts and arms and legs and planets, which merrily continue rotating past 90 degrees. Shafts don't dissolve, legs don't jump into an alternate universe.polistra
December 11, 2021
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