On Sunday, December 31, 2017 at 5:39:02 AM UTC-7, Phillip Helbig
(undress to reply) wrote:

In article , Gary
Harnagel writes:

However, an atheist's belief system also colors HIS science.

Why? If one believes that there is no God, because one has no evidence
(just as you are very probably an atheist with respect to Zeus and
Odin), this doesn't have any effect on one's evidence-based view of the
world.

If Odin-worship were a prevalent religious movement and one were an
ardent atheist who was miffed by Odin-worship, that might affect his
line of inquiry. Scientists are human, too :-)

For example, if the movie "Theory of Everything" is correct,

Certainly not the best way to learn about Hawking's science. His most
famous result, that black holes are not completely black, is handled
really badly.

I go to more solid sources when they're available.

Hawking won some honor for proving that time had a beginning,

The Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems.

[[Mod. note -- Just to clarify (the author likely knows this, but others
may not)... The hawking-Penrose singularity theorems prove that (given
the classical Einstein equations (no quantum mechanics) and certain other
assumptions which we think are reasonable) a "trapped surface" must
necessarily contain a singularity or singularities. Any astrophysical
black hole must necessarily contain a trapped surface.

This has very little to do with proving that time had a beginning
(in fact, I doubt there is a mathematical proof of this statement),
because the universe as a whole is neither a trapped surface nor a
black hole.
-- jt]]

It looks like the movie version was wrong there, too.

but then he decided to prove that time did NOT have a beginning (I
couldn't find any other reference to this).

There might not be any. Also, did he "decide to prove" or did some
evidence suggest something to him? A scientist cannot just decide to
prove something and then prove it. There are at least two restrictions:
it has to be provable (which implies that it is true, but not
necessarily vice versa) and he has to be capable of proving it.

There are theories (or better called hypotheses) already in existence
positing that time had no beginning. The oscillating universe, for one.
The multiverse one where our universe popped out of it like a bubble is
another. Presumably, our universe had a beginning but time existed
before that in the one it popped out of. And there are scientists on
both sides of the fence on whether they have any existence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiv...s_and_skeptics

It seems to me that they have Steinhardt in the wrong camp since his
idea has the flavor of a multiverse hypothesis.

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.

Do you have any evidence at all for this? Hawking has been rather clear
that he is an atheist, regardless of his belief on whether the universe
had a beginning. (Even if it did, this does not in any way imply that a
Christian God must exist.)

I agree, but that has nothing to do with what Hawking believes.

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?

Any theory has to agree with the fact that the present universe is well
described by the FLRW metric.

Sure. And it has been shown that GR can be derived from quantum theory
(with certain assumptions):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9zcBKoFrME

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi...10.1086/683448

So, since QED/QFT predicts results closest to reality, it appears that
GR is a poorer approximation than a quantum gravity theory would be.
For one thing, the graviton is a force particle not unlike the photon or
gluon, so the concept of curved (or uncurved, for that matter) spacetime
is just a mathematical crutch. (I'm not saying here that crutches are
BAD, just that one should keep a place holder for when one gets well).

\_spacetime is likely to be an approximate description of something quite
different._/ ---Steven Carlip

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.

Yes, it predicts one (in most cases, including our universe) if the
current expansion is naively extrapolated back to a singularity. But a)
no-one actually believes that such a singularity exists physically
(which is independent of the fact that some theories predict
singularities in some cases) and b) no-one yet knows what actually
happened in the very early universe.

Exactly. We'll probably never get to see behind the veil of opacity,
which cleared long, long, long after inflation is supposed to have
occurred.

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.

Some people do; some people don't.

Those who do change before extreme evidence exists are more often
treated as outcasts, crackpots, etc., by the majority.

In any case, science is not about belief. Yes, some scientists might be
influenced by belief, or money, or fame, or whatever, but this doesn't
mean that science is about these things.

You are espousing the ideal.

Science is not whatever scientists do.

No, not "whatever" they do. It IS influenced by what they THINK.

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.

How does this in any way contradict any worldview?

The existence of a benevolent civilization billions of years older than
ours wouldn't change YOUR worldview? Come ON!