Originally posted by
[email protected] 28, 2007 10:32 pm
The Big Crunch theory made the hypothesis that the Universe should beging slowing down in its expansino and then collapse back in upon itself.
This idea is testable and it's been found incorrect: the Universe is speeding up in its expansion.
True - though that theory is about the life cycle of the universe and doesn't address the question of causality or reversal of entropy.
Well, if we could detect some manner in which other Universes popped into being, say via black holes or some such thing (purely fictional on my part, as an example), and we could devise some means of 'seeing' this happen, we could know.
In other words, if we could observe it, then we could validate the theory by its ability to predict these phenomena. The problem with this is that there is no way to detect something not in our own universe, by definition. If something is detectable, it is in our universe. Black holes we can detect, but they are entirely inside of our own universe.
Well, given all that, we could make a computer account of the entire history of the Universe, then play the tape back as it were.Unfortunately not, as there are a number of phenomena, particularly relating to the event horizons of black holes, that appear to either destroy information or sequester it until the end of time. So even if we had perfect knowledge of the exact state of every molecule in the unverse, we would still be unable to go backwards and determine the starting state, leaving aside the issue of Heisenberg uncertainty.
Scientific theories start off as conjecture.
But they require testing and validation to become anything else. Testing and validation that, I posit, are impossible for questions outside our own universe. Essentially, my position is that anything outside of our own universe is axiomatically supernatural. Science therefore has nothing to say about it because science is inapplicable to the supernatural. Science can of course speak to the life cycle, the events of the birth and death of our own universe. But the question of what caused it, and where it all came from, are probably not just practically but theoretically impossible to answer.
Are you a physics student/physicist? It's clear you know more about it than I do.
I used to study physics, before I got too weirded out by the whole subject.
We simply don't know whether or not quantum fluctuations could do something like start a Universe.We have a pretty good idea. Quantum fluctuations occur entirely in our own universe, governed by the natural laws of our universe. We have no more reason to suspect that a quantum fluctuation can create a universe than to suspect that I could fart a universe after eating a chili-cheese burrito.