On Sat, Feb 1, 2025 at 9:24 PM Alan Grayson <agrayson2...@gmail.com> wrote:
*> It could be a 4D surface which is approximately spherical, and spatially finite without a boundary (approximately spherical because the Cosmological Red Shift is not exactly uniform in all directions). AG* *Our 3D space could be embedded in 4D space but that complication is not necessary to explain observations, it is not necessary to jump out of 3D space to tell that it is curved. Also, if 3D space is embedded on the surface of a 4D sphere then the size of that finite sphere needs to be specified, that makes the starting conditions even more complicated. * *> How could Nothingness, which presumably has no properties, be unstable? > AG* *First of all it's important how you define "nothingness". If your question is "**how did some THING that totally lacks the capacity to become something rather than nothing?**" then no theory can answer the question, and that includes the God theory, because the *very *question contains a self-contradiction. However if you give a more reasonable definition to "nothingness", such as infinite unbounded homogeneity, then we might be able to find an answer*,* and the physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote an entire book trying to do just that, it's called "**A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing**" and I highly recommend it. In it he shows that if something is as empty as it possible to be there could still be very rare occasions where bubbles of space-time are produced from nothing. Krauss also gave a talk about this to the Richard Dawkins foundation, the most relevant part comes about 30 minutes in:* *'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo>* *John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* nfu > > O > > On Saturday, February 1, 2025 at 5:57:43 AM UTC-7 John Clark wrote: > > On Fri, Jan 31, 2025 at 11:12 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote: > > *> If the universe is spatially infinite, it must have begun as spatially > infinite* > > > *Yes.* > > *> But I have a problem with such an initial condition since it seems to > contradict the BB by adding an additional singularity (to infinite density > at T=0). * > > > *Infinity + infinity = an Infiniti of equal cardinality to the previous > two. And an initial condition in which you don't have to specify a > boundary, which would be the case if we're dealing with infinite space, is > simpler than an initial condition in which you do have to specify a > boundary, which would be the case if we're dealing with finite space. > That's why it's far easier to calculate the gravitational field around a > dense rod that is infinitely long than a rod that is only finitely long, > and the same thing is true of calculating the electrical field around a > charged rod, or a magnetic field around a current carrying wire. In all > these cases infinite things are much easier to deal with than finite > things. * > > *As to the question why there is something rather than nothing, it's > beginning to look like the answer MIGHT be because the most fundamental > laws of physics dictate that nothingness, that is to say infinite unbounded > homogeneity, is unstable.* > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0UyZfAdQngisJpdd1wL9WkBAMr%3DTJj28eUpL6H8B873Q%40mail.gmail.com.
