The Big Bang to Now in 90 seconds

Causality and the Universe

A commenter by the name of Don felt left this comment on an old post I wrote ‘This Is How The Universe Happened, It Wasn’t Magic‘, attempting to refute the scientific logic with the below logic. I replied to him, and wanted to turn it into a full-blown post for two reasons. First to communicate the latest research in science, and secondly, because I spent a lot of time writing it, and this is now my fiftieth post, yahoo! (is that three?) Continuing on, this misunderstanding is the clearest instigator of deistic and theistic belief (which is not in itself bad, but believing in something because you don’t understand something else is probably never a good reason). His comment has been corrected for spelling errors (which were quite rampant), otherwise it was left as is.

God, Belief, and the Universe, in Context

Over the years, I have often debated on the nature of God and against religion. Over time, my arguments have become more refined (in a roundabout way), but today, a new thought popped into my head. In all my back-and-forth’s (which I’ve finally realized is futile, because people believe what they want, not what is true), I’ve always made my argument in a lack of context. The result being the sabotage of my argument, first by its lack of context, but further still, in its complexity.

Right off the bat, any argument instigated in such a way is crippled. So from now on, if I ever get into such a personal debate again (which I’m thinking not too), it will go something like this:

Since nothing can ever be thought of as certain, even in science, specifically quantum mechanics, which at its foundation, precludes absolute certainty (the highest is 99.9999…%), therefore, we are forced to deal with varying probabilities of certainty, and should tackle the question of God in such a way. So with that being said, and in light of my earlier contextual ambiguities and unnecessary complexity, I have boiled it down to these two questions:

On Debating Non-Debatable Subjects: God, Creation, and Religion

Last week, among a gathering of friends, we ended up debating for many hours, the subject of creation, religion, and god. It was a lively discussion to say the least, and one I was ill-equipped for, after drinking 10 glasses of wine, and on many occasions, found it difficult to articulate my proper thoughts, much as I imagine, did many of my friends. One rather large mistake we made, was not stipulating a suitable foundation to base our friendly discussion upon, which led to us going around in circles for far too long, as well as relying, far too much on our inter-cranial intuitions, thinking that because we can think certain things, that they must then be granted validity of truth, even in the face of objectivity and even when experimentation says that is not the case. But I want to express what foundation is required for this kind of discussion in order for it to be relevant, to others, as well as any future discussions I get into on the subject, and, somewhat selfishly, articulate my proper thoughts from last night.

Biblical Metaphors…Flipped on its Head

Invariably when I get into a biblical discussion with Christians, I go into the why for’s and the WTF’s of the supposed morality, history, logic, and contradictions inherent in the Bible. And every time I rip apart the immoral, genocidal, murderous, and misogynistic rage that makes up most of the Old Testament, and which creeps into the little nooks and cranny’s of the New Testament, I get the all-to-familiar “It’s not meant to be taken literally.” Sometimes followed by, “Well its a metaphor for >>insert nonsense here<<“.

I fail to see the metaphorical value of killing my brother, mother or father for enticing me to follow other (or any) Gods. Where is the metaphor there? Or in stoning your child to death for talking back to his parents? Yes, yes, that is a metaphor for >insert bladdy-blah here<… Nor do I see the metaphor in Jesus not wanting to start a new religion, otherwise he would have written the damn book himself.

But, seeing as how the logic works for Christians. I decided to not take the Bible literally. In the process inserting some scientific truths where the writers of the Bible inserted bobble-cock, because they possessed a third-graders worldview.

I’m not one for formalities so let’s dive right in.

What if Nothing Never Existed?

What is nothing, and where did the something that we are and see all around us, come from? These are questions asked since our humble beginnings. Through the magic of modern-science, answers are finally being wrested out of the ether of space and time, and into something approximating language. Let us begin firstly, with a scientific controversy in 2012 relating to this very notion: the reception to the book, A Universe from Nothing, by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss.

There was a firestorm in some parts of the philosophic—and most certainly all parts of the theological—community due to Lawrence’s book, where he explained the latest theories in Physics. The crux of the storm rested upon the assertion that Lawrence made in regard to the nothing that a Universe can be born from, the Quantum Field (derived from Quantum Field Theory), which is as close to nothing as we have we ever arrived—and maybe ever will. Soon after its publication, the philosopher of science and theoretical physicist David Albert, wrote a scathing review of the book on the New York Times alleging that Lawrence was misleading everyone because his book never addressed the basic question of how a Universe was born of nothing, because the Quantum Field is something, even if it isn’t comprised of matter or energy, and that the book does not mention where those fields came from.

But what if the nothing that we demand explanation of, to explain our origins, never actually existed? That is, a region devoid of fields, physical laws, matter, anti-matter, the Higgs boson, and everything else (presumably including God since by this definition, He is something). What if semantics is the only thing being argued?

Maybe ‘nothing’ doesn’t, and never did, exist, and there has always been something, one-way or the other. 

The history of modern-science has come with it, at every step, the uncomfortable notion that we have been wrong about almost everything we’ve had an opinion on, especially those things that are orders of magnitudes bigger or smaller than us, and even many times, that which is on our scale. What makes the notion of ‘nothing’ any different? Below are some ancient and modern common-sense world views that met the cruel fate of greater understanding: 

• We are intelligently designed
• The world is flat 
• Stars are holes in heaven’s floor
• Earth is the center of the Universe and Solar System
• The aether permeates space
• Time is an absolute function of the universe
• The very small (atoms) obey the same laws as the very large (galaxies)
• Matter is solid
• Space is a vacuum

 Our notion of nothing, to me at least, seems no different. It has been recently shown in this strange Universe we live in, by such astrophysicists’ as Lawrence et al, in doing a rather ambitious experiment found that the total amount of energy in the Universe is zero. That is, the amount of positive energy (matter) is exactly cancelled out by the amount of negative energy (gravity), and they both add up to zero. This question, seemingly, is no longer philosophical at its premise, and as Lawrence himself says, “Nothing is inherently unstable.”

One of the first Greek philosophers, Parmenides wrote, “It is,” a statement in regard to the cosmos, or to anything you can think of. And to pre-existence, or nothing as, “It is not.” However, the latter statement is self-contradictory. To say “It is not,” is to say, “It is,” for you’ve contradicted that it is not, because you can think it in your mind (and we can’t actually think of nothing), and if nothing exists, it’s not nothing, but something. Or put more simply, “nothing comes from nothing.” From this, he takes the conclusion, one that I ascribe too, that there has always been something, in one form or the other. Today our best (though incomplete) theories suggest the Quantum Field is at the bottom of it all. Maybe that’s right, and I’m inclined to agree (not that my preference counts), or maybe it will be something else deeper down, but it seems absurd to suggest, or demand, that for a theory to be ontologically relevant, it must explain why there is not nothing. We have only one Universe, which came from a singularity (neither of which is nothing), which gives us a sample of one something, and zero nothings. No matter which way, or how deep, or far any theory goes, it will always be possible to probe one level deeper and say why this and not that? But just asking that question does not give it validity. This is not too say that it should not be disputed, or challenged, for this is where science thrives, but we must understand that our language muddles the issue here: the very word ‘nothing’ has no intrinsic meaning, nor is there anywhere in the Universe where there is truly nothing. Maybe by that admission alone, we’ll never know, but there’s even less fun in that.

 

“Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Our common sense intuitions can be mistaken, our preferences don’t count, we do not live in a privileged reference frame.” ~ Carl Sagan

 

The Simplest Explanation of God

For thousands of years, humanity has attempted to explain that elusive being called God, but the commonly accepted mental manifestation of Him today reeks of overcomplicated and distorted human ideals that a God simply would not have.

Throughout much of recorded history, we’ve had gods, eventually culminating in the One True God of monotheism. The explanations for their existence are clear in hindsight; they are, and always have been, intended to explain the unknowable to those who have never grown comfortable to the thought of doubt—which, admittedly, is many of us, this author included.

We began with dozens, perhaps hundreds of gods who oversaw the myriad forces of nature such as Zeus, the god of thunder, and Anubis, the god of the underworld. We now have the One True God with His dozens of angels to govern His domain. Himself, an evolution of the concepts that attempted to tame man’s initial ignorance. So the next time a creationist tells you evolution is a myth, explain to him or her that religion has itself evolved from simple roots. As a matter-of-fact, Yahweh was originally the Israeli God of War, evolving into the One True God around the time of the Babylonian Exodus, which seemingly explains the barbarism of the Old Testament…but I digress.

This Is How The Universe Happened. It’s Not Magic

Many people think the Universe was created by God. Of those, a few believe the Earth is just a few thousand years old and created it in 6 days. I get into this debate a bit, and routinely the defense of the other party is that they can’t imagine it happening any other way. Somehow ignorance became knowledge of God. Anyway, even though I know most of those people won’t read this, I’m going to explain how it happened anyway. An exercise in futility if you will…

But before I begin, a short rant. Just because you don’t know where something came from doesn’t mean it was invented. There are those who hold onto a belief in God because they see a Universe that seems designed. A world so perfect (even though it isn’t, our technology just makes it seem so) for us to live on that it couldn’t have just happened by itself, of course they neglect to remember (or just don’t know) it is amiable to us because we evolved to adapt to it, not the other way around, and 99.99% of all species of animals that have ever roamed the earth, went extinct over the eons, so God created an imperfect world for them for…what? Why did he create them in the first place? There’s also the small notion that the rest of the Universe, so far remains inhospitable to human life. Hmm. On the scale of the cosmos, we don’t register at all, not even a blip. Of course, if you still want to believe God did it, then all by means, knock yourself out. No one is going to force you to believe anything you don’t want too. Just remember, you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan so succinctly put it.

With that out-of-the-way, let’s get started!

13.72 billion years ago, a singularity exploded creating space and time. In the first few seconds, inflation occurred (exponential increase in size beyond what is occurring today), and during this inflation, little quantum jitters were magnified, creating tiny imperfections in the fabric of spacetime. Before the Big Bang, neither space nor time existed so the question of what came before the big bang isn’t a question. During the big bang, three gaseous elements were created in descending quantities; hydrogen (77%), helium (23%), and trace amounts of lithium. As the Universe expanded, it cooled down, naturally dissipating its heat. This all happened in just the first few minutes.

Then, matter started attracting other matter gravitationally, due to those tiny imperfections (otherwise everything would’ve been pulling equally on everything else and would remain formless). After lots of time, there were clumps of matter around the place swirling around and forming into spheres generating heat (friction). The bigger a clump of gas got, the more pull it exerted on other gas floating around, and other gas clumps nearby. As these clumps got bigger, the swirling gas within them start moving faster around each other and generating ever more heat. The bigger the clumps became, the faster the gas moved, and the more gas that was attracted, and the more heat was generated. Eventually, this heat reached a critical temperature and nuclear fusion began. At this juncture, the clump of gas turns into a star. Nuclear fusion is the process of smashing two elements together so violently, thereby forming a new element in the process, with 1% of the energy released as electromagnetic radiation; a small sliver of which we perceive as heat, and see as light.

Here, Hydrogen fused into helium, which is eventually fused into Carbon, in turn fused into Oxygen, and so on until Iron and other heavy metals are made. Once heavy metals like Iron are made, the star has reached the end of its life (as it can’t use iron as fuel), and the gravitational inward pull of the star’s mass begins to outweigh the outward push of its weakening nuclear reaction, and it rapidly collapses on itself, breaking the balance that kept the star in equilibrium. If the star is big enough, then the rapidly collapsing frictional-kaleidoscope heats the star’s interior so quickly, so energetically, that it explodes outwards, seeding the Universe with its matter, in what is known as a supernova. It is in supernova that elements heavier than Iron are made. This process repeats ad infinitum until the 92 natural elements are created and flying across the Universe every which way creating other stars, planets, and seeding galaxies. Everything that you are made of came from an exploding star. Side note: If the star is even bigger (about four solar masses), then the gravity is so strong, that it creates a black hole, where the current laws of physics break down.

Then, about nine-billion-years after the Big Bang, in a quiet corner of an ordinary galaxy, untold amounts of dust, ice, rock and even gas begin co-mingling in the aforementioned gravitational process, around a newly forming yellow star, which we would eventually call the Sun, and begin their tumultuous journey to becoming our Solar System. Asteroids and meteors zip around the place seeding these new planets with new elements, and eventually with the building blocks of life, amino acids. In at least our case, one of the commonly accepted theories is that a meteor with amino acids (the building block of proteins: we are made of protein) landed here on Earth. In the ensuing, millions of years. These amino acids mixed with lightning and volcanic activity, becoming organic matter, and then somehow, in a process known as abiogenesis, transformed into single-celled life, of which we believe the first life was an archaea and bacteria. Evolution begins at this point, and within two-billion years, the first multi-celled life appeared as a result, of what we believe was an archaea organism swallowing a bacteria, thereby absorbing its energy allowing it to grow. From here random mutations routinely appear in each successive generation, and those that are conducive to the organisms survival live to pass on their genes. This is known as natural selection via random mutation. It took several hundreds of millions of years from the creation of the Earth to single-celled life, then another couple of billion years to multi-celled life, and then five-hundred million years to hominids, then five-million-years to us, Homo sapiens.

That’s how it all started. Not that hard is it? Of course, I’ve left out a few things such as Dark Energy & Dark Matter, some finer points of planetary formation, and the genetic evidence that links us to that first single-celled archaea, but the core of it is the gist of it. Those extra details I just mentioned fill in the blanks in-between some of the events just told, but the story told without them is easier to digest. It’s easier to first build a foundation, then start building your home, or in this case, your knowledge.