Oh good, another religion bashing thread.

Thats a prayer of a quote

Yes but we all know that's the answer to the wrong question.:D

Big Bang theory? Am I only one who while reading that remembers "president Sarkozy's" call to then VP candidate Sarah Palin where he praises new "documentary" about her life? :hmmm:

You sure did, squiggy.

The saying amongst physicists is that if you claim you understood quantum physics, you indeed illustrate by that very claim that you have not understood it at all. Quntum physics are so absurd and alogical and anti-intuitive, that you cannot think of it as something that is understood in the ordinary meaning of the term "understanding". I think our thinking and imagination reach their limits there, and our mathematical descriptions remain to be lifeless abstractions that again have no real meaning for us in the world that we experience.

A universe that fluctuates between two Big Bangs, expands and collapses and there goes Big Bang again, just is a theory that shifts the need to explain what was before the Big Bang, at the infinite. Sorry, I am not sure if I put it into correct words.

Hawkings and others tried to attribute characteristics to a nothingness that actually by being attributed with these feature s is no real nothingness, but is something. They think they have solved a basic dilemma and have shown the omni-valid potence of physical sciences that way. But that is wrong - they still speak about an existing something that way.

You could also try to escape the dilemma by trying theoretic construction moving from the universe to an multiverse, universes that exist in huge or infinite numbers inside an even greater entity that I just labelled multiverse. Like solar system exist inside galaxies exist inside local groups exist inside superclusters exist... Or subatomic particle exist inside electrons and neutrons exists inside atoms exist inside molecules exist...

But two wuresiton remain even then: "Why is all this, why is there this entity I cvall myelf witnessing and reflecting this all?", and "Where does the multiverse exist, what is beyond it, where doe sit come from?"

Theories like entropy and Big Bang all represent structures by which we organise our insights and current observations as best as we can. But we should be always be aware of what I already express in the formulation: "we organise them, we are the ones doing an active act of creation there, we create the structure by which we filter our future perceptions and organise the memory of our past perceptions. Whether these laws are valid in every corner of the universe, whether it even makes sense, in a dimensional meaning, to make a statement like this, we cannot say.

I must admit that by all my sympathy for the scientific method, I think it is too careless and undisciplined in the reach it claims validity for. An intelligence of a totally different kind than ours, able to think in more than three dimensions, may come to totally different models of a functioning science, mathematics, time and cosmos. And we would be unable to recognise it as such.

Arthur C. Clarke once said that a foreign equivalent to what we call technology, from a certain level of superiority on would necessarily appear to us as either pure magic, or would bypass our perception completely, like the ant does not recognise the scientists' intelligence observing it, manipulating it and studying Ant City.

All this is fascinating firework in our minds. Distracting us. excites us, entertains us. But in the end, considering the real questions of our lives, and deaths, it seems to be what in German would be called breadless art. And it does not seem to turn us into better humans. Nor do we know of any other species or intelligence on Earth or elsewhere caring at all for our hobby that we take so serious.

Just to make sure you're clear on my motives, I wasn't challenging anything you said. I don't begin to understand, but I had to ask the question of how they could be sure of anything that may or may not have existed before existence as we know it started existing.

I don't get it. But there's a lot I don't get.

Why? I don't know any more than anybody else does, and I don't see that anybody else knows anything.

Now to the next level: can we even know anything for sure?

:D

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

The answer still eludes us...

:huh: Dang. Spilled my drink.

Well if they do they aren't making it stick. :O:

I know for sure it's Saturday night.:03:

Not here it isn't!

Ha! :O::O::O:

You Brits are different. You drive on the wrong side of the road I hear. :O:

No misunderstanding here Sailor Steve :salute: to be honest I saw this thread as a chance for a bit of a laugh is all. You know, science/religion deathmatch kind of thing. So yeah I just replied in my own way, to me it was funny, but then as the saying goes 'I do amuse myself sometimes'

Ahhh but the idea that existence as we know it started existing at any point is yet again another anthropologically hampered idea. We do not know if existence existed before our universe existed or not. If it did it was likely not existence as we know it. but it was still existence, simply of a different kind. Different dimensions curled up, maybe only 2 of space but with an extra time or 3, or maybe no time dimension but 23 of space etc.. who knows? not I. What I do know is that the contemporary mathematical models of the big bang absolutely require a pre-existing state of something, in order for the bang to occur. This is where the mathematical models of Brane or M-Theory and string theory come in, as they deal with these extra dimensions and are capable of describing different states of existence, rather than cheating and inserting the 'singularity' about which there can be no mathematical model, as the singularity is where the equations regarding mass/energy/time/space result in infinity. In maths, infinity is almost certainly an indication that your maths is broken.

I did not intend to tread on anyones sensiblities regarding religion, I have my own views and humour and here in this thread I felt it was on topic to express them. Feel free to ridicule them and have a laugh on me folks. Honestly when science gets this abstracted, I couldn't really blame anyone for looking at it the way I look at religion.

I got to admit talking about nothing presents some interesting grammatical problems. Reminded me of Arnold J Rimmer, 'it may be going to not be happening, but it hasn't not yet happened happened going to be...' *trails off looking confused*

Anyway the best wisdom consists in knowing that which you know amounts to nothing compared to what there is to be known. But you know this already! and I know that you know. Now you know that I know that you know. And still the sum total of all we know is naught.

Regards, Sam.

The last time I said I didn't know anything, you said I did know something but I was wrong. :O:

If I know something, but I'm wrong, then am I right when I say I don't know anything? If I'm wrong about not knowing anything then I must know something, but whatever it is eludes me. :doh:


There's an exception to every rule.

Except that one.

can WE know anything? No. The only thing that is certain is that i exist. Everything else is speculation and perception. of course, if i believed that nothing and no one else but me existed for certainty i probably wouldve died a long time ago. So i accept what i perceive, and i perceive that you guys are the same as i am, living, thinking human beings. Im not being selfish, only speaking from my point of view. It is the same for you guys as well, everything else is based on perception. Everyone views the universe differently, in a very literal sense. Its why paranoid schizophrenics are not crazy, they simply perceive things differently, and whatever they see does exist in their mind, though maybe not in physical form. Its like everyone lives their own universe in a sense, though we come together.

and so i believe that the only thing that is absolutely certain is that you yourself exist in some form. everything else, what you see, hear, smell, taste, touch, is perception. Its a little bit like the question "if a tree falls in the woods and nothing is around to hear it, does it make a sound". No, it doesnt, because no one is around to observe it and therefore it doesnt exist. Of course, thinking someone or something who is across the world doesnt exist because you cant hear, smell, taste, touch, or see them is ridiculous, leaving a window open for religion in people's minds. Its a paradox thats not worth wasting alot of time over, because youll drive yourself mad thinking "well, how do i know such and such exists, blah blah blah", and in the end it just ends up making you confused until you accept what you see to be real. on the same episode of "through the wormhole" with Morgan Freeman as i previously mentioned, with the explanation of what came "before", they talked about if you lost all your senses, would the universe exist? its mind boggling to think about, though stimulating. Its also been thought out way too much :D.

Although their was Einstein and Quantum Physics, Newtonian physics still apply in practical billiards.

In our ordinary everyday lifes, and ordinary day conflicts, all these high-flying thoughts debated here play practically no role, or almost no role. On these levels, we indeed can know the things relevant for them. ;) There is no need to ask existential questions over why that dog bites me when I kick it.

But its high-flying philosophy talked about here, existential questions, metaphysics. That slightly different from the ordinary ground our normal lives' everyday-decisions must be made on.

Yes, but it seems as if you is not that you that you usally think yourself of, nor is the world what your senses seem to tell you what it is. What your senses tell you only is that they function according to their design. A species with different senses has very different images of what is around. And your idea of world and perception - is created by your brain. And it seems you cannot go beyond your brain that easily.

And whether you go into space and examine astronomical dimensions, or fopcus your attention into the sub-atomic cosmos, you soon realise that you always seem to deal with just this: empty space between solar systems, stellar obecjets, galaxies, or neutrons, electrons and other subnuclear particles. And there is no borderline between the biog space up there and the tiny space in there. It seems to be just one empty space.

And although your body every six years has completely replaced all cells, molecules, atoms that it once cvomns78uted on and physicsally you without doubt are not ther being you have been six years ago, and although you are separated from your past time and are noit ion touch with past times and only imagine memories that tell you what you once have been and experienced but now are no more, you still use to think that "this was me and this is me now and I span all this time and I am all those minds from different ages and I am what I have forgotten as well".

So what is it that exists and thinks of itself as "this is me"?

Time. Another conception so hard to deal with. Time passing with different speeds. Space-time. Time-slices.

Hunger. Espresso. In the kitchen.

http://imageshack.us/a/img577/5618/h...5c1590x389.jpg

Long distances...