Do you believe in gravity?

[Lagboltz]

Will math fail at some point?

Of course that is hard to say, but to see one type of failure, look at Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems
I read a book on that subject, it is a real brain twister. Gödel eventually went insane. I almost did too.
One of his theorems stated loosely is, if you can prove that algebra is self-consistent, then algebra is self-inconsistent.

Can you describe this sentence mathematically?
"This sentence is not true"

That is an example of a reflexive sentence. Propositional calculus allows you to make statements about other statements, but will not allow a statement about itself. In other words that sentence is not allowed, and you are not allowed to draw conclusions from it. Nevertheless it is a great sentence to use as graffiti on the wall of a public toilet. It gets people athinkin.

Here is a second level of reflexivity:
The following sentence is true.
The preceeding sentence is false.
That's good for toilet walls too.

 

[numinus]

Mr. Cranky pants? Name calling? I've seen much worse in this forum. It's just a friendly moniker, but I think you are just kidding about that.

I wasn't kidding about how you haven't answered any of my questions, if that's what you mean.

Physicists are looking for a coherent model that brings unity to the nature of the universe. It is a noble endeavor. If the large scale and small scale can be united, other things like the cosmological constant, inflation, etc may (or may not) follow. If the current large problems are solved by a new small scale model, then experimental verification will have been done.

Coherence isn't the only thing that validates a scientific theory. Never mind the lack of experimental verification. The idea that you need to add more and more dimensions to a mathematical model to fit previously unexplained phenomena is my primary criticism of string. Stringy people aren't even unanimous in exactly how many dimensions there are.

Given enough aptitude in higher math, I can choose to contrive a model with as many dimensions as necessary and in as many shapes as there are functional relationships.

In fact, any two discrete phenomena can be easily joined by a smooth curve through a simple exercise of differential equations. The loudness of your fart, for instance, could just as easily be a function of the length of time you are logged-on in this forum.

That was his intention, but the important thing he did was put a covariant tensor into his field equations that kept consistency. That term now has multiple purposes outside his original purpose. In simple terms, Einstein made his theory more flexible, and physicists are now using that flexibility in different ways.

Again you missed the 'big picture'.

He was trying to derive a steady-state universe. Why the universe is in a steady-state to begin with is something he only felt like thinking.

And so, prior to his death, and in the face of friedmann's independent derivation of his field equation (minus the cosmological contant -- friedmann being a citizen of communist russia, felt no particular need to think the universe was in a steady state), he admitted that the cosmological constant was his greatest blunder.

Presently, we know that the universe is not only expanding, it is doing so at an accelerated rate. And since nothing in gr could explain this, we have merely recycled the cosmological constant and applied a different value to it.

Hey, Mr. Nasty Pants. Are you trying to put me down so you can woo Mare into thinking you are the most brilliant person in this thread? Just kidding, no need to answer.

No. I am truly interested in this subject matter for the longest time. I just haven't found anyone rational enough to discuss it with. For a moment there, I had high hopes for you. No such luck, I'm afraid.

Feel free to flirt with mare as you wish.

You also may want to refresh your memory too. The reference you sited has the following passage:
"A major outstanding problem is that most quantum field theories predict a huge cosmological constant from the energy of the quantum vacuum."

Quantum vacuum - the froth at the bottom strikes again! This kind of shows that that string theory with the "10 or 11 dimensions indeed!" are kind of at the bottom of things, so to speak, and has a fundamental bearing on the cosmos. So don't you think you should look at the teeny picture at quantum scales too if you want to understand the big stuff?

I have no problems with that. My problem rests on the fact that since matter and energy is conserved, the amount of contracting tendency of space is fixed. To accelerate space in the opposite direction, you need an ever-increasing lambda. Since lambda is a function of vacuum, it suggests that lambda is being created out of nothing.

I was responding to your comment:
"Now, you must admit, lambda is a curious something that arises from nothing. Not only does it violate lorentz invariance (able to propagate faster than the speed of light via hyper-inflation)..... "

You were worried about something going faster than light. So now you agree that "local" is the operative word. Case closed.

Are you saying that there is a way by which the speed of light varies? Perhaps it is a function of an extra dimension wrapped around space-time. And that the invariant speed of light is actually the visible effects of shortcuts as light travels along this spiral?

That would explain your infatuation with string. And yes, it is a bit contrived.

Not so. It was "contrived" to explain the apparent age of early galaxy formation, and other things. The fact that IR space telescopes stare at an event horizon 13.6 billion light years away came as a consequence.

Eh? You just paraphrased the horizon problem which I just mentioned. What dishonest nonsense.

Assuming the universe is 13.6 billion years old, and that expansion occurs constantly in all directions, we have a universe with a diameter of no less than 27.2 billion light-years. Since entropy can only propagate via radiation, that is, the speed of light, then we have an entropically disjoint universe.

And your solution is simply, space expanded faster than light. Duh?

Sigh. Sigh. (Note: "sigh" is a put down. I am up one sigh above his now.)

That's right. That Newton is sooo yesterday.

EM waves ain't got nuthin to do with bundled anythings. Quantum mechanics is not like that, but I'm further digressing from your digression, so I won't pursue it, unless anyone is interested in that off-topic.

A photon is a quantized electromagnetic field. If you are going to impugne what I say, then you should have some credible facts and logic to support it, now, shouldn't you?

You are prejudging the potential theory. Gravitons may not necessarily curve space. Einstein's warped space was way outside the box of Newton's inverse square action at a distance. Likewise, graviton gravity (catchy little phrase isn't it) may not have anything to do with warped space. One requirement is the so-called "Correspondence Principle". A new theory must be able to include the old theory as an adequate approximation under loose enough conditions.

It doesn't curve space eh? Now you are trying to catch your own tail. Round and round and round....

 

[numinus]

Well, we have both been arrogantly criticizing each others posts. I will stop if you do. Deal?

The only difference is that you make no sense. Deal?

I never meant to imply otherwise.

I couldn't have guessed that from someone who has said 'you are wrong' so much (and goes on to paraphrase the exact same thing I said).

Now, stop that.

You stop.

Yes, we gotta listen to Occam and his razor, but Einstein also amended "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

And with this dictum in mind, perhaps merely adding more dimensions to a mathematical model isn't the way to go. After all, complexity is such a bore -- and more often than not, lead to bs.

I covered it's relevance in a previous post. I didn't see this post when I uploaded my last post. The number of dimensions in string theory are dictated by the properties of particles (barons, leptons, gluons, etc.) Ten dimensions is the lowest number that can accommodate string theory. Going to fewer dimensions is "simpler than possible" for what needs to be done there.

Yeah right.

There is a minimum number of dimensions but most probably, it would be more, depending on how many people criticize it.

Makes perfect sense.

That is a great question. I vexes me and many scientists who care to think about it. What has happened, is an evolution of mathematical complexity. From algebra to 4-vectors and tensors, to group theory and other non-commutative algebras. (Note to others: That means an algebra where this can happen,
A times B is not equal to B times A.)

So far mathematical models (theories) have worked on many most fundamental aspects of describing nature. There are many unsolved problems at the large and small scale. Will math fail at some point? Will there be newer and more abstract mathematics that will satisfy future needs? If not, physicists will be out of business, but they won't know it and won't stop trying.

And that is just it, really -- that it is more of faith, rather than anything, that governs the way we think, even in science.

 

[Lagboltz]

I wasn't kidding about how you haven't answered any of my questions, if that's what you mean.

I think I have addressed your questions concerning the properties of gravity in this post. If I have not, you will have to refresh my memory because the thread is getting complicated with various ideas; admittedly some of them are my fault.

Coherence isn't the only thing that validates a scientific theory. Never mind the lack of experimental verification. The idea that you need to add more and more dimensions to a mathematical model to fit previously unexplained phenomena is my primary criticism of string. Stringy people aren't even unanimous in exactly how many dimensions there are.

I don't know if you heard about Murray Gell-Mann's "Eight Fold Way" but this site, http://www.answers.com/topic/eightfold-way has some neat two dimensional pictures of how particles fall into natural classifications using group theory. You can open the pictures to see them better. The particles fall in patterns in various spaces. We don't think much of a toy top spinning clockwise or counterclockwise as being fundamentally different from each other. It turns out that in these new dimensions entirely different particles (such as protons and neutrons) are actually just the same thing only they are spinning differently or are displaced in a different direction in some space with an odd name. This picture unifies hundreds of elementary particles into a few much simpler schema.

Gell-Mann's theory grew into the "Standard Model" and further into string theory, which attempts to combine all these patterns at deeper levels to bring about a cohesive understanding to all particles and gravity. Combining these particle patterns (shown at the web site I gave) of different dimensions requires 10 dimensions. However, you are quite aware of the difficulties in that there are four different 10 dimensional string theories. So why 11 dimensions?

Imagine looking at a pencil drawing of a cube. Suppose there are four different papers with four different angles that the cube is being drawn. They all look different in the two dimensional perspective, but we understand 3 dimensions and we can say that they are all cubes from different angles. It was found that the 4 different string theories were merely the same thing viewed, in a sense, from different directions if you went up one more dimension from 10 to 11. It's just like going from different 2-D drawings of a cube to the actual cube, by going up one dimension to 3-D.

Given enough aptitude in higher math, I can choose to contrive a model with as many dimensions as necessary and in as many shapes as there are functional relationships.

If you did that, it would violate "simpler than possible". The passage of particle understanding in going up in the number of dimensions must encapsulate all fundamental laws of particle physics. It is not lightly done.

Again you missed the 'big picture'.

He was trying to derive a steady-state universe. Why the universe is in a steady-state to begin with is something he only felt like thinking.

Well, yes, in the sense that at the time nobody, including Einstein knew that the universe was expanding. Hubble discovered that ten years later. Einstein's blunder was that he didn't believe that his own theory was correct. He had an amazing farsightedness in his earlier work in predicting mind blowing things, but he got cold feet in saying "the universe is not steady. It's expanding." That finding was left to Hubble's data, and not Einstein's theory.

Presently, we know that the universe is not only expanding, it is doing so at an accelerated rate. And since nothing in gr could explain this, we have merely recycled the cosmological constant and applied a different value to it.

I agree. Sort of like Einstein was right, but for the wrong reason.

I have no problems with that. My problem rests on the fact that since matter and energy is conserved, the amount of contracting tendency of space is fixed. To accelerate space in the opposite direction, you need an ever-increasing lambda. Since lambda is a function of vacuum, it suggests that lambda is being created out of nothing.

Could be, but my opinion is that lambda is controlled by something that is not understood yet.

A photon is a quantized electromagnetic field. If you are going to impugne what I say, then you should have some credible facts and logic to support it, now, shouldn't you?

Right, a photon is a quantized field. However, I was responding to what you said earlier,

A light source emits electro-magnetic waves 'bundled up' as photons....

There is a big difference between quantum field theory and what comes out of light bulbs. The "credible facts and logic to support it" are in any textbook on quantum mechanics.

It doesn't curve space eh? Now you are trying to catch your own tail. Round and round and round....

I have no idea what you are referring to, in catching my tail, etc. Perhaps you misread my thoughts.



The following is response to your post #123

And with this dictum in mind, perhaps merely adding more dimensions to a mathematical model isn't the way to go. After all, complexity is such a bore -- and more often than not, lead to bs.
Yeah right.

There is a minimum number of dimensions but most probably, it would be more, depending on how many people criticize it.

Makes perfect sense.

It doesn't seem like you have a good opinion of physicists, yet you are engrossed in some of the problems they are working on. You continue to sneer at the current state of the science.

I'm trying the best I can to explain the present state of science and the brilliance of the last 30 years in the depth of understanding the big picture. I am also trying to explain where the small picture is crucial to that understanding of the big picture. That quest has been lightly put as the "Theory of Everything", which is not easy.

It seems that you want to understand the big picture too, but you continually deride the science of the last 30 years that is trying to help you do so.

The only difference is that you make no sense. Deal?

What do you mean by "Deal?". When I wrote "Deal?" I was trying to reduce the snide arrogance that both of us had been practicing. I feel I am doing my share, but you are not.

 

[Dr.Who]

That is an example of a reflexive sentence. Propositional calculus allows you to make statements about other statements, but will not allow a statement about itself. In other words that sentence is not allowed, and you are not allowed to draw conclusions from it. Nevertheless it is a great sentence to use as graffiti on the wall of a public toilet. It gets people athinkin.

Here is a second level of reflexivity:
The following sentence is true.
The preceeding sentence is false.
That's good for toilet walls too.

I don't know enough about propositional calculus to know if that is right or not. But when I just apply common sense to the sentence I see no reason that it cannot talk about itself.

I do know that there are a number of unresolved paradoxes out there.

Any one of them indicates that either logic fails at some point or that the solutions has just not bee found yet.

 

[Lagboltz]

I don't know enough about propositional calculus to know if that is right or not. But when I just apply common sense to the sentence I see no reason that it cannot talk about itself.

I do know that there are a number of unresolved paradoxes out there.

Any one of them indicates that either logic fails at some point or that the solutions has just not bee found yet.

It seems that mathematics wants to protect itself so that when a system is devised such as arithmetic, you find that dividing by zero leads to paradoxes or falsehoods. For example,
2 x 0 = 3 x 0
Factor out the zero.
2 = 3
To get out of this problem, you simply say you can't divide by zero.

But you are right. In common sense we allow a lot more leeway. A lot of self referencing sentences are logical to people and are true, like,
This sentence is colored red.
But when they made the rules for formal logic, they had to preclude that, so science precludes that too. You may be right in that a full understanding of nature may require self referential statements, and even paradoxes. I have no idea how that can be handled.

This is quoted in the reference I gave in post #121. Near the bottom is
"... Stephen Hawking and others, argue that ... even the most sophisticated formulation of physics will be incomplete, and that therefore there can never be an ultimate theory that can be formulated as a finite number of principles, known for certain as "final"."

 

[numinus]

Lagboltz:

I do not know exactly what you wish to achieve in your posts.

When I state a fact, you arrogantly declare I am wrong and then proceed to paraphrase exactly what I said.

When I venture an opinion based on facts and logic, you criticize my opinion and then proceed to add to what you erronously imagine I said.

More particularly, this:

It doesn't seem like you have a good opinion of physicists, yet you are engrossed in some of the problems they are working on. You continue to sneer at the current state of the science.

I do not even know where to begin to refute such an absurd opinion.

Engineers are people who use those parts of physics that actually work -- therefore may be deemed as 'practical' physicists.

Nor are all theoretical and experimental physicists necessarily string theorists.

Nor is string theory representative of the current state of physics.

And just because you are apparently enamored by this particular theory, doesn't mean that everyone else should.

I fairly know what you are saying. As a theory on quantum gravity, there are very good reasons to accept string.

In this stringy world, everything is made up of strings or membranes with lenghts not much more than the planck length. Given this, one would naturally expect an unavoidable space-time quantization. After all, regions smaller than strings are, in essence, metaphysical quantities -- effectively beyond the scrutiny of science.

It is also not bad as a unifying theory -- since apparently different particles and forces are nothing more than vibrating strings, like strings of a guitar or a piano. And with each vibration, the 'particle' acquires a particular quality in much the same way that the vibrations of a guitar define different notes. Viewed from afar, strings vibrating differently would appear like different types of particles.

But its benefits end there. The truth is, the theory has not been able to consistently quantize space-time nor curvature. These strings or membranes are actually vibrating in a fixed background very similar to a newtonian, clockwork space. After the non-vanishing particles (photons, gravitons and other massless particles), the next lightest particle is billions of times heavier than an electron. It still requires a lot of work, certainly not a scientifically accepted model.

Now, you have to admit, until recently, string contrived a world with 26 dimensions. Subsequent revolutions in the theory theorized 2, 10 and -2 (that's right, negative 2 dimension) until it settled at 11. At this point, I have given up trying to understand the thinking of these esoteric bunch of psuedo-scientific mathematicians. After all, it is not very hard to imagine, quite possibly, thousands of different kinds of string theory -- as numerous as anyone's capacity to tenaciously do n-dimension math.

And as a response, they imagined to call all these as m-theory. That would have been well and good had they actually decided what m really stands for? Presumably, it stands for membrane. But it could very well stand for magic, muck or masturbation.

 

[numinus]

I don't know enough about propositional calculus to know if that is right or not. But when I just apply common sense to the sentence I see no reason that it cannot talk about itself.

I do know that there are a number of unresolved paradoxes out there.

Any one of them indicates that either logic fails at some point or that the solutions has just not bee found yet.

The essence of godel's incompleteness theorems is simply -- that any form of predicate logic, whether in math, computer language or philosophy, cannot stand without a a set of postulates or axioms at its foundations.

If you do not accept these axioms, then the whole theory becomes incomplete. If you do accept these axioms, then they are inconsistent, simply because you did not prove these axioms.

 

[numinus]

I think I have addressed your questions concerning the properties of gravity in this post. If I have not, you will have to refresh my memory because the thread is getting complicated with various ideas; admittedly some of them are my fault.

I don't know if you heard about Murray Gell-Mann's "Eight Fold Way" but this site, http://www.answers.com/topic/eightfold-way has some neat two dimensional pictures of how particles fall into natural classifications using group theory. You can open the pictures to see them better. The particles fall in patterns in various spaces. We don't think much of a toy top spinning clockwise or counterclockwise as being fundamentally different from each other. It turns out that in these new dimensions entirely different particles (such as protons and neutrons) are actually just the same thing only they are spinning differently or are displaced in a different direction in some space with an odd name. This picture unifies hundreds of elementary particles into a few much simpler schema.

Gell-Mann's theory grew into the "Standard Model" and further into string theory, which attempts to combine all these patterns at deeper levels to bring about a cohesive understanding to all particles and gravity. Combining these particle patterns (shown at the web site I gave) of different dimensions requires 10 dimensions. However, you are quite aware of the difficulties in that there are four different 10 dimensional string theories. So why 11 dimensions?

Imagine looking at a pencil drawing of a cube. Suppose there are four different papers with four different angles that the cube is being drawn. They all look different in the two dimensional perspective, but we understand 3 dimensions and we can say that they are all cubes from different angles. It was found that the 4 different string theories were merely the same thing viewed, in a sense, from different directions if you went up one more dimension from 10 to 11. It's just like going from different 2-D drawings of a cube to the actual cube, by going up one dimension to 3-D.

If you did that, it would violate "simpler than possible". The passage of particle understanding in going up in the number of dimensions must encapsulate all fundamental laws of particle physics. It is not lightly done.

Look. My interests in a quantum mechanical theory of gravity is, at best, tangential. I am interested more in physical cosmology. Until you can show a compelling reason why gravity should be quantized in the first place, then I'd rather stick with 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension, if you don't mind. At least, I'd be working on more stable grounds -- where the degree of speculation is considerably smaller than in string.

After all, what we need is a theory of EVERYTHING, not a theory of ANYTHING. And that is exactly what string is.

 

[Lagboltz]

When I state a fact, you arrogantly declare I am wrong and then proceed to paraphrase exactly what I said.

When I venture an opinion based on facts and logic, you criticize my opinion and then proceed to add to what you erronously imagine I said.

Well, your posts had been rather abasing, replete with words such as "duh", "understand"? as though the responder was stupid. I saw many posts as in the ball park of true, but missing some important aspects that physics demands. You apparently may not have been able discriminate what I was saying vs. what you were saying.

Quote:Originally Posted by Lagboltz
It doesn't seem like you have a good opinion of physicists, yet you are engrossed in some of the problems they are working on. You continue to sneer at the current state of the science.

I do not even know where to begin to refute such an absurd opinion.
...
... esoteric bunch of psuedo-scientific mathematicians.

That is the sort of thing I was referring to. I agree string theory is not well founded, but it is not pseudo-science.

Look. My interests in a quantum mechanical theory of gravity is, at best, tangential. I am interested more in physical cosmology. Until you can show a compelling reason why gravity should be quantized in the first place, then I'd rather stick with 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension, if you don't mind. At least, I'd be working on more stable grounds -- where the degree of speculation is considerably smaller than in string.

I am interested more in physical cosmology. Until you can show a compelling reason why gravity should be quantized in the first place, then I'd rather stick with 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension, if you don't mind. At least, I'd be working on more stable grounds -- where the degree of speculation is considerably smaller than in string.

Actually neither string theory nor a quantum representation of gravity is needed to express the difficulty of the vacuum foam. The spontaneous creation and dispersion of matter in the vacuum comes from the standard theory of particles and has an experimental foundation too.

I don't recall any posts here about dark matter. Apparently dark energy is part of the big picture according to most cosmologists, but they are rather vague as far as what it is. That is supposed to have an influence on lambda and inflation in the early universe.

Here is more food for thought:
http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/abhotswh.html
Hawking, A Brief History of Time: "...the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero".

This is one calculation of the total energy:
http://www.curtismenning.com/ZeroEnergyCalc.htm

This abstract says that the total energy of the universe is zero but only according to some models.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h316307258181076/

In using this hypothesis, some cosmologists think that the whole universe is a big vacuum fluctuation from nothing.

What do you think?

 

[numinus]

Well, your posts had been rather abasing, replete with words such as "duh", "understand"? as though the responder was stupid. I saw many posts as in the ball park of true, but missing some important aspects that physics demands. You apparently may not have been able discriminate what I was saying vs. what you were saying.

Of course it is missing important aspects. That has been my contention from the beginning.

You, on the other hand, dishonestly insert string as if it is THE solution. It simply is not.

That is the sort of thing I was referring to. I agree string theory is not well founded, but it is not pseudo-science.

I would feel the same way, if I spent all that effort in graduate school learning something as esoteric as string, if indeed you went to graduate school at all.

And yes, it is pseudo-science because it does not offer experimental verification. Im afraid our pretend-agnostics, topgun and mare, are firm on this criteria.

Actually neither string theory nor a quantum representation of gravity is needed to express the difficulty of the vacuum foam. The spontaneous creation and dispersion of matter in the vacuum comes from the standard theory of particles and has an experimental foundation too.

Again, you are peddling dishonesty.

The spontaneous creation/annihilation of matter are observed within planck scales -- easily attributable to heisenberg's uncertainty.

I am not talking about that since you need to spontaneously CREATE lambda in COSMOLOGICAL SCALES, enough to accelerate space-time expansion.

I don't recall any posts here about dark matter. Apparently dark energy is part of the big picture according to most cosmologists, but they are rather vague as far as what it is. That is supposed to have an influence on lambda and inflation in the early universe.

They are vague about dark matter and energy precisely because dark anything is associated with something as curious as lambda.

Here is more food for thought:
http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/abhotswh.html
Hawking, A Brief History of Time: "...the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero".

This is one calculation of the total energy:
http://www.curtismenning.com/ZeroEnergyCalc.htm

This abstract says that the total energy of the universe is zero but only according to some models.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h316307258181076/

In using this hypothesis, some cosmologists think that the whole universe is a big vacuum fluctuation from nothing.

What do you think?

What???

The gravitational field is the energy density associated with matter. In space-time geometry, it serves to DECLERATE expansion. The universe can, theoretically, go on expanding indefinitely at a decelerating rate in much the same way that an object can move away from a gravity source indefinitely -- slowly declerating but never stopping.

Your entire analogy breaks down given a universe that is expanding at an ACCELERATED RATE. In this case, the total energy density can't possibly be zero. And however much you tinker with the initial conditions, you can't derive a space-time geometry like that without violating either lorentz invariance or conservation.

And the moment you concede that, indeed, conservation is being violated -- that indeed, lambda is being created out of nothing, then you have arrived at a conclusion that is NO FURTHER NOR MORE LOGICAL than the one being offered by ONTOLOGY.

 

[Mare Tranquillity]

And yes, it is pseudo-science because it does not offer experimental verification. Im afraid our pretend-agnostics, topgun and mare, are firm on this criteria.

I appreciate the fact that you feel confident using me as an authority to quote, but, gosh, it would be nice if you got my position right at least once. I'm not an agnostic and never have been.

 

[numinus]

I appreciate the fact that you feel confident using me as an authority to quote, but, gosh, it would be nice if you got my position right at least once. I'm not an agnostic and never have been.

I got your position perfectly clear. Unless of course you are back-pedalling and are no longer looking for empirical proof.

 

[Mare Tranquillity]

I got your position perfectly clear. Unless of course you are back-pedalling and are no longer looking for empirical proof.

One does not have to have empirical proof to "believe", you are the one trying to make your belief empirical. I know better, I believe what I believe and don't feel the need to try and prove it because I know it can't be done. Nor do I need to make other people live by my rules.

Our personal relationships with our Creator are what we make them, there's no proof except what you find in your own heart.

 

[Lagboltz]

I would feel the same way, if I spent all that effort in graduate school learning something as esoteric as string, if indeed you went to graduate school at all.

I got a PhD in physics back before string theory was around. As I said, you don't need any kind of exotic string theory to get vacuum energy which has an important bearing on the big picture.

Originally Posted by Lagboltz
Actually neither string theory nor a quantum representation of gravity is needed to express the difficulty of the vacuum foam. The spontaneous creation and dispersion of matter in the vacuum comes from the standard theory of particles and has an experimental foundation too.

Again, you are peddling dishonesty.

The spontaneous creation/annihilation of matter are observed within planck scales -- easily attributable to heisenberg's uncertainty.

We have another strong disconnect. What I said about spontaneous creation and annihilation can't come from anywhere except Heisenburg's uncertainty and it was discovered long before string theory came about. Yet, you call me dishonest, and then say pretty much the same thing that I just said.

What???

What do you mean What???

The gravitational field is the energy density associated with matter. In space-time geometry, it serves to DECLERATE expansion. The universe can, theoretically, go on expanding indefinitely at a decelerating rate in much the same way that an object can move away from a gravity source indefinitely -- slowly declerating but never stopping.

Well yes, and....

Your entire analogy breaks down given a universe that is expanding at an ACCELERATED RATE. In this case, the total energy density can't possibly be zero. And however much you tinker with the initial conditions, you can't derive a space-time geometry like that without violating either lorentz invariance or conservation.

Analogy? My analogy? Or Hawking's?

And the moment you concede that, indeed, conservation is being violated -- that indeed, lambda is being created out of nothing, then you have arrived at a conclusion that is NO FURTHER NOR MORE LOGICAL than the one being offered by ONTOLOGY.

Conservation is violated? Just because something is accelerating doesn't mean conservation is violated. That often means that potential energy is being traded for kinetic energy. Ontology? I haven't heard of that theory of the universe.