I joined this forum in order to know about the beginning of the universe.

[cotner]

I have some ideas about beginning, and I like to test my ideas against the more learned and more convincing ideas of people here.

 

My present task is to get people involved with beginning to come to points of consensus, because I seem to observe that everyone is talking but no one is sure of points of consensus; and as long as we don't have points of consensus we will never come to any knowledge about the beginning which is similar to the knowledge enabling man to clone a sheep and travel to the moon and back.

 

 

cotner

[Buffy]

Consensus is definitely good when you can get it!

 

How did you find us?

 

Have fun!

Buffy

[cotner]

I think I was using Google to look for a forum in science and philosophy that has plenty of members in order that many viewpoints would be represented, that's how I seem to have found you.

 

What do you think? are there plenty of viewpoints here even contradictory ones or at cross purposes?

 

 

And I am curious to know whether the supervisorial personnel here can control themselves from getting personally involved, as to resort to personal insults against members who disagree with them and even use their powers to eventually and successfully push members they don't like out of the forum.

 

Well, I guess someone will already accuse me of whining.

 

 

cotner

[Tormod]

Iare there plenty of viewpoints here even contradictory ones or at cross purposes?

 

Why don't you just dive into our cosmology forums and check it out for yourself! :shrug:

 

 

And I am curious to know whether the supervisorial personnel here can control themselves from getting personally involved

 

We are a bunch of volunteers who see no reason to not involve ourselves in the issues we feel like talking about.

 

The staff must follow the same rules as everyone else, but they also have the role of enforcing those rules.

 

Make sure you know our rules though. :hihi:

 

http://hypography.com/forums/?page=rules

[C1ay]

I have some ideas about beginning....

 

Beginning? What beginning?

 

Welcome to Hypography :)

[cotner]

Beginning? What beginning?

 

Welcome to Hypography :naughty:

 

Well, that is the common experience of mankind, that there is always a beginning with any specific thing; for example there is a beginning of myself, beyond which in time there was no me.

 

But we can say that there are parts which went into the making of me and these parts beg to be inquired into about their beginning, and so on and on until we come to the idea of what, that we will never reach the very first beginning of anything, going along that path of inquiry.

 

Now, please don't laugh, but I seem to have learned in simple geometry that in a circle there is no beginning and no ending; so there is really if everything is in a circle no beginning and no ending.

 

But let's go back to a specific thing like myself, there was a beginning and there will be an ending, as far as I know from my experiences derived with my senses and some elementary imagination.

 

 

What really I find unimaginable is the idea I read time and again there was nothing in the beginning and the universe just popped out from nothing.

 

 

My own humble imagination is that there has always been something even beyond what we know to be time and space, and on that basis it is the beginning beyond which nothing can be further discoursed on, if something can still be discoursed on, then that something is the very beginningest of beginning.

 

So, there is a beginning, in that there is something all the time and beyond time.

 

But why do some people want to insist that the universe, meaning all the universe including what we don't know about, just all and everything that has being, they all came from nothing at the beginning.

 

In which case they are talking about two kinds of nothing, that from which nothing proceeds and that from which something proceeds; in which case then they are just dividing nothing into two kinds with the second kind, the one from which something proceeds instead of nothing, that is then not nothing but something, or if they prefer, nothing from which something proceeds as against nothing from which nothing proceeds.

 

Anyway, that is why I can't accept people who want to insist that the whole whole whole universe known and unknown and unknowable to man came from nothing, which they understand to be the kind of nothing from which nothing (not in any way something) proceeds.

 

Unless they have a hidden agenda which they themselves are not aware of consciously but which motivates them to speak in impossible statements.

 

 

cotner

[C1ay]

What really I find unimaginable is the idea I read time and again there was nothing in the beginning and the universe just popped out from nothing.

 

Quite unimaginable indeed. It begs the question if there really was a beginning. According to the laws of physics as we know them, matter is neither created or destroyed, it only changes form. We do not know if this law applied to the era of time at the event referred to as the Big Bang. I think it's entirely possible that the matter which exists today existed prior to the Big Bang. In this case the Big Bang would have just distributed that existing matter, not having created it from nothing. I don't tend to have much belief in creation theories personally.

 

If the above is true then the Big Bang is not the beginning of time, only the beginning of the current cosmological era in our local space that we refer to as the observable Universe. For all we know time could be infinite with no beginning at all. On this I would consider myself agnostic with a belief that we cannot and will not ever know the truth. IMO any conclusion about time prior to the limit of our observation is unfounded and unsupportable.

 

While many things have a determinable beginning I am not inclined to conclude that matter or time had one based on the observable evidence.

[cotner]

Simply put, there is something all the time and beyond time, as opposed to that nothing from which nothing proceeds.

 

My curiosity is to determine the motivation of people who want to say that everything came from nothing, understanding nothing as from which as from a point anterior in time and in place and in everything beyond time and place and whatever; so that anterior to something there was absolutely nothing, not even that kind of nothing from which something proceeds, as from a point from which.

 

 

Have I really come across such people who put that down in their writing?

 

 

I will look them up.

 

 

cotner

[cotner]

So, I looked up some sites where I read some people saying that the universe came from nothing, or there was nothing before the appearance of the universe.

 

But most people say that science does not really say that the universe came from nothing or that before the universe there was nothing.

 

[ I have three links here but had to remove them because I have not yet completed ten posts to qualify to cite links; if you ask me by private message, I will supply them to you -- unless I am also disqualified from using pm's for not having completed ten posts. Hahaha. But I am sure anyone curious about the nothing question must have come across links in the web where some persons are quite vehement in insisting that the universe came from nothing.]

 

I noticed that there are some persons who get angry at people asking the question with the implied answer that for them the universe did not come from nothing, or that there was something before the appearance of the universe, and there was and is and will be always something.

 

Why they would be angry, that is a most interesting question to ask them; but one has to be careful because they might get still more angry and tell you to study quantum physics or fluctuations, whatever.

 

 

Do we have to study the most deep physics to come to an answer to the question whether before the universe there was nothing, or there was and is and will always be something, before, during, and even after the universe?

 

 

For myself, there was, is, and always will be something even if the universe never appeared; and the simple reason is because we are here and we are in existence; if we are here and in existence, then there was, is, and always will be something, call that being.

 

 

cotner

[C1ay]

Do we have to study the most deep physics to come to an answer to the question whether before the universe there was nothing, or there was and is and will always be something, before, during, and even after the universe?

 

No because that would not give you an answer. According to Occam's Razor the simplest answer is usually the correct answer. IMO, the simplest answer to this question is that man cannot and will not ever know the answer of what existed before the Universe as we know it. It is and always will be beyond the limits of our observation.