1. How Did the Universe Survive the Big Bang? In This Experiment, Clues Remain Elusive

Comment #31872 by Snaffle on April 14, 2007 at 7:39 pm

No problem, all will be resolved in the next accelerator, planned for some time this century:
It's the Particle Accelerator Tunnelling Booster Neutrino Experiment...


The PAT BooNE!

2. Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created from Nothing

Comment #28916 by Snaffle on March 31, 2007 at 3:04 pm

Hi all - my first post. I was a little concerned that Spinoza and Yorker were headed for a flame-war, but I'm glad to see an intelligent resolution; good on both of you.
I think one of the problems in all this discussion of Hawking's purported statement that the universe "came from nothing" lies in implicit assumptions about time.
I am by no means a physicist, so my ideas are, at best, vague and non-mathematical on this topic, but references to "cause and effect" are inherently temporal - they depend upon the idea of time itself. To apply this thinking to a supposed "before" of the Big-Bang implicitly involves the idea of Absolute Time (that is, time that exists outside of the events under discussion) - something which I understand Einstein did away with.
We're struggling with something quite outside the conditions for which our intellects evolved. Kip Thorne, in his book "Black Holes and Time Warps" makes the point that we cannot experience Space-Time directly because we do not operate at relativistic speeds in our daily life, instead we experience it as a separation of 3d space + time. When we try to think about such things visuo-spatially, it's not surprising that we essentially can't; we need the abstractions of mathematics to be able to manipulate these ideas, and it's all bound to seem quite counter-intuitive. This, I think, is where Spinoza's objections come to grief; the "Argument from Personal Incredulity" is not a valid objection, merely a statement of human limitation.
These concepts are something that my wife and I call a "Gonk": an idea that, no matter how you try to run it through your mind, just produces nasty grinding-gears noises and an error signal. It's fun to try, though, isn't it? And it says a lot about the flexibility of human intellect that we DO try. :-)