Reply #57: If you can spare a moment away from the herd... [View All]

[Silent3]

Quoting Hoyle et al is very nice, but that's just an appeal to authority, that's not showing us that you know the physical laws you're tossing around very well or how to use them. Further, I'd love to see the supposed equations out of which spring forth the Ten Commandments or Noah's Ark. Are you offering up brilliant men with brilliant proofs, or just brilliant men rationalizing their own wishful thinking? It's not like being smart makes you immune to such things.

Many brilliant physicists are atheist or agnostic or, to the extent that the believe in and speak about "God", that God is a very abstract notion which can mean nothing more than the order they see in the universe itself, as opposed to some separate creating entity. What makes them wrong and Hoyle right? You can find plenty of refutation of Hoyle, for instance, here: Problems with the creationists' "it's so improbable" calculations

Let's look at conservation of mass/energy, which you seem to think is such a winner for your case. How would we state that law mathematically? Well, working within the scope of pretty limited text formatting, skipping some relativistic complications, and using E denote universal mass/energy...

Et = Enow, for all valid values of t.

This is to say, the total mass/energy at any valid time t equals the total mass/energy right now. One could simply say that Enow is an unchanging constant, but that's not an equation, and an equation helps demonstrate what you're overlooking.

What happens if you try to apply this to the very beginning of the universe? Let's call the very first moment in time 0 (zero). Then all values of t < 0 are invalid. After all, how can you calculate anything involving a time before the beginning of time?

The result is that you simply cannot apply this equation to questions of the origin of the universe. It only has meaning once there is a universe to talk about, and no meaning outside of that. Unless you can point me to some well-proven law about conservation of universes or conservation of entire flows of time, you haven't got anything here to go on.

On top all of this, toss in some relativistic complications with primordial singularities and quantum complications like trying to deal with universe smaller than a Planck length, or times intervals shorter than a Planck time, and you're totally out of luck trying to say that the law of conservation of mass/energy can tell you anything at all applicable to such circumstances as the beginning of the universe.

Something further for you to consider: What do you imagine constitutes "proof" for something like a conservation law? How are such things validated? Where does the justification come from for using our own infinitesimally small set of experimental measurements (compared to enormous conceivable set of possible measurements which could be done over the vastness of all space and time) and saying that we can extrapolate those things universally? Wouldn't you imagine those recommending such extrapolations might consider that there are reasonable limits to such extrapolations, and that a little ol' thing like The Beginning of Everything might be among those reasonable limits?

As I said before, you're treating physical laws like a lawyer who wants to nail someone on a technicality ("You agreed to pay for all travel expenses. You never specifically ruled out my client buying a private jet to do his travel, now did you?") rather than like a physicists.