[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Sammi79

But this is actually quite disappointing for scientists as it is the last piece of the standard model puzzle. It implies that the standard model is correct, which leaves us with currently insurmountable problems regarding uncertainty and accessible information. It is like coming to the end of a long corridor only to find the door at the end was simply painted on solid rock.

OIh, give it some time. I am very confident that this will not remain to be the last word spoken. You indicated it yourself when naming it the "standard model". Standard means there may be alternatives, model means it is not the real thing itself.

Be careful not to misuse the word theory. In this context, theory is the best possible current explanation of the evidence.

Yes, that is the nature of all and every scientific explanation. It is a temporary arrangement in which to sort observations to make them match best way we can currently imagine, and to explain things in the most embracing and easiest way currently possible. But it remains to be an artificial order that is not discovered as a reality existing, but is thought out. By us. It's a convention. That does not lower its value. Actually, I am a great fan of it. But one has to understand the rules by which it runs, and its limitations. And its nothing that has made the object it cannot deal with literally unthinkable.

To quote Mr. Spock, one of my favourite ST quotes: "Logic is the beginning of all wisdom, but not its ending."

) Also the questions regarding everything from nothing have no meaning without first defining nothing, which is a nothing that we have no evidence for at all. As far as we can see, the closest thing to ultimate nothing we can observe is a complete vacuum, but this sort of nothing still has dimensions and can still contain energy as light passes through it, amongst other quantum processes that cause various quanta to appear and disappear seemingly at random, even occasionally forming into baryonic matter, which is either quickly disassembled by the inverse pressure of the vacuum or through a wave function suddenly teleports somewhere outside of the vacuum.

Sorry, no, you are wrong there. The nothingness referred to when saying "Big Bang and before things existed", and before even space-time existed, is the absence of things and the absence of all and anything. Even the absence of vacuum. A nothingness that is so total and complete in meaning and span of "nothing", that about this nothingness cannot even be said it existed. A double negation, if you want. It is impossible to attach qualities, features or descriptions to this, and it is even impossible to say what it is not , because dpoing so would result in efforts and temrs being part of the existing universe and space-time that we experience. Human mind just cannot embrace the total lack of any conception like this. Even the laws of maths as we know and understand them, mean nothing there anymore. Nothing=absence of anything, even the meaning of the words "absense", "of" and "anything". Not even calling nothingness a nothingness makes sense anymore. We do not talk of a physical vacuum - a vacuum actually would be something.

So this complete vacuum nothing certainly appears to be a something that other somethings can and do spontaneously spring from. Did ultimate nothing ever exist? if it did wouldn't that imply that nothing is actually a kind of something? will we ever create this ultimate nothing so we can test it? wouldn't that also define it as something? Oh no I've gone cross eyed...

Metaphysically, one maybe would say that the all-referring absence of anything means unlimited potential for realization of infinite things in infinite combinations, where nothing is, there is still room for everything becoming possible. But that is already thinkling - our thinking, and thus a thing of limited scale and tpyoliy: human brain's typology. Our linear thinking still must ask - and cannot avoid doing so! - why in such a nothingness as I explained anything should and could suddenly spring into existence at all.

All human thinking, reasoning, yearning, learning, researchging, trying, culminates int his simple question that I have understood to have become the unsolvable koan, the Zen riddle at the centre of my own life: Why? And I am perfectly aware that logical thinking and reason will not help me one bit in this, at best only let me understand the limited scope of these methods. That's what koans are there for.