Spirituality
24 Jul 20
14 Sep 20
@secondson saidAre you saying that Genesis 1 is "beyond human comprehension"?
Forgive my intrusion in this discussion with my own feeble minded thoughts. After reading this thread thus far I would think to ask myself this question.
How might I understand how "something" exists in contrast to the existence of "nothing" when I am devoid of the knowledge and understanding of how even "nothing" did not exist before "something" did?
In my opinion th ...[text shortened]... that I am ignorant, at which point I will disengage and leave you all to fluff it out on your own. 🙂
Because it was clearly written for the non-scientific mind of 3500 years ago.
It was written to be in line with human comprehension *of that time*.
"Something out of nothing" was a well-known concept. Yesterday the sky was clear, today rain falls from the sky. An animal dies in a field, tomorrow it is covered in maggots. Today, we know these causes, but then, it was "something out of nothing".
14 Sep 20
@suzianne saidIt’s an interesting point you raise.
"Something out of nothing" was a well-known concept. Yesterday the sky was clear, today rain falls from the sky. An animal dies in a field, tomorrow it is covered in maggots. Today, we know these causes, but then, it was "something out of nothing".
One thing for Christians to consider (which I’ve raised in here in the last year) is the infallibility of scripture, the actually breadth and depth of the inspired nature of it.
The topic is a sacred cow and most here don’t want to even touch it for fear of death (so it seems to me), but it is a legitimate question nonetheless.
15 Sep 20
@soothfast saidOr manipulate E = mc²
I shall now produce something out of nothing.
Is everyone ready?
Here it goes:
0 = -1 + 1
16 Sep 20
@soothfast saidA wave propagates and carries energy, unless it's a standing wave, so if there's two standing waves on a guitar string, say, and they're out of phase with each other by 180° then that will cancel out, but in the case of waves propagating from a source it's not so clear to me. If one imagines a couple of sources at some point and if one emits a wave then it propagates through whatever medium we've got and transmits energy by displacing the medium. Suppose the other source emits sound (or whatever) 180° out of phase with it, then if they both start emitting at once at the same frequency and amplitude no energy will propagate from the combined non-source. There's no displacement of the medium and so I think we can safely say that we can distinguish between something and nothing in this case.
I've been thinking. Always perilous.
Commence with the logic of noise-cancelling headphones: an unwanted ambient sound of a certain frequency, such as the drone of a jet engine, can be cancelled out by emitting in equal measure a new sound of the same frequency yet 180 degrees out of phase with the unwanted sound. Each crest of the unwanted sound wave overlaps a troug ...[text shortened]... ficance itself.
What is there then? What is reality? Just change and contrast. Yin and yang...
Of course, in practice we cannot have two sources at one point, the closest we can manage is either to have two small loudspeakers near each other, in which case what we'll actually see is some sort of interference pattern, or a single loudspeaker with two signals being fed into it in which case the two signals will cancel out and the material the loudspeaker is made of won't vibrate.
So, I don't think your physics introduction really works, although I don't mind the conclusion. In the modern picture of physics the vacuum is just the lowest energy state. So, in Dirac's picture, there's a dense sea of negative energy electrons, when one interacts with a gamma ray with more energy than the mass gap it's knocked into a positive energy state and the resulting hole in the negative energy sea is seen as a positron. This seems similar to the picture you're presenting in the second half of your OP.
19 Sep 20
@Ghost-of-a-Duke
So infinite regresses? No beginning for the universe? There are problems with this however as it brings about absurdities and impossibilities as the infinite can't be traversed.
Also why don't things just pop into existence right now out of nothing ? They don't. People use the argument that virtual particles just pop into and out of existence but the very vaccum itself is teaming with energy so to these particles it's a misconception to say they pop into existence out of absolutely nothing.
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@menace71 saidIs God infinite? Does His existence throw up the same absurdities and impossibilities?
@Ghost-of-a-Duke
So infinite regresses? No beginning for the universe? There are problems with this however as it brings about absurdities and impossibilities as the infinite can't be traversed.
Please explain the difference.
05 Oct 20
@menace71 saidIt is possible for a system to be finite yet unbounded. Start with the surface of a sphere, for instance, and let loose your imagination...
@Ghost-of-a-Duke
So infinite regresses? No beginning for the universe? There are problems with this however as it brings about absurdities and impossibilities as the infinite can't be traversed.