The Void of nothing

Originally posted by knightmeister
I think the idea that anything "can bring itself into existence" completely illogical. It would have to exist first before it could bring itself into existence. (???) It's a rhetorical question , I'm taking the XXXXX

But we know for a fact that particles are popping in and out of existence all the time. Do they exist first? No. Or are you saying that that is only possible within those non-existent dimensions?

Originally posted by twhitehead
I think the problem is I come from a mathematics background where logic does not have 'less' or 'more' values. A proof is either valid or not. A theorem is either proven or not.
A much better word in this case it parsimony which scottishinnz likes to use.
Whatever the case, if you are using logic at all you must agree that your conclusion that finite ti ...[text shortened]... am saying is that you have so far given no evidence at all that such a premise is valid.

if you are using logic at all you must agree that your conclusion that finite time implies the existence of nothing 'before' the universe (and hence S from N), is only a valid conclusion if your premise that such a thing as 'before' the universe exists is a valid premise. WHITEY

You think that I would believe that nothingness would "exist" and if it did exist exists within "time" . That would be completely ridiculous. Non-existence doesn't exist - it "non-exists".

I would use your very own reasoning to support my premise. You say that there is maybe no such thing as "before"/"outside" the universe. If there isn't then nothing can exist before/outside the universe because there is no before/outside for nothing to exist in. However , since the the concept of existence does not apply to nothing (because if nothing existed it wouldn't be nothing) it's better to say that nothingness NON-existed , which of course would be right if there is no before or outside.

What you are really doing is saying that there is nothing that we can logically infer with any likelihood about these things at all. If you are saying this then I wonder on what logic you are basing your inference. ?

Even a negative inference is still an inference.

Originally posted by twhitehead
But we know for a fact that particles are popping in and out of existence all the time. Do they exist first? No. Or are you saying that that is only possible within those non-existent dimensions?

We do not know this for a fact . We just know that we don't know where they are before they appear. It's a subtle but huge difference and it's a massive leap of faith given that we have yet to unravell things like dark matter , or the mysteries of black holes.

This is my problem with modern physics. It takes a physical experiment and makes philosophy out of it without rigorous thinking.
How do you prove the particles are "popping out of existence" ? Have they been observed popping into a non-existent place? How are you sure that they are not emerging from some as yet unknown phenomena ?

Waht you really mean is that particles have been oberved to appear and disappear apparently out of nowhere and nothing in a vaccuum of nothing. But as we know , a true absolute vaccuum is a physical and philosophical impossibility because it can be penetrated by gamma rays and such like. Great physics , woolly philosophy.

Originally posted by knightmeister
This is my problem with modern physics. It takes a physical experiment and makes philosophy out of it without rigorous thinking.
How do you prove the particles are "popping out of existence" ? Have they been observed popping into a non-existent place? How are you sure that they are not emerging from some as yet unknown phenomena ?

I agree that it is not a well understood phenomena and neither is any physics at the quantum level. However that simply makes your statements about it being 'logically impossible' even more hilarious.

What you really mean is that particles have been observed to appear and disappear apparently out of nowhere and nothing in a vacuum of nothing. But as we know, a true absolute vacuum is a physical and philosophical impossibility because it can be penetrated by gamma rays and such like. Great physics , woolly philosophy.
Why is a true vacuum a physical and philosophical impossibility? Do you have anything to back up that statement? What on earth do you mean by "because it can be penetrated by gamma rays and such like."
Are you saying that every point in space contains something. Even in the little spaces between protons in the nucleus of the atom? What something is that?
This is great new physics here if you have any evidence!

Originally posted by twhitehead
Are you saying that every point in space contains something. Even in the little spaces between protons in the nucleus of the atom? What something is that?

Right. It's called nothing, and it's from what we all originate. I've told you all
already how it works. Now, just accept my whimsical pseudo-poetry as science
and we can move on to more interesting things.

Originally posted by knightmeister
Doh! I agree entirely . Time is a dimension. I have spent hours arguing with agerg that you can't locate anything in the universe without refering to the dimension of time. However , just because I , like you, believe that time is a dimension doesn't mean I think it exists . Time is like length , it's a dimension, but can you tell me what length is m . Look up reification.

But did the matter and energy bring itself into existence ?

Doh! I agree entirely . Time is a dimension. I have spent hours arguing with agerg that you can't locate anything in the universe without refering to the dimension of time. However , just because I , like you, believe that time is a dimension doesn't mean I think it exists . Time is like length , it's a dimension, but can you tell me what length is made of (or time for that matter) ? When you are measuring a mountain then length is made of rock? Measure a car and it's made of metal?

Meh! the important part of my debate on that matter was to draw your attention to the fact that the 3 spacial dimensions we call the cartesian axes are homogeneous; these spacial dimensions + the time dimension/spiritual dimension are not! (this is why I challenge certain people's analogies when they try to describe how a being that exists outside our dimensions cannot be understood by us etc...(especially when such analogies also require that the subject be wholly imaginary...like 2D ants or talking circles...though this is not my main gripe))...whether one needs or does not need a point in time to locate something is irrelevant to what these dimensions describe.

Originally posted by stocken
Right. It's called nothing, and it's from what we all originate. I've told you all
already how it works. Now, just accept my whimsical pseudo-poetry as science
and we can move on to more interesting things.

LOL! Oh this particular post is very funny, you are killing me man!

Originally posted by knightmeister
Ask yourself is it the zero that makes the elephants not exist or is it just an absence of elephants that is defined as "zero elephants".

If I said there goes a troop of elephants , does this thing called a "troop" exist? If I take out the troop does it really make a difference? If I take out the elephants it certainly does.

So , these things yo a zero weigh? If I set fire to length would it burn? Can I bump into time and hurt myself?

The point is that everything that exists, must exist within 4 dimensional space, and must have all those dimensions. If something exists for zero seconds, does it exist? Does a line with a length of 0cm (or metres or kilometres, or whatever) exist? No! Existing for an amount of time is a pre-requisite for existing, as is possessing mass-energy. You seem to want to talk about [edit; causality] independent of time, but that's not feasible.

Time exists only as a dimension of the universe, and cannot be used to describe things happening within a singularity. Thus, all your talk of "what caused the big bang" is utterly ludicrous.

Oh, and length is what you measure. Objects have length, and width, and depth and duration. A metre is a arbitrary unit of length, but it isn't length per se.

Originally posted by knightmeister
So , these things you call dimensions that you think exist as real , if you looked inside a "dimension" would you find matter, energy , electrical charges, quantum particles?

You repeatedly mention the Big bang, does this mean you accept that it took place? Do you accept that the universe is expanding? Do you know that the expansion of the universe is not caused by matter / energy etc moving away from each other but rather the very fabric of space/time expanding(spacial dimensions) . So if these dimensions do not exist as you claim, then how can they be expanding?

Originally posted by twhitehead
I agree that it is not a well understood phenomena and neither is any physics at the quantum level. However that simply makes your statements about it being 'logically impossible' even more hilarious.

[b]What you really mean is that particles have been observed to appear and disappear apparently out of nowhere and nothing in a vacuum of nothing. But as the atom? What something is that?
This is great new physics here if you have any evidence!

Why is a true vacuum a physical and philosophical impossibility? Do you have anything to back up that statement? What on earth do you mean by "because it can be penetrated by gamma rays and such like." TWHITEHEAD

Did you not read this the first time???

Can there be space independent of things? How can something come from nothing? Why something rather than nothing? Genz poses these questions and dozens more. Overall--and especially during the first half of the book--the discussion is more philosophical than scientific. "The Philosophy and Science of Empty Space" would have been a more accurate subtitle.
The reader is taken through a near complete history of what people have thought about the nature of space and the nature of 'nothingness'. This includes pre-Platoian times, Plato, Aristotle, the Scholastic philosophers, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, and the modern scientists who have left us with experimental evidence that we are really dealing with a quantum mechanical vacuum filled with fluctuations. Although the history of these ideas is important and frequently interesting Genz can go beyond what many people are expecting or wanting to read. Chapter 2, for instance, rambles for much of its 64 pages.

The point Genz hammers home through this history lesson is that vacuums were once thought to be impossible, then thought to be probable, and are just now (during the past hundred years of experimentation and observation) known to be impossible. He states on page 207 that "there is no such thing as absolutely empty space. All space contains fluctuating fields and particles. Even in the emptiest space that the laws of nature permit, there are energy levels about which the energies of the fields and particles fluctuate; and these energy levels are never sharply defined." Essentially, as space is created it is given some properties of 'non-emptiness'.

http://www.2think.org/nothingness.shtml

Ah, for the good old days when a vacuum meant nothing. That's changed for good. There's reason to believe that the universe's vast tracts of emptiness seethe with unimaginable power.

In a way, it all starts with the ancient Greeks, who hated the notion of a vacuum. Their argument was semantic, stemming from their love of logic. How could there be a vacuum, they reasoned, when "be" and "vacuum" are contradictory? If a vacuum is nothingness - well, there can't BE nothing.

Those silly Greeks, we all thought back in the '60s when I first studied physics in college. Of course you can create a vacuum: Just evacuate all the air out of a bell jar, and voila. Our laboratory vacuums still had a few molecules, but so what? That hardly mattered.

It turns out that the Greeks were right. First, no matter how good the vacuum, its space is still penetrated by some infrared heat and microwaves from the vacuum's walls and environment. Since energy and mass are fundamentally the same, those waves zipping through space mean that you can't ever have a true vacuum.

But that's small potatoes compared to this next item. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says that a vacuum shouldn't exist, and other theorists argued that the vacuum of space should be filled with a bizarre sort of quantum energy.

They were right, too. Much experimental evidence shows that "virtual particles" - things like electrons and antimatter positrons - snap, crackle and pop out of nothingness everywhere and all the time. Each particle typically exists for just a billionth of a trillionth of a second, then vanishes. If there's an energy field around, a subatomic particle can borrow some of that energy to remain in existence forever. Thus, things perpetually spring to life out of that quantum vacuum.

http://www.ulsterpublishing.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=355850

Originally posted by twhitehead
I agree that it is not a well understood phenomena and neither is any physics at the quantum level. However that simply makes your statements about it being 'logically impossible' even more hilarious.

[b]What you really mean is that particles have been observed to appear and disappear apparently out of nowhere and nothing in a vacuum of nothing. But as ...[text shortened]... the atom? What something is that?
This is great new physics here if you have any evidence!

Are you saying that every point in space contains something. Even in the little spaces between protons in the nucleus of the atom? What something is that?
This is great new physics here if you have any evidence! TWHITEHEAD

3 years old physics to be precise. Funny ol' thing this vaccuum of "nothingness" ...there's sems to be so much somethingness there! All you have to do is heat it up!

I can say I understand all the physics here but I understand enough to feel justified in being extremely suspicious of any something from nothing claims.


"To look deep into the fundamental structure of matter is to look billions of years back in time, to the moment when matter first blinked into being.
Recreating the conditions of that moment has long been an aim for physicists wanting to understand how the universe evolved from the cosmic fireball that existed a fraction of a second after the big bang. Now researchers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, have, almost certainly, finally recreated the moments after creation.

By colliding nuclei together at enormous speeds, RHIC experimenters were able to break down the structure of nuclear matter. This resulted, most experts agree, in the formation of a long-sought-after plasma that is believed to be the primal stuff of the cosmos, the state of matter at the beginning of time.

It turns out, though, that the nature of matter is inextricably tied to the vacuum in which it resides. And the RHIC experiments have thrown up some surprises. They seem to show that the vacuum is a richer and more complicated place than was previously imagined.

They suggest the boundary between something and nothing is more blurred than experts had predicted. The stuff made at RHIC is a plasma consisting of quarks and gluons, the most basic building blocks of everything we see around us.

Quarks combine in threes to form the protons and neutrons that comprise the nucleus of every atom. But while we can observe a single proton or neutron, we cannot observe a single quark. Quarks are perpetually confined to group living. In fact, the harder you try to pull quarks apart, the stronger the force between them becomes. This is part of the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which describes how the force between the quarks is carried by the massless gluons.

In QCD, it is the vacuum that imprisons the quarks. While it may sound like a barren place, the vacuum of QCD is a complex, dynamic arena. It writhes with virtual particles that appear in pairs, then annihilate and disappear again. It is haunted by strange creatures of various kinds, too, topologically complex knots and twists that are relatives of wormholes, places where space turns in on itself and seems treacherous.

These knots and twists carve out paths for the gluons to travel along, thereby keeping the quarks together. These strange ideas have credence because of the success of QCD in predicting the reactions of fundamental particles. The only way to unglue quarks is to "melt" the vacuum between them. But the vacuum doesn't give in easily.

To raze its jagged terrain requires enormous amounts of concentrated energy, found only in powerful nuclear collisions, or the fireball at the earliest moments of time. Melting the vacuum is like returning to the state of the universe at the time it first existed."

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/physics-04zg.html

Originally posted by twhitehead
You repeatedly mention the Big bang, does this mean you accept that it took place? Do you accept that the universe is expanding? Do you know that the expansion of the universe is not caused by matter / energy etc moving away from each other but rather the very fabric of space/time expanding(spacial dimensions) . So if these dimensions do not exist as you claim, then how can they be expanding?

Of course I accept the big bang idea and the idea that the universe is expanding , however the weak link in your argument is that what you call matter and energy is only at our current level of understanding. The fabric of space time has to be made of something otherwise it can't exist. There are still many possibly deeper levels of matter and energy to discover. Once we find out what matter the fabric of space is made of then we will define it in terms of matter . It will be the matter that exists not the dimensions although we will still describe it as dimesnional space. Where we differ is that you see matter and energy as somehow suspended or supported on some kind of dimensional reality , whereas I see only matter and stuff and the dimensional terms we use to describe it. It's as if you are saying that there is the existence of matter and energy and alongside it there is also the existence of dimensions.This to me is a schism. To me it's all matter and energy. It's all made of "stuff". All of it. And there is still lots about matter we still don't know. To me there is no schism between dimensions and matter. If a piece of wood a metre long expands to 2 metres in one way we can say that that the metre has expanded , but if we started saying that the "fabric" of the metre had expanded this would be existentially incorrect , only the wood can expand.

The universe exists and it's made of something, we describe the motion and expansion of this something as spatial/time dimensions but the description can never supercede the reality. Unless you think that matter is made of dimensions rather than the other way round?

Look at what physics does when it probes into the fundamental reality of existence. Does it probe deep into matter or deep into dimenions?

Originally posted by knightmeister
.there's sems to be so much somethingness there! All you have to do is heat it up!

Heat is energy, energy = mass.

So what you are in fact saying is that emptyness becomes not empty when you put something in it.....

Originally posted by scottishinnz
The point is that everything that exists, must exist within 4 dimensional space, and must have all those dimensions. If something exists for zero seconds, does it exist? Does a line with a length of 0cm (or metres or kilometres, or whatever) exist? No! Existing for an amount of time is a pre-requisite for existing, as is possessing mass-ener ...[text shortened]... pth and duration. A metre is a arbitrary unit of length, but it isn't length per se.

Oh, and length is what you measure. Objects have length, and width, and depth and duration. A metre is a arbitrary unit of length, but it isn't length per se.SCOTTY

WHAT TWADDLE! When have you ever seen anyone measure length? As if you could walk up to someone and say" Hi mate , what are you measuring with that ruler of yours ?" "Oh it's a bit of length I found the other day , I'm going to chop it up into equal pieces and share it with my friends" " Oh great , that's funny I found some width down by that river yesterday , it's pretty heavy though" "What! It can't be as heavy as the weight Bob found in the forest"

You cannot say objects have or contain length in the same existential sense that you can say they have or contain atoms.

If length exists as a substantial reality then what is is made of? Atoms? Quarks? energy?

An object doesn't need length in order to exist any more than a painting needs beauty to exist.

Originally posted by scottishinnz
Heat is energy, energy = mass.

So what you are in fact saying is that emptyness becomes not empty when you put something in it.....

The vaccuum would have already had a temperature before it was heated up therefore it couldn't be a true vaccuum. In any case what about microwaves? Radiation?