As readers will gather, the religion news was a bit late on Sunday. Here we are dragging in with our last news item Monday morning, like the tomcat back from his travels.
Well, it’s from Britain’s Daily Express:
The colossal question has troubled religions, philosophers and scientists since the dawn of time but now a Canadian team believe they have solved the riddle.
And the findings are so conclusive they even challenge the need for religion, or at least an omnipotent creator – the basis of all world religions.
Whoa! An omnipotent creator is not the basis of all the world’s religions; alert! horseshoe in the works.
Scientists have long known that miniscule particles, called virtual particles, come into existence from nothing all the time.
But a team led by Prof Mir Faizal, at the Dept of Physics and Astronomy, at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, has successfully applied the theory to the very creation of existence itself.
Whatever the heck “the very creation of existence itself” means, it doesn’t come up a lot in science, which deals in verifiable/falsifiable statements, not generalities.
The prof did some calcs and came up with a grand theory.
Dr Mir said: “Something did not come from nothing. The universe still is nothing, it’s just more elegantly ordered nothing.”
Pass the joint.
Seriously, it’s probably not an Onion; the Abstract is below.
Physicist Rob Sheldon notes, re the oniony taste:
It’s hard to say. On the one hand, there are physicists like Lawrence Krauss who talk this way all the time. On the other hand, the three speculations in this announcement–total E = 0, double relativity, inflation–are all rejected by some physicists, and the intersection of those who believe all 3 is probably less than 10%, perhaps less than 1%.
So this is not consensus physics, and by no means a breakthrough.
On the other hand, the Express piece misspelled “Hadron” as “Hardron”, which I don’t think was intentional, but does suggest that the journo writing the article was not particularly diligent, so much of the spin might be blamed on the journo–not that I want to let the physicists off the hook, but spin-doctoring is rampant. Because if it were intentional like an Onion piece, there would be more misspellings and more double entendres, so the rarity of such features make it look like an accidental parody.
Because you are right, it is a parody. So the intelligentsia has become unintentionally self-parodying, which is like a dress designer being laughed off the runway, and that’s a sign that there is about to be a phase-change in PC, with “true intelligentsia” becoming counter-cultural, like the Velvet Revolution.
Velvet Revolution: Czechoslovakia leaves communism out with the non-recyclable trash, gets everything washed, scrubbed, and dry cleaned.
Note also the many meanings of the weasel word nothing. Was it Ravi Zacharias who said, “Nothing is what stones dream about”? But physics isn’t immune from post-modern word games.
Here’s the abstract:
In this paper, we consider the Wheeler-DeWitt equation modified by a deformation of the second quantized canonical commutation relations. Such modified commutation relations are induced by a Generalized Uncertainty Principle. Since the Wheeler-DeWitt equation can be related to a Sturm-Liouville problem where the associated eigenvalue can be interpreted as the cosmological constant, it is possible to explicitly relate such an eigenvalue to the deformation parameter of the corresponding Wheeler-DeWitt equation. The analysis is performed in a Mini-Superspace approach where the scale factor appears as the only degree of freedom. The deformation of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation gives rise to a Cosmological Constant even in absence of matter fields. As a Cosmological Constant cannot exists in absence of the matter fields in the undeformed Mini-Superspace approach, so the existence of a non-vanishing Cosmological Constant is a direct consequence of the deformation by the Generalized Uncertainty Principle. In fact, we are able to demonstrate that a non-vanishing Cosmological Constant exists even in the deformed flat space. We also discuss the consequences of this deformation on the big bang singularity. (Public access .pdf) – Cosmological Constant from a Deformation of the Wheeler-DeWitt Equation Remo Garattini, Mir Faizal. Oct 15, 2015. 11 pp. e-Print: arXiv:1510.04423 [gr-qc]
See also:
NPR: Can everything come from nothing? Doubtless, Smolin and co. will end up with laws of nature which aren’t really laws because they “evolve.” Much as if the number 23 changed its quantity over time.
and
In search of a road to reality
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