The Physics of God

[wigglieverse]

Momentum is transferred through the wall (nothing is really 'fixed', everything gives a 'little' bit). The closer together the clocks, the bigger the effect.

 

If you suspend a metal bar from the ceiling. and tie two roughly equal weights on roughly equal lengths of string or wire, and set them swinging randomly, eventually the motion will swing in opposing directions, and in time (synchronously); 'because' this is the most 'balanced', or relaxed, state, for the system (a coupled oscillator).

 

This is a simple example of something that oscillates, or has harmonic motion. When the bodies are coupled with springs, it gets a bit more interesting, but pendulums are pretty cool. Did you know a pendulum precesses in the earth's gravitational (inertial) field?

[paigetheoracle]

If we discuss man's concept of God, we always segue into the world of mysticism and the thousands of different concepts of who/what God is or isn't. We also get into discussions of the Bible or Koran or other man-made books or theories. Why can't we just concentrate on creation. This occurred billions of Years before man ever conceived of God. If man did not exist or if the earth was destroyed, the universe would still exist. The question is: what/who made the universe and all the components that make it work. If the universe was created, then the creator was supernatural and all powerful.

If it was not created, that means it occurred without cause...a concept I have trouble with. It is useless to continue to give opinions on the gender, physical description or place of residence of God who only appeared with the advent of man.

 

God has to be mystical as my post suggests and this includes creation but not as an attempt to mystify and confuse, just because that is what the state involves (Understanding reduces things to the known/mundane/boring but God as a 'state' involves awe/mystery/inspiration). Without God we have no direction. By this I mean energy/drive - we are literally in the dark, physically and consciously (going nowhere). So to know God is to reconnect with hope/rekindle effort (see Purpose of Words thread by me under Linguistics and Wiggleverse's mention of nouns (dead ends) and verbs (live wires)). Understanding is the key (way forward) as confusion is getting nowhere (being lost in limbo - getting nowhere because you don't know where you are or what is going on/ what to do about it). We all know God and it isn't a question of joining the right club/ following a particular ritual but waking up to possibility - our own and the universes (By the way it makes me laugh when religious fanatics feel they have to protect God from harm: If he's all powerful and everything, why does he need us or our help at all? It's like kids trying to protect their parents and just as feeble: Blasphemy as a concept is about limits and how can something that is infinite and eternal have limits? Illogical Mr Spock!).

 

Science is the conquest of fear, through the acquisition of knowledge (When we understand things they no longer spook us). When we step into the next stage (creation) we become Gods ourselves as Clarke et al, in the sci-fi market, have surmised (also see PK Dick for the even grander implications of this).

[paigetheoracle]

 

Evolution does not occur without an advantage. What would be the evolutionary advantage of having a menstrual cycle that matches the phases of the moon? Why wouldn't we see this in other creatures?

 

So two pendulum clocks on the wall will eventually synchronize and swing in unison? I've never tried, but I find that impossible to believe. What would be the forces involved in this?

 

/QUOTE]

 

With regards to synchronicity - think of gears. Things gelling in harmony that have similar properties does make survival sense as conflict (not hitting it off) doesn't but that is the difference between reproduction and digestion. Both states exist in nature (positive and negative) and are part of the system that ensures exchange and therefore movement in the world (As we go through the universe, the universe goes through us - creating a kind of equilibrium: Things don't so much change as ex-change (surface reality not depth i.e. laws of existence): See twins for the true wonder of synchronicty and also how the effect of one atomic particle is carried across to another, no matter how distant).

[Mike C]

That is not evidence. It is supposition. Where's the physics in this. Where's the religion in this?

 

These religions in the Middle East are derived from the Sun and the Moon.

 

The Egyptians were the first to create their god from the Sun as a creator god and named him RA (World Almanac 2006, p, 665).

 

So, IMO, I believe the Jews wrote their bible based on this Sun god and separated this concept to the 'day and night' that included the Moon as the night representative.

I guess they wanted to restore the credibility of the lion as the day god that the Egyptians decapitated and replaced the head with one of their own (Sphinx) likenesses.

The OT promotes chauvinism that the lion exhibits.

 

So the Sun and the Moon are 'physical' objects and are the sources of the religions in the Middle East.

 

That is my opinion.

 

Mike C

[Mike C]

Craig

 

You are ignoring the image on the Moon that people referred to as 'the man in the Moon'. Have you ever heard that expression?

 

The Sun and the Moon are the sources of religion in that area (ME).

Read my reply to 'jeda'.

 

Mike C

[questor]

Inter--I think it is counterproductive to use the word God on this site. The science imbued immediately recoil in horror that we are talking about an old man in a white robe with angels flying around looking after his flock. They cannot Separate this image from that of a creator. Creator does not equal God. Creator is the force or ephemera that created the universe billions of years before God was born of man. If a creator did not create the universe then what happened? All of a sudden, for no reason we can discern, gravity, light, matter, superheated gases, and all physical laws suddenly appeared in a huge explosion. All this came with the future ability to continue expansion, forming vast stars and planets and life. We are to believe all of this is just a matter of coincidence, that there was no cause, yet our universe does not have any non-causal phenomenae. This was a supernatural occurrence and if there was a creator, it was certainly supernatural.

[wigglieverse]

It was a random fluctuation in the 'vacuum', or something. Maybe it 'bounced', so we're in the 'bouncing up' phase, if the universe is closed; it should all get re-compressed after it stops expanding and begins to contract. When it gets to '0', it will 'bounce' the other way (into a negative universe), and so on, We're just a ball being bounced, or something.

The quantum bounce. Hmm.

[CraigD]

Some 'clocks' don't stop, though.

Some don’t stop for a very long time – for example, the “clock” of the Sun and stars’ positions in the day and night sky, which, though it won’t keep very good time, will in the case of the Sun likely keep “running” for about 5.5 billion more years, for the stars, orders of magnitude more.

 

Practically any man-made clock, though, from a water to a pendulum to a cesium fountain, is a sort of engine, which, in compliance with the laws of thermodynamics, converts orderly potential energy into disorderly heat. They all stop, eventually, and most after fairly short runtimes – though “extending” their systems to include clockwinders, etc, can extend their runtimes by a large multiple of its base.

 

We use Ce atoms to keep accurate track of "Time", or change, by counting hyperfine transitions in electron energy levels, or quantum states of "oscillation" around a cesium nucleus.

A cesium fountain clock such as NIST-F1 will run only until, either intentionally or due to mishap, its electric power supply is interrupted.

 

I’ve observed a lot of confusion in the community of people who have at least heard of “atomic clocks” about how they actually work, in large part, I think, due to the amount of digging necessary to find a readable description of sufficient detail. The above link has about the best semi-detailed explanation I’ve yet found.

 

In short, NIST-F1 and its relatives are no more than very precise quartz crystal clocks - essentially similar to the kind used in cheap watches – used to “drive” some configuration of atoms (always, AFAIK, with microwaves) which are then inspected via some means to count how many underwent a change in hyperfine structure. A computer adjusts the adjustable parts of a combination of digital and analog frequency multipliers to produce a signal that maximizes this count, assuring that it never drifts far from the target time standard. This signal is counted by an ordinary digital counter, and the count converted arithmetically to a time reading.

 

These clocks don’t passively count some highly constant duration physical event involving atoms, the way a pendulum clock counts the regular swings of a pendulum, but rather are more analogous to the old technique of tuning a guitar by picking a string while turning its tuning peg until a metal tuning fork pressed against its face rings out in resonance. In this analogy, the pick equates to NIST-F1’s electric power supply, the guitar string and body to its quartz crystal clock, the tuning peg to its adjustable frequency multipliers, and the tuning fork to its super-cold cesium atoms. You are equivalent to the florescence detector and the computer program performing the adjustments.

 

Though an amazing machine, NIST-F1 and similar atomic clocks aren’t innately long-lived. AFAIK, they are usually pre-loaded with fixed amounts of atomic material, with no provision for “recycling”, the assumption being that they will be replaced with an improved machine long before they reach their designed maximum lifetimes.

Momentum is transferred through the wall (nothing is really 'fixed', everything gives a 'little' bit). The closer together the clocks, the bigger the effect.

 

If you suspend a metal bar from the ceiling. and tie two roughly equal weights on roughly equal lengths of string or wire, and set them swinging randomly, eventually the motion will swing in opposing directions, and in time (synchronously); 'because' this is the most 'balanced', or relaxed, state, for the system (a coupled oscillator).

 

This is a simple example of something that oscillates, or has harmonic motion. When the bodies are coupled with springs, it gets a bit more interesting, but pendulums are pretty cool.

These are very cool! :hyper: ;)

 

My high school physics lab had a simple apparatus similar to the pendulums on a bar you described, which could be set in motion by hand, and would quickly reach a synchronized state.

 

My dad spent a good bit of time working on getting an odd collection of small pendulum clocks he’d acquired to exhibit the phenomena, eventually resorting to hanging them on a “false wall” panel mounted on lose bushings. The arrangement worked after a fashion, but tended to fall out of sync when people watch it, presumably due to small shifts in the floor and wall from their movements.

[jedaisoul]

Inter--I think it is counterproductive to use the word God on this site. The science imbued immediately recoil in horror that we are talking about an old man in a white robe with angels flying around looking after his flock. They cannot Separate this image from that of a creator. Creator does not equal God. Creator is the force or ephemera that created the universe billions of years before God was born of man.

I'm glad to hear you distinguish between "God" and a "creator". I think most scientifically minded people associate one with the other because the people promoting the idea of a creator generally seem believe in a creator god.

 

If a creator did not create the universe then what happened? All of a sudden, for no reason we can discern, gravity, light, matter, superheated gases, and all physical laws suddenly appeared in a huge explosion. All this came with the future ability to continue expansion, forming vast stars and planets and life. We are to believe all of this is just a matter of coincidence, that there was no cause, yet our universe does not have any non-causal phenomenae. This was a supernatural occurrence and if there was a creator, it was certainly supernatural.

If the big bang theory is correct then time itself started with the big bang. Therefore the universe has existed "for all of time" even though it had a beginning. Also there was no time or place in which your putative creator existed.

 

By suggesting that time, space and a creator existed before the big bang is simply saying that the big bang was not the beginning of the universe. Care: I'm using the term "universe" in it's scientific meaning, i.e. to mean everything that exists or has existed. If your creator exists or existed, then, by this definition, it is part of the universe. So to posit a creator who exists outside the universe (if you do?) is a non sequiteur. So when, by this definition, did the universe come into existence? Also, what caused time, space and the creator to come into existence?

 

I would suggest that just positing the existence of a creator does not resolve the question of when or why the universe came into existence.

 

Note: The mention of a "creator who exists outside the universe" is not intended to be a straw man. I'm not sure whether that is your view, but it would seem to follow logically from what you have said. My apologies if this is a misinterpretation of your views.

 

Also, my understanding is that if something can happen and has happened then there has to be a logical explanation for it. The fact that we may not know the explanation does not make it "supernatural". So how can an event occur, and be "supernatural"? Can you please define "supernatural"?

[questor]

Jed, you offer food for discussion. I did not say that the creator exists outside the universe. Why could he not exist within or OF the universe. Since we may never discover the truth, all that can be done is muse upon the possibilities. There are things of no weight or mass, such as a thought, but we know they exist and have a cause. The universe offers so many complexities that it is difficult to imagine it all occurred with no cause or plan.

If there was no cause, the presence of gravity, light, matter, life,etc. would all have occurred by happenstance. The odds of all this happening coincidentally must almost be infinite. Whether there was a BB or not, the question still is: was there a cause or not? If there was a cause, it had to be out of the ordinary to create an extraordinary occurrence, which has never happened before or since, hence the term ''supernatural''.

[CraigD]

The universe offers so many complexities that it is difficult to imagine it all occurred with no cause or plan.

If there was no cause, the presence of gravity, light, matter, life,etc. would all have occurred by happenstance. The odds of all this happening coincidentally must almost be infinite. Whether there was a BB or not, the question still is: was there a cause or not? If there was a cause, it had to be out of the ordinary to create an extraordinary occurrence, which has never happened before or since, hence the term ''supernatural''.

This is the jist of many works of science fictional, such as the Rama series mentioned in post #1 – although the assumption of most hard sci-fi writers is that, if some “creator” can get a few fundamental physical parameters right, assuring a few fundamentals like gravity and the right mix of fundamental particles and ratio of mass to energy, more complicated stuff like life will take care of itself.

 

There are, as best I can tell, a few basic variations on the theme of an “intelligent tweaker”:

• Big bounce survivors. Counter to best present-day evidence, the universe is actually gravitationally closed. Eventually, its expansion halt, reversed, and it collapse back into a pre-big-bang singularity. An advanced intelligence figures out a way of surviving this event, and meddles with conditions around the crunch and next bang to make the resulting “new universe” at least as good for life as the last one, or, more commonly, better. In novels like the Rama series, this intelligence may hang around to see how well their work turns out – though nobody is certain on this point, or really any of this speculation.
  
• Universe creators. An advanced intelligence figures out how to create new universes. In many science fictions, this is as “simple” a matter as crafting just the right sort of black hole. As in the previous variation, this intelligence can engineer certain key physical parameters of the new universe, and possibly inject itself into it to see how things turn out, even possibly passing the information back out to its native universe.
   
  Greg Egan’s excellent novel “Diaspora” involves a future humanity pursuing such a creator though a vast, nested series of such universe.
  
• Time travelers. No big bounce or universe-creating black holes. An advanced intelligence makes a time machine, and goes back to near the beginning of time to make a few adjustments.
   
  Steven Baxter’s excellent “The Time Ships” is my favorite example of this variation. This novel was actually authorized by H. G. Well’s estate as a sequel to his 19th century masterpiece, “The Time Machine”, and has the same unnamed protagonist as Well’s novel.
  

All these variations could be termed instances of “the God of getting it right the next time around”.

 

They all address, to some extent, the “tuning” problem – as questor and other have put it, the odds of the universe having turned out just right for us to be here now appears astronomically small. Extrapolating a bit, they suggest that the first God came from a universe just barely capable of producing an advanced, universe tweaking-capable intelligence, and God has been engaging in a repetitive course of trial and error universe – and self - improvement ever since.

 

Opposite this are the many variations of the anthropic principle – which state, in short, that the vast improbability of our universe is because, if it were not so, we wouldn’t exists to wonder why not. It may be, as Edward Tryon puts it that “Our Universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.”

 

The scientific question here – and my motive in starting this thread – is what sort of experiments might be able to determine if our universe is of the “tweaked” type, or the anthropic principle type. In theological terms, this question is a form of the “existence of God” question. In scientific terms, it’s one of a search for artifiacts.

 

It’s also a politically charged question, due to recent efforts by theists of the Intelligent design movement to discredit mainstream science under the guise of just this question. However, I’m asking the question sincerely, not to promote a religious agenda (for the record, I’m a “devout” atheist).

[Turtle]

These are very cool! :D :)

 

My high school physics lab had a simple apparatus similar to the pendulums on a bar you described, which could be set in motion by hand, and would quickly reach a synchronized state.

 

My dad spent a good bit of time working on getting an odd collection of small pendulum clocks he’d acquired to exhibit the phenomena, eventually resorting to hanging them on a “false wall” panel mounted on lose bushings. The arrangement worked after a fashion, but tended to fall out of sync when people watch it, presumably due to small shifts in the floor and wall from their movements.

 

I didn't see anyone mention what 'the phenomenon' is called. :D The password is...entrainment. In the case of the clocks, (I first heard the term applied with metronomes as the example pendulum), the physics definition applies. A god would know and apply the principle of entrainment... and emergence. A god relying on emergence is a god with a sense of humor. :)

[wigglieverse]

Thanks for that.

BTW entrainment happens in electronic circuits (oscillating current and charge), and in light waves.

 

Anything that oscillates (our solar system, e.g.) exhibits this tendency to relax, and 'find' the lowest available state of energy. Nature always seeks a "balance". Something Aristotle thought about, back in the day.

 

Also to do with something called resonance. A free string on a guitar will resonate, if a string near it is plucked. Same on a piano; it's why a damper for the strings was made, back when modern pianos were still an idea.

 

Guitarists damp free strings as they play, so they don't resonate in sympathy.

Sympathetic resonance is another word for what happens to the two pendulums hanging from a suspended bar (the thing that couples the two pendulums).

 

P.S. This is a note about non-coupled oscillators and the effect of randomness, or noise ("chaos", according to the early Greeks):

 

"Absent any coupling, two clocks at the same frequency will move out of sync. There will always be random frequency noise, and the phase (i.e. time) is the integral of frequency.

When you integrate white noise you get random-walk noise, so two clocks that are synchronized will random-walk away from each other. You have to keep synchronizing the clocks."

--scienceforums.net

[jedaisoul]

I did not say that the creator exists outside the universe. Why could he not exist within or OF the universe. Since we may never discover the truth, all that can be done is muse upon the possibilities.

If the creator did not pre-exist the universe, in what sense could it have created the universe? And as I've already pointed out, if anything, pre-existed "the universe", then what you are describing as it's creation is not the universe! It is a logical falacy to suggest that something can pre-exist the universe. Therefore the universe cannot have a cause. It really is as simple as that.

 

If there was no cause, the presence of gravity, light, matter, life,etc. would all have occurred by happenstance. The odds of all this happening coincidentally must almost be infinite. Whether there was a BB or not, the question still is: was there a cause or not?

Apart from my comment above, I think CraigD has said all I'd like to say about this, in his excellent post.

 

If there was a cause, it had to be out of the ordinary to create an extraordinary occurrence, which has never happened before or since, hence the term ''supernatural''.

So you are using the term "supernatural" to mean "unique". I can live with that :)

[InfiniteNow]

P.S. This is a note about non-coupled oscillators and the effect of randomness, or noise ("chaos", according to the early Greeks):

 

"Absent any coupling, two clocks at the same frequency will move out of sync. There will always be random frequency noise, and the phase (i.e. time) is the integral of frequency.

When you integrate white noise you get random-walk noise, so two clocks that are synchronized will random-walk away from each other. You have to keep synchronizing the clocks."

--scienceforums.net

 

I sincerely hope you know that a person's post on another internet forum is not a valid citation. How about if you're going to quote somebody else, you at least have the decency to acknowledge WHO on scienceforums.net posted it, or provide a link directly to their post.

 

 

This is such a remedial request. You shouldn't have to be told somthing so simple, but now you have, so there's no excuse.

[questor]

Craig, the answers to your questions may never be fothcoming. Man seems to now be capable and determined to end his short stay on the earth and perhaps take the earth with him as he exits. Your quote:

''The scientific question here – and my motive in starting this thread – is what sort of experiments might be able to determine if our universe is of the “tweaked” type, or the anthropic principle type. In theological terms, this question is a form of the “existence of God” question. In scientific terms, it’s one of a search for artifiacts.''

I don't know of a need to ''tweak'' the universe. We probably have it as good as it gets. If the artifacts have not been obvious to us now, they may never be. We pretty well understand or at least aware of the composition and machinery of the universe. To me, the important part we don't understand is

intelligence. The ability of inert matter to combine in such a way as to create thought and smell and live reproduction of cells guided by an unknown power.

At what particulate level does thought or life exist? Is it subatomic, or above? Maybe 500-1000 years from now we will have all the answers and also the answer to how all this came to be.

[questor]

Jed, your quote:

''If the creator did not pre-exist the universe, in what sense could it have created the universe? And as I've already pointed out, if anything, pre-existed "the universe", then what you are describing as it's creation is not the universe! It is a logical falacy to suggest that something can pre-exist the universe. Therefore the universe cannot have a cause. It really is as simple as that.''

 

You may think it is a logical fallacy, but we still don't know what happened or why. Arguing from what humans call ''logic'' does not answer all questions. The Big Bang does not strike me as a logical event. You seem to be arguing that the universe just ''happened''' for no reason and with no cause. That does not seem ''logical'' to me. I'm sure this argument has been hashed out many times over. The true answer is... we don't know what happened, how or why.