tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4505812700967330296.post4577591338473744829..comments2023-10-30T11:46:43.284+00:00Comments on Musings of the Cosmic Calamari: Shrinking Gods And Narrowing GapsSpaceSquidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760939592584995876noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4505812700967330296.post-13215628748926711232008-11-20T13:48:00.000+00:002008-11-20T13:48:00.000+00:00I wasn't going to say anything, but since you've s...I wasn't going to say anything, but since you've subsequently asked me specifically: on the subject of sufficient 'explanation' of the Big Bang, it's still far from understood, but there are a lot of theories abound. Some involve<BR/>singularities, some don't, some involve other universes (before/after/alongside ours), some don't, some don't even require a "Big Bang" in the sense it's now typically used to describe, although the difference would likely be invisible to a layman.<BR/><BR/>In short, the main problem is that they're all hypotheses; they're as yet untested. Some of them are impossible to test based on current scientific principle, some just need us to build bigger particle accelerators a few decades/centuries from now, some are theoretically testable already but very difficult to analyse sufficiently accurately/obtain enough data. Lots of explanations, but no-one knows who's right.<BR/><BR/>However, there is one deeper problem, and that's what created the manifold/brane/hypersurface/field that the universe itself was created from. You can already see the problem: it leads to the same infinite regression as 'who created the creator' (or even 'if this is a simulation, so are the people who made it').<BR/><BR/>To the best of my knowledge (which is <I>very</I> limited at this level of quantum cosmology), no-one's made a significant attempt to go back a step further than what created the universe (yet); we have enough trouble just supposing (read: inventing) various fields and branes in order to explain all we can see rather than worrying about why they were there already. (There <I>are</I> some people with loose suggestions - not least science fiction writers - but nothing you would ever want to call a theory.) The current theories are too incomplete to do more than worry about which one is right, never mind what's behind it. In essence, I guess we're still too busy trying to figure out what 'god' is before we get to what created it; religious/philosophical thinking has a few millenia head start on science.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com