On Friday, December 29, 2017 at 8:18:56 AM UTC-7, Phillip Helbig (undress to
reply) wrote:

In article , Gary
Harnagel writes:

Phillip wrote:

Yes, he was a priest, but, unlike some other scientists who are
Christian (i.e., Christian scientists, not necessarily Christian
Scientists), such as Don Page, he managed to keep the two areas
separate.

I didn't realize that about Don Page, or much about him at all. From this
little treatise:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/...and-cosmology/

One Bob Zannelli responded, "Don Page is a first rate cosmologist, and a
very nice guy to boot. He is scrupulously honest and while I reject his
evangelical Christianity I have great respect for him."

I don't understand your denigration of him.

As my history teacher used to say, just an observation, not a judgement.

I'm glad :-) However ...

The point is that his belief does affect his science. He believes "that
the universe was created by a...personal God...who relates to it as His
creation" who also may have created "new heavens and new earth for us
after death". (Quotation is from The Philosophy of Cosmology, edited by
K. Chamcham, J. Silk, J. D. Barrow, and S. Saunders (Cambridge
University Press), 2017.) This is not something he said in a pub, but
something he wrote in a cosmology book.

However, an atheist's belief system also colors HIS science. For
example, if the movie "Theory of Everything" is correct, Hawking won
some honor for proving that time had a beginning, but then he decided to
prove that time did NOT have a beginning (I couldn't find any other
reference to this). If this is so, however, possibly the switch was
because religious folk seized upon the first proof that God was required
to start time and Hawking's new direction is an attempt to refute God.

Because the Schwarzschild radius, as I already mentioned, applies in an
asymptotically flat spacetime. That does not describe the universe.

Well, that flat claim of yours doesn't agree with observation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatness_problem

The flatness problem (about which I have written an entire paper) refers
to the spatial flatness of the universe on large scales, not to
Minkowski space (which is what the black hole is embedded in). You are
confusing two different uses of "flat" here. (Again, maybe the
moderator can insert some standard explanation here.)

[[Mod. note --
There are three distinct concepts involved he
(a) *Spacetime* as a whole can be flat, i.e., it's the Minkowski
spacetime of special relativity, where the 4-dimensional spacetime
Riemann tensor is zero.
(b) A spacetime can be *asymptotically flat*, which means that there's
a region "far away" where the gravitational field is small. This
provides a setting to mathematically formalize such concepts as
gravitational radiation, black holes, and measurements of
gravitational radiation far away from its sources.
(c) A spacetime (which may be non-flat) may be *spatially flat*,
i.e., its 3-dimensional t=constant "spatial slices" (roughly
speaking, these represent "all of space at a moment in time")
may be flat (3-dimensional *spatial* Riemann tensor is zero).
Such a spacetime may still have 4-dimensional spacetime curvature.

A Venn diagram would show (a) as a single point, and (b) and (c)
as partially overlapping regions (whose overlap contains (a)), within
the larger region of all spacetimes.

In the context of cosmology the universe in which we live is (c)
to within experimental error. It is not (a) or (b).

However, for astrophysics purposes other than cosmology (e.g.,
studying black holes and/or gravitational waves emitted by sources
other than the big bang itself), it's a very very *very* good
approximation to treat the universe as (b). I'll say a bit more
about this approximation in a separate posting.
-- jt]]

Of course, this ASSUMES that the FLRW metric describes our universe.

All observations suggest that out universe is well described by the FLRW
metric.

Doesn't Steinhardt's "theory" also describe it, and without kludging it
up with inflation?

Since,
as Don Page pointed out in the link given above, "We simply do not know
whether or not our universe had a beginning."

What actually happened at the beginning, if there was one, is a
different question.

The FLWR metric predicts one, so I think it is quite relevant.

My belief system says that it didn't. And I reject the "bounce" model, too.
IOW, "big bangs" happen repeatedly without bouncing. In such a universe
(multiverse?) curvature is only a "local" phenomenon.

Science is not about belief.

Au contraire, as I pointed out. It's a historical fact that one becomes
married to a viewpoint and only extreme evidence can change that. I'm
not saying that's wrong; after all:

\_any alternative theory has to explain at least as much as the
`standard model' does._/ --- George Efstathiou

Steinhardt claims his "theory" does but, heck, I don't know. But in
addition:

\_Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence._/ --- Marcello
Truzzi

It would seem there is some wiggle room in what the definition of
"extraordinary" is, and that is determined by the definer.

I think all who ponder the whichness of why, particularly scientists,
have two world views. One is the public view (the politically-correct
scientist) and his internal world view which maps his personal
relationship to the universe. These two world views are probably most
nearly congruent in the atheist, but are also most likely to be wrong.

The reason for this is that they discount the 13 billion year (and maybe
MUCH longer) existence of the universe. Ignoring the "much longer"
possibility for now, it appears that the earth and sun were created
about 4.5 billion years ago and science posits that intelligent life
developed here independently. Our galaxy is twice as old as our sun;
indeed, there is a red dwarf a mere 150 light-years away whose
metallicity, etc., puts its age at 14 billion years, plus or minus.
Anyway, long before our galaxy formed, supernovae had enriched dust
clouds with all the chemical species we have today.

It is quite unreasonable to assume that in all the universe we are the
first. In fact, it is unreasonable to assume that a civilization like
ours didn't develop billions of years ago.

\_There may be millions of inhabited worlds circling other suns,
harboring beings who to us would seem godlike, with civilizations and
cultures beyond our wildest dreams._/ -- Arthur C. Clarke

Or there may be only ONE. One that has everything organized, or has it
all organized in this galaxy, or spiral arm, or ? Anyway, imagine what
a civilization a few thousand years beyond ours would be like. It's
even harder to imagine one a billion years older.

\_we think everything in this universe has to conform to our paradigm of
what makes sense. Do you have any idea how arrogant that view is and on
how little of this universe we base it?_/ ---Robert Buettner