# The Big Bang never happened?



## RJM Corbet (Jun 6, 2020)

Has anyone heard of this guy? Is he valid? 38 min


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 6, 2020)

The accepted explanation for the preponderance of matter over antimatter in the universe has always worried me: that because we live in a matter universe therefore the BB must have produced more matter than antimatter.

Inflation too, of course.


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 6, 2020)

Part two. More on the channel:


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## Ori Vandewalle (Jun 6, 2020)

(Wow this ended up much longer than I expected.)

Never heard of this guy and only skimmed the first video, but I see he's a plasma universe guy. In general, proponents of the plasma universe hypothesis are not held in high regard in the cosmology community. They tend to see everything through that one lens (plasma physics) to the exclusion of all else.

But regarding his claim that the Big Bang model has made incorrect predictions, I want to push back against this conception of the scientific method. Thanks in large part to the work of Karl Popper, the popular idea of science is as something that proceeds by falsification. Make a hypothesis, test it against the real world, throw out the hypothesis if the data refute it, come up with another one. But this really isn't the way that science has _progressed_ historically speaking, and most philosophers of science today take a broader view than just simple Popperian falsificationism alone.

Important here, I think, is the idea that science is a powerful tool for providing explanations of natural phenomena. Now, any hypothesis that is flatly and completely contradicted by the data makes for a bad explanation of what's going on. But when you look at scientific theories held up as being good, you won't see any that are completely consistent with the data as we know it. The problem is that (1) most scientific theories are only valid under certain parameters, and (2) we cannot interrogate the natural world directly but must interpret results through experiment.

Winding back to the point... in 1915 Einstein replaced Newtonian gravity with general relativity. Newton's theory was "falsified" (it couldn't explain the anomalous perihelion precession of Mercury) and consequently discarded by physicists! Except not really. When engineers and scientists today send probes to the outer solar system with pinpoint accuracy, they don't do so by solving Einstein's field equations. They use good old fashioned F=GMm/r^2 and it works just fine, despite it being empirically incorrect. They can do so because Newton's gravity provides a good, useful explanation of what's happening in the weak-field limit, and this is more important than whether or not it is, in some sense, physically true.

GR is the theory upon which the Big Bang model is based. So far, when tested against reality, it has provided very powerful and useful explanations for a wide variety of phenomena, including time dilation of GPS satellites, gravitational redshift, gravitational waves, etc. One of the consequences of GR is that, if applied to the universe as a whole, it looks like universes can be either expanding or contracting, with stable being, well, unstable. And the observational evidence we have points overwhelmingly toward expansion over contraction, with the key part being the "recession" of distant galaxies. From that recession rate, you can predict the universe must have been smaller, denser, and hotter in the past, and if you throw in some thermo, out pops a cosmic microwave background of a specific temperature. It's there, of course.

Those results alone are enough to trust (not believe 100% or accept no matter what, but trust) the idea that GR and the Big Bang model are a good explanation of what we see. But what I mean by the "Big Bang model" is simply that the universe was smaller, denser, and hotter in the past and has since cooled and expanded. From there, you can dig into the physics and construct a more detailed model that looks at the consequences of this hypothesis, including Big Bang nucleosynthesis, matter content, density, etc. But as you incorporate more elements, all of this starts to get more complicated, such that you may run into areas where the basic model loses some validity or you have to scrutinize the data you collect extremely carefully to make sure you're really seeing what's out there. And yeah, that means sometimes the data and the theory will not be completely consistent. But you shouldn't take this as a kind of "gotcha haha you're falsified!" moment, but as evidence that our explanation, useful though it may be, is incomplete.

I realize that as a specific critique of this guy's video and ideas, this might not be a wholly satisfying answer. If you have questions about particular pieces of evidence for or against the big bang, I can probably give an explanation of the standard answers given by cosmologists today.


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## Brian G Turner (Jun 6, 2020)

A quick search on Wikipedia suggests that his ideas are not mainstream. 

However, my own reading suggests that while the broad framework of the Big Bang model is broadly accepted in the mainstream, there are a ton of variations in the details and a lot of arguments about the differences.


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 6, 2020)

Ori Vandewalle said:


> (Wow this ended up much longer than I expected.)
> 
> Never heard of this guy and only skimmed the first video, but I see he's a plasma universe guy. In general, proponents of the plasma universe hypothesis are not held in high regard in the cosmology community. They tend to see everything through that one lens (plasma physics) to the exclusion of all else.
> 
> ...


Ok. Thank you for the response. In effect this is 'plasma universe' theory, then? Thank you. I just needed some educated input.

Welcome to Chrons, by the way


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 6, 2020)

Brian G Turner said:


> A quick search on Wikipedia suggests that his ideas are not mainstream.
> 
> However, my own reading suggests that while the broad framework of the Big Bang model is broadly accepted in the mainstream, there are a ton of variations in the details and a lot of arguments about the differences.


Thanks Brian


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## Ori Vandewalle (Jun 6, 2020)

RJM Corbet said:


> Welcome to Chrons, by the way



Thanks! I've been trying to get back into writing recently and went looking for a writing community. Unfortunately sometimes I can't stop myself from over-explaining things...


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## mosaix (Jun 6, 2020)

Interesting article in this week’s New Scientist by the Nobel Prize winning Jim Peebles. 

It’s clear, concise and supports the Big Bang theory. 









						Why the universe I invented is right – but still not the final answer
					

Nobel prizewinner Jim Peebles introduced dark matter and dark energy into our standard model of the cosmos – but that is only an approximation to a deeper truth, he says.




					www.newscientist.com
				




You have to be a subscriber to read the full article but it’s pretty convincing.


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 6, 2020)

Ori Vandewalle said:


> sometimes I can't stop myself from over-explaining things...


Oh no, I did not pick that up at all



mosaix said:


> Interesting article in this week’s New Scientist by the Nobel Prize winning Jim Peebles.
> 
> It’s clear, concise and supports the Big Bang theory.
> 
> ...


Ok. Thanks. But I'm not a subscriber..


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## mosaix (Jun 6, 2020)

RJM Corbet said:


> Oh no, I did not pick that up at all
> 
> 
> Ok. Thanks. But I'm not a subscriber..



I get the weekly magazine so rarely use their website.  If I can remember my password I’ll try and post the relevant bit here.


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 7, 2020)

mosaix said:


> I get the weekly magazine so rarely use their website.  If I can remember my password I’ll try and post the relevant bit here.


Thanks mosaix


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## BigBadBob141 (Jun 9, 2020)

If there was no Big Bang how do you explain cosmic background radiation?
Always liked the steady-state myself, not looking forwards to the Big Crunch or being the last galaxy left in the observable universe!


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## Astro Pen (Jun 9, 2020)

I have never been convinced about  inflation. They might as well  have proposed that 'it was magic'  as present that ridiculous FTL 'solution' to paper over the gaps.
As for 'big crunch', will there be an FTL contraction phase then?  Or is the supposed process assymetric?

Note for @dannymcg  Here, no doubt,  comes the "The question has no meaning" thing


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## Ori Vandewalle (Jun 10, 2020)

I don't think people should be _convinced_ by inflation because at present it's a very loosely defined idea and (depending on who you talk to) it's not clear what problems it's actually solving. But I don't think it's magic, and it's not really FTL in a way that causes issues in relativity.


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## Mark Turnbull (Jun 14, 2020)

I think that there are so many scientific facts through history that have been disproved, that it's hard to accept anything as an absolute truth, especially something like the big bang that happened so long ago. And our understanding of science is only based on our understanding of reality which isn't complete.


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 14, 2020)

Inflation is the event horizon of the BB singularity?


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## ginny (Jun 14, 2020)

Here's his wiki








						Eric Lerner - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org
				




That much said...


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## Ori Vandewalle (Jun 15, 2020)

RJM Corbet said:


> Inflation is the event horizon of the BB singularity?



I think there's currently not great evidence that the universe was ever in a state that could be described as a singularity. If you trace the evolution of the universe back far enough, you get to high enough temperatures and densities and small enough regions of space that our current physical models break down and you need a theory of quantum gravity to explain what's going on, which we don't have.

This is also true of the singularities in black holes. A singularity is a mathematical error that represents where a theory stops working. With quantum gravity, it's likely we'll see some other physical explanation for what's in the middle of a black hole but no singularity.

Event horizons are described perfectly well by general relativity, however. Thing is, an event horizon implies the existence of something outside the horizon, and if the universe is all of spacetime, there's no outside for which any part of the universe could serve as an event horizon.

On top of that, if something like inflation occurred, it's possible the universe never got so small and hot as to require radically new physics like quantum gravity (instead you need new physics to explain inflation). Best evidence from the CMB seems to line up with the universe never having been in that way too small state, which supports the idea of inflation, but I'd say we still don't really have a good handle on that period. I wouldn't be surprised if we see major revisions to that aspect of the theory eventually.


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 15, 2020)

Ori Vandewalle said:


> A singularity is a mathematical error that represents where a theory stops working


Well, not an error but a limit, as far as I understand?

There was a recent discussion in this thread:

Does 'Stuff' Ever Disappear? From The Universe?

Check out the enlightening post by @Venusian Broon:



Venusian Broon said:


> Just because our calculations from an incomplete theory that we know is not a full description of the universe, goes to infinity at a point, doesn't mean that real stuff does the same. But I'd rather interpret the singularity as a breakdown of our understanding - it's as far as these mathematics can take us. Divide by zero is not calculable. It has no meaning.
> 
> I'd be willing to be bet that a real 'singularity' is in a new phase of matter or more probably a new phase of space-time, or whatever fundamental 'thing' that makes up the building blocks of the universe, that allows the black hole object to exist in some stasis that is not infinite. Until Hawking radiation, as @Laughingbuddha mentioned, evaporates it.
> 
> ...


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## Ori Vandewalle (Jun 15, 2020)

Yeah, error is not quite the best term. I meant it in the sense of "calculator error" the same way Venusian Broon talked about division by zero not being calculable.


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 15, 2020)

Ori Vandewalle said:


> Yeah, error is not quite the best term. I meant it in the sense of "calculator error"


Sure. Understood. Thank you.
This is interesting:


Ori Vandewalle said:


> ... an event horizon implies the existence of something outside the horizon, and if the universe is all of spacetime, there's no outside for which any part of the universe could serve as an event horizon.


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## Astro Pen (Jun 15, 2020)

Whilst we are on this I will mention that zero isn't a 'number' and never was. It is a mathematical  'sign or symbol' meaning "nothing at this power"


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## Ori Vandewalle (Jun 15, 2020)

RJM Corbet said:


> This is interesting:



Yeah. The math of a black hole describes what happens to spacetime outside some chunk of mass. As far as that math is concerned, the event horizon isn't anything special. Spacetime on one side and spacetime on the other look pretty identical, and there's nothing in the math that establishes any kind of physical border or barrier. The difference is merely that for particles inside the event horizon, their future is confined to being inside that horizon.



Astro Pen said:


> Whilst we are on this I will mention that zero isn't a 'number' and never was. It is a mathematical  'sign or symbol' meaning "nothing at this power"



Eh, I think what counts as a number is up to us. But according to set theory, the logic that underlies modern mathematics, 0 is the cardinality of the empty set, and that's basically the same kind of definition all the natural numbers have.


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## Astro Pen (Jun 15, 2020)

They reckon the James Webb will be able to see back to the first 100 million years of the observable universe. Which is kind of interesting because the implication is that if we could see back  another 100 million we could see the singularity - all around us.  Which looks like something of a paradox to me.


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## Ori Vandewalle (Jun 15, 2020)

JWST will be looking back in infrared, which should let it see some of the very first stars. If it ever launches, it's gonna be awesome.

We can already see further back, though, to about 400,000 years after the the big bang, by looking at the CMB. But that's radio/microwave. Going back even further still is problematic because light gets progressively fainter and more redshifted, and because the CMB is opaque to a wide swath of interesting wavelengths.


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 15, 2020)

Well


Astro Pen said:


> Whilst we are on this I will mention that zero isn't a 'number' and never was. It is a mathematical  'sign or symbol' meaning "nothing at this power"





Ori Vandewalle said:


> ...Eh, I think what counts as a number is up to us. But according to set theory, the logic that underlies modern mathematics, 0 is the cardinality of the empty set, and that's basically the same kind of definition all the natural numbers have.



Well, this is an issue where media celebrity scientists talk about 'a universe from nothing' -- uh uh -- that is a universe from _something._  'Nothing' has no properties: it is not a void or an empty place -- because that is _space_ -- nothing is not the opposite of 'something' -- nothing is not an emptiness -- _nothing_ just is not, never was, and never will be?

Quantum vacume peturbations are space/time events. The vacume is not 'nothingness'?

Nothing is not zero, because zero can be written down and conceptualised. Nothing has no properties, not even zero? Nothing can ever come from nothing because nothing is non-existent? It just isn't there.

I don't find this so hard to understand as some people seem to have a problem with?

,


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## Ori Vandewalle (Jun 15, 2020)

If you want to learn about nothing, talk to philosophers:






 

(Actually an interesting book.)


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 15, 2020)

Ori Vandewalle said:


> If you want to learn about nothing, talk to philosophers:
> 
> View attachment 65421
> 
> ...


IMO: There is nothing to be learned about or from nothing. Nothing is not the absence of something. It is not a hole in 'something' -- a hole is a hole. A hole exists in space/time. As a part of spacetime.

If you're writing about nothing, you are writing about something -- or about the alternative of 'something' -- but the alternative of 'something' is 'something else'  because nothing can be said about nothing?



ginny said:


> Here's his wiki
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Thank you


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## Astro Pen (Jun 21, 2020)

Dilbert Comic Strip on March 01, 1999
					

Dilbert and dogbert walk outside.  Dilbert says, "...And we know mass creates gravity because dense planets have more gravity."   They stop, Dilbert sits on a rock.  Dogbert says, "How do we know which planets are more dense?"  Dilbert says, "They have more gravity."   Dogbert says, "That's...




					dilbert.com


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 21, 2020)

And nothing continues to have no properties, regardless of desperate attempts?


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## Stephen Palmer (Jun 22, 2020)

_A Universe From Nothing_ - short review.


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## mosaix (Jun 23, 2020)

Astro Pen said:


> Whilst we are on this I will mention that zero isn't a 'number' and never was. It is a mathematical  'sign or symbol' meaning "nothing at this power"



Surely, if zero wasn’t a number when you subtracted 1 from 1 you’d go straight to -1 instead of zero.


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## Astro Pen (Jun 23, 2020)

mosaix said:


> Surely, if zero wasn’t a number when you subtracted 1 from 1 you’d go straight to -1 instead of zero.



You'd go straight to the absence of a number or quantity. Which is represented by the sign  0
No beans is not a 'quantity' of beans, it's just no beans.


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## mosaix (Jun 23, 2020)

Astro Pen said:


> You'd go straight to the absence of a number or quantity. Which is represented by the sign  0
> Is the space between your words included in the alphabet? Nope.


But subtracting 1 from this ‘absence of a number’ suddenly produces another number. Which would, to me, seem to indicate that zero has all the properties of the numbers on either side of it.  

Additionally if zero wasn't a number then you’d have two consecutive odd numbers (1 and -1).


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 23, 2020)

Stephen Palmer said:


> _A Universe From Nothing_ - short review.


But Stephen, it is exactly this attempt by especially Lawrence Krauss to manipulate the meaning of 'nothing' that I have a problem with.

"Above all, his goal is to show how the universe could have appeared from nothing, and how that means a creator is unnecessary"

_Nothing_ does not exist. 'Nothing' is not another name for a void, or for emptiness, both of which exist.

Quantum virtual fluctuations do not originate from a state of 'nothingness' outside of spacetime/nature. They are spacetime events. Natural events. If _something_ is there, it came from something else? So the debate has to eventually concern what that 'something else' might be?

EDIT
That does not mean it has to be 'a creator' -- but it definitely indicates the existence of a state beyond nature?


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## Astro Pen (Jun 23, 2020)

mosaix said:


> But subtracting 1 from this ‘absence of a number’ suddenly produces another number. Which would, to me, seem to indicate that zero has all the properties of the numbers on either side of it.
> 
> Additionally if zero wasn't a number then you’d have two consecutive odd numbers (1 and -1).


That isn't subtracting from anything, it is "placing" -1 on the table. Yes you have 2 odd numbers because the zero point acts as a mirror reflecting  a sequence, so obviously the reflected sequence starts with -1 which must be odd.


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## Ambrose (Jun 23, 2020)

I have nothing to add to the discussion, but it brought back a memory.

More than ten years ago I was trying to explain the Big Bang to my grandson and used the illustration of the change of pitch as a fire-engine approaches and then recedes.  Shortly after he sent me a text which said: 'So that's why some people appear bright, until they start to speak?'  I forget how I replied.


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## Astro Pen (Jun 23, 2020)

ps. Being as this zero thing is getting circular . I will drop out. I said what I believe, and that is how I see it. Since everyone else adheres to the quantity notion rather than the placeholder concept, it is  pretty pointless repeating my apparently eccentric position.
I think todays Dilbert kind of swung it for me LoL








						How To Identify Good Ideas
					

dilbert: i can't tell the difference between good ideas and bad ones. there are smart people on both sides of every idea. what rational process do you use to determine who is right? wally: i label people who disagree with me "idiots" and call it a day.




					dilbert.com


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## Ori Vandewalle (Jun 23, 2020)

Astro Pen said:


> No beans is not a 'quantity' of beans, it's just no beans.



How many beans is _i_ beans?

Edit: Whoops, didn't see latest post. Fair enough.


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## tegeus-Cromis (Jun 23, 2020)

0 is a point on the number line. It is a potential result for numerical calculations. A potential value for a numerical variable. All that makes it a number.


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## tegeus-Cromis (Jun 23, 2020)

I read _A Universe from Nothing _a few years ago, and found it a pretty terrible book: philosophically unsound, and not proving what it claims to prove. Here is a review of it that discusses many of its flaws: On the Origin of Everything
And a piece on it at Scientific American: Is Lawrence Krauss a Physicist, or Just a Bad Philosopher?


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## Stephen Palmer (Jun 23, 2020)

RJM Corbet said:


> But Stephen, it is exactly this attempt by especially Lawrence Krauss to manipulate the meaning of 'nothing' that I have a problem with.
> 
> "Above all, his goal is to show how the universe could have appeared from nothing, and how that means a creator is unnecessary"
> 
> ...


For once, it wasn't the atheist angle which interested and enthused me, it was his intellectual curiosity.
I accept that physics is not the same as philosophy. I did quantum mechanics in my physics degree, that's how I know!


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 23, 2020)

Stephen Palmer said:


> For once, it wasn't the atheist angle which interested and enthused me, it was his intellectual curiosity.
> I accept that physics is not the same as philosophy. I did quantum mechanics in my physics degree, that's how I know!


Fair enough. But where a scientist uses the word _nothing_ (no thing) as the origin of _everything_, is he using the word differently to the common understanding?

Of course that is not a wrong thing to do, because words often do have different, or more precise,  meanings in science and law than in common speech.

But what is the 'nihilo' used in the term universe ex-nihilo? _Something_ can't be added to or taken away from nothing. Nothing is just nothing? Nothing can't give origin to nature; nothing isn't a quantum vacume -- nothing just doesn't exist?

As soon as _nothing_ is credited with any qualities or abilities -- including the ability to act as an origin for nature -- it stops being 'nothing' and instead becomes 'something outside nature that we don't understand'?


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## Matteo (Jun 23, 2020)

So Shakespeare was right?
_
Nothing will come of nothing._

I think he was referring to a point of cordeliality.  And went on to say (if memory serves me well after 33 years) _Mend your space a little lest it mar your physics._


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 23, 2020)

Matteo said:


> So Shakespeare was right?
> 
> _Nothing will come of nothing._
> 
> I think he was referring to a point of cordeliality.  And went on to say (if memory serves me well after 33 years) _Mend your space a little lest it mar your physics._




How, how, Cordelia? Mend your speech a little, lest you may mar your fortunes.
 -- King Lear


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## mosaix (Jun 23, 2020)

Astro Pen said:


> ps. Being as this zero thing is getting circular . I will drop out. I said what I believe, and that is how I see it. Since everyone else adheres to the quantity notion rather than the placeholder concept, it is  pretty pointless repeating my apparently eccentric position.
> I think todays Dilbert kind of swung it for me LoL
> 
> 
> ...



It was an interesting discussion A.P.


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## mosaix (Jun 23, 2020)

RJM Corbet said:


> Fair enough. But where a scientist uses the word _nothing_ (no thing) as the origin of _everything_, is he using the word differently to the common understanding?
> 
> Of course that is not a wrong thing to do, because words often do have different, or more precise,  meanings in science and law than in common speech.
> 
> ...



It’s an interesting point RJM.  Some computer languages have the concept of a field having a NULL value. ie the field has never contained a value - not space, not zero, not anything. 

Now, interestingly, if you compare a NULL field to a given value the result is not as, in my innocence, I expected ‘unequal’ but ‘undetermined’. 

This, to say the least, can be a real pain.


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## Brian G Turner (Jun 23, 2020)

I've got a book on my shelves called _The Nothing That Is_ by Robert Kaplan. I've not yet read it, but I suspect it's very pertinent to this discussion.


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 23, 2020)

mosaix said:


> field having a NULL value. ie the field has never contained a value - not space, not zero, not anything.


Interesting  

But it is nevertheless a field? A NULL field, sure. But it is a field? It has the potential? A field is a field?

I can say 'John's not here' -- but that means John exists as absent? I can't say: Someone who isn't called anyone, who never existed and never will exist -- isn't here?'

Well, I can say it ... but it's meaningless?


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## RJM Corbet (Jun 23, 2020)

tegeus-Cromis said:


> I read _A Universe from Nothing _a few years ago, and found it a pretty terrible book: philosophically unsound, and not proving what it claims to prove. Here is a review of it that discusses many of its flaws: On the Origin of Everything
> And a piece on it at Scientific American: Is Lawrence Krauss a Physicist, or Just a Bad Philosopher?


Thank you. Valuable observations, imo ...

There cannot be degrees  or properties of what does not exist?


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## ginny (Jun 23, 2020)

Much ado about nothing.


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## tegeus-Cromis (Jun 23, 2020)

Matteo said:


> And went on to say (if memory serves me well after 33 years) _Mend your space a little lest it mar your physics._


So, basically, "Free your mind and your ass will follow."


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