On Sat, 11 Jun 2016 09:17:24 -0600, mg <
no...@none.nl> wrote:
<El Castor wrote
<snip>
>As I understand it, physicists, or at least some of them, with their
>mathematical formulas consider it to be nothing. However, I don't
>think it would be called nothing by the dictionary definition.
>George Orwell, in his book "1984", once said, "It's a beautiful
>thing, the destruction of words.
People used to believe the planets moved because
angels were pushing them around. That worked for
a long time, but then Newton's gravity came along.
Then Einstein's General Relativity came along though
Newton's theory is still used because it does work
well enough to describe interactions between bodies
where the conditions are not too extreme, as they
are around black holes for example, but it's very
unusual to encounter black holes when one goes
shopping, and Newtonian calculations are much
easier to do.
If cavemen had to take into consideration all the
physical aspects of jumping across a stream, our
ancestors would all have been eaten by tigers
and we wouldn't be here. Sometimes you just
have to go with what's "good enough", as far as
you can see and as long as it serves you well.
>>
>>
>>As for the existence of a God, the universe
>>is almost certainly infinite in age and dimensions.
Wrong
>>The Big Bang was >>almost certainly not the
>>origin of the universe -- just the origin of
>>our tiny fly spec corner.
That fly-speck corner is "our universe".
>People like Rumple are fools to presume to
>>have all the answers.
I don't have all the answers, in fact I'm sure
that "Why is there something instead of nothing"
can ever be answered, no matter how much we
come to know, because understanding is not, and
can never be, an adequate tool to answer such
a question. Understanding can figure out how
one thing came from another, but existence
itself cannot be the consequence of anything
else, because that "anything else" would be
part of existence. Turtles, and all that.
The ancients felt that the world was supported
ultimately by a chain of turtles all standing on
each other's back, but they knew they couldn't
account for a "first" turtle. Even the ancients
understood the enigma of "existence" better
than El Castor.
When it comes to understanding "existence",
El Castor never made it out of kindergarten,
and apparently never could, although maybe
he became a skilled banker - that's a different
thing, and something I could never have been.
>>
>Even back in the days when I was a young kid, the scientists'
>definition of the universe didn't make sense to me. My comment used
>to be, "Okay, if that's the case, what happens if I go to the edge
>of the universe and leave one leg inside of it and put the other leg
>outside of it?". The answer I used to get, as I recall, was, "That's
>undefined and it's not a valid question".
>
That's 17th century stuff: "Here be
dragons" on the maps and all that.