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-------------------- 2574 - UNIVERSE - who made the Universe?
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- Where did the universe come from? How did it get here? How did I get here? Please respond if you have figured this all out? There must have been some earlier, pre-existing form of reality that can explain our situation.
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- We might know that we, as individuals, came from other humans, but then we can ask where the first humans came from? If the answer is another pre-existing life form, then we can ask the question of how life began in the first place.
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- We can continue this line of questioning as far back as we want, to even before the Big Bang, until science has nothing left to say, and all we have is the grand abyss of the unknown.
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- The major data sets collecting temperature on the Earth going back to 1880 are all in stunning agreement, and all indicate a steady warming that appears to be accelerating today. Note how, as of 2016, the warming trend can be teased out of the data with overwhelming (5-sigma) significance. What do us humans have to do with it?
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--------------------- When and how did the first human beings arise on our planet?
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--------------------- When and how did any form of life begin on Earth?
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--------------------- When and how did the Milky Way come to be?
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--------------------- When and where did the very first star in the observable Universe first form?
--------------------- Where did all the matter (as opposed to antimatter) that enabled our Universe to form come from?
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- There are a lot of pieces of information that we scientifically know surrounding these questions, but the exact, definitive answers to them remain elusive. We fully expect that the answers to these questions are knowable, and one of the goals of modern science is to uncover these answers. We just do not have them yet.
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- There exists an equally-symmetric collection of matter and antimatter , of X and Y bosons, and anti-X and anti-Y bosons could, with the right GUT properties, give rise to the matter/antimatter asymmetry we find in our Universe today. However, we assume that there is a physical, rather than a divine, explanation for the matter-antimatter asymmetry we observe today, but we do not yet know for certain.
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- And there are questions that we can ask or ponder whose answers may never be revealed to us. As vast and enormous and old as our Universe is, the part of it that we can access and gain information from is most definitely finite.
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- We cannot observe any signals from more than 46.1 billion light-years away, as that's the farthest extent of the observable Universe from our perspective. We cannot measure any information from more than 13.8 billion years ago, since everything that exists is limited by both the speed of light and the time that's passed since the Big Bang.
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- And even though the number of particles present in the Universe is mind-boggling, as there are approximately 10^90 of them (including neutrinos and photons), that's still a finite, quantifiable number.
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- On a logarithmic scale, the Universe nearby has the solar system and our Milky Way galaxy. But far beyond are all the other galaxies in the Universe, the large-scale cosmic web, and eventually the moments immediately following the Big Bang itself.
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- Although we cannot observe farther than this cosmic horizon which is presently a distance of 46.1 billion light-years away, wherein approximately 10^90 total particles can be found to exist, there will be more Universe to reveal itself to us in the future because more light will be reaching us. However, the total amount of information available will always be finite and limited.
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- In other words, there are questions we can ask whose answers may be scientifically impossible to know. We might be able to state what it was like when the Big Bang first began. We might even be able to tease out some information about cosmic inflation, the state that preceded and set up the Big Bang.
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- But if we want to know where cosmic inflation came from, how long it went on for, or what its properties were prior to that final fraction-of-a-second where its imprints actually affect our observable Universe, there doesn't appear to be any way to test those ideas.
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- Similarly, we cannot observe other Universes and thereby test the idea of a multiverse, or concoct a test that would enable us to probe the many-worlds idea of quantum mechanics.
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- We can imagine a very large number of possible outcomes that could have resulted from the conditions our Universe was born with. The fact that all 10^90 particles contained within our Universe unfolded with the interactions they experienced and the outcomes that they arrived at over the past 13.8 billion years led to all the intricacies of our experiences, including our very existence.
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- It is possible, if there were enough chances, that this could occur many times, leading to a scenario that we think of as "infinite parallel Universes" to contain all possible outcomes, including the roads our Universe didn't travel, but we can only observe the one Universe we have on the road that we did travel.
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- It's important to recognize that within this Universe, these three classes of questions should be dealt with in fundamentally different ways.
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- (1) You can ask a question whose answer is not only knowable, but already known.
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- (2) You can ask a question whose answer seems to be knowable if we had enough information, and that information exists in our Universe, even if we don't have it yet.
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- (3) You can ask a question whose answer is not knowable, even if we were to obtain every quantum bit of information available in the entire Universe.
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- The Milky Way is a stunning, awe-inspiring sight to anyone, and a spectacular view of a great many stars in our galaxy. We once assumed that the stars were put there by divine beings, but modern astronomy and astrophysics has shown us that these points of light have their origin in purely physical phenomena.
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- There is a large suite of scientific evidence that supports the picture of the expanding Universe and the Big Bang, but that does not necessitate a conflict between scientific conclusions and religious beliefs.
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- In scenarios where the answer should be scientifically knowable in principle, but we do not yet have adequate information to provide that answer, invoking a deity is only a slightly less bad ide. This is what is infamously known as a God of the gaps argument: appealing to divine intervention to explain a physical phenomenon in this Universe that might be explicable by purely physical rules alone.
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- Throughout the past few millennia, many phenomena that once fell into this category have since had their nature revealed, and are explicable without an appeal to the divine at all.
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- When we ask questions about how we should live, how to treat one another, why we exist, or anything to do with our cosmic purpose, science appears to be ill-equipped to provide comprehensive, unambiguous answers.
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- Religion is for anyone who wants it in their life, and science is as well. They are neither fundamentally incompatible, nor are they mutually exclusive. Knowledge, education, self-improvement, and the bettering of our shared world are endeavors that are open to everyone.
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- Did God, in some form, create the entire Universe? Not only don't I know, but I daresay that no one does.
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- From the end of inflation and the start of the hot Big Bang, we can trace out our cosmic history. Dark matter and dark energy are required ingredients today, but when they originated is not yet decided.
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- This is the consensus view of how our Universe began, but it is always subject to revision with more and better data. Note that the beginning of inflation, or any information about inflation prior to its final 10^-33 seconds, is no longer present within our observable Universe.
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- Science cannot prove the existence of God, but it cannot disprove God either; it can only disprove the notion of a specific, poorly conceived God. If you claim that your God lives in the clouds, you can disprove that God by simply observing the clouds. If you claim that God lives in our Universe, you can disprove that God by observing the entire Universe. But if your God exists in an extra dimension, before cosmic inflation, or outside of space and time altogether, neither proof nor disproof is possible.
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- In a fundamental way, it is purely a matter of what your faith is. All we can control, at the end of the day, is how we treat one another. Do we welcome those who believe different things than we do into our hearts, communities, and lives?
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Regardless of what you believe, choose kindness. It costs nothing, while benefiting the giver, the recipient, and those who simply witness it.
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------------------------------ Index of other Reviews available upon request:
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- 2572 - UNIVERSE - size and age determined?
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- 2569 - What is the fate of the universe?
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- 2551 - Exploring the age and size of the universe?
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- 2552 - Studying the birth of the universe?
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- 2553 - Is the Universe homogeneous?
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- 2504 - Measuring the universe from the biggest to the smallest?
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- 2524 - What is the structure of the universe?
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- 2536 - Explaining the universe is explaining the impossible?
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- 2449 - Strange universe is expanding forever?
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- 2459 - Measuring the universe?
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- 2476 - Determining the age of the universe?
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- 2478 - What is the shape of he universe?
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- 2447 - UNIVERSE - how did it all happen? 13.8 billion years ago the universe started as the Big Bang when space itself rapidly began expanding. At the time the observable universe, which included enough materials to build at least 2 trillion galaxies, fit into a space less than a centimeter across. Today the observable universe is 93 billion light-years across and still expanding.
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- 2439 - UNIVERSE - discovering the expansion? One of the biggest scientific surprises in astronomy was the recent discovery that space itself is expanding. And, expanding the Universe at an ever increase rate. Distant galaxies recede from us and from one another more quickly than the nearby ones, as though the fabric of space itself is being stretched by some dark form of energy.
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- 2432 - UNIVERSE - expanding space. If you were born when the Universe was ten times its current age, our local group of galaxies would merge into one and would be the only galaxy you could see in the Universe for trillions of light years.
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- 2419 - and - 2393 - Age of the Universe?
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- 2412 - Comprehending the expanding Universe?
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- 2394 - Wrap your mind around the Universe?
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- 2364 - Universal beauty in symmetry?
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- 2349 - Why the night sky is dark and the universe is leaving us?
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- 2348 - The Universe from start to finish. 13 pages.
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- 2347 - The Island Universe?
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- 2335 - The Universe almost did not happen?
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- 2334 - How is it expanding?
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- 2328 - Born from the Universe?
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- 2312 - How fast is it expanding?
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- 2292 - Accelerating the universe from unknown force?
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- 2253 - Expanding universe, how can it be flat? What is beyond the edge?
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- 2263 - The universe as we know it?
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- 2262 - How fast is it expanding? Also list more reviews about the Universe. It is a big topic. In fact it is the biggest?
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- 2230 - Te story beginning to end. How to get the age of the universe from the rate of expansion.?
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- 2202 - The structure of the universe?
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- 2196 - Discovering the age of he universe?
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- 2195 - How are Cepheids used in the calculation of the age of the universe?
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- 2194 - How the Universe was born?
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- 2193 - What is the universe expanding in to?
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- 2192 - The universe as we know it?
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- 2177 - The universe by the numbers? Mass, density, diameter?
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- 2167 - Planck satellite measures the cosmic microwave background?
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- 2166 - History of the universe from picoseconds to years, birth to now. 17 pages.
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- 2121 - An expanding Universe.
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- 2104 - Laws of the universe.
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- 2102 - Age of the Universe?
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- 2086 - Puzzles in astronomy?
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- 2083 - Pressed for time?
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- 2075 - Too weird to ponder?
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- 2072 - The age of the universe?
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- 2066 - Extremes in the universe?
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- 2031 - The observable universe?
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- 2027 - Lists more reviews about the universe you live in?
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- 2016 - Birth of the universe?
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- 2008 - The universe almost did not happen?
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- 1991 - What are the odds you are able to read this?
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- 1836 - An expanding universe?
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- 1821 - Describing the universe in math . His review list 15 more reviews available on the Universe.
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- 1782 - Telescopes looking back in time?
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- 1759 - Why is the universe expanding?
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- 1701 - The expanding universe?
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- 1672 - Beginning the universe? Astronomy looks for answers.
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- 1665 - How the universe started?
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- 1634 - The universe started out in the realm of particle physics.
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- 1627 - Is the universe really expanding?
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- 1584 - Universe lifetimes?
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- 1583 - Simulating the expanding universe?
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- 1563 - How old is the universe?
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- 1523 - Turn the sky into a 3D map back to the beginning?
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- 1493 - Puzzles in astronomy?
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- 1471 - Our strange universe?
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- 1469 - How we thing the universe began?
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- 1421 - The size of the universe smallest to biggest?
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- 1314 - Could the astronomer’s math be wrong?
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- 1311 - Is the universe spinning?
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- 1307 - How will the universe end?
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- 1294 - How the universe was formed?
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- 1285 - How the universe was born?
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- 1275 - The universe is born in billion year steps?
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- 1268 - How to explain the universe?
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- 1227 - Does the expanding universe violate the law of conservation of energy?
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- 1225 - Is the universe really a computer?
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- 1146 - Why did the universe turn dark, then light up again?
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- 842 - Pressed for time?
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- 342 - The whole shebang.
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- January 1, 2020 2574
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----- Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ----
--- Some reviews are at: -------------- http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----
-- email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews
--- to: ------ jamesdetrick@comcast.net ------ “Jim Detrick” -----------
- https://plus.google.com/u/0/ -- www.facebook.com -- www.twitter.com
--------------------- Thursday, January 2, 2020 --------------------
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