Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Stephen Hawking - "The universe began with 'almost infinitely small quantum foam of the singularity before the Big Bang.'" Say that again?


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1 Cor 1:20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. 
1 Cor 2:9 But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”— 10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

I write today with love for the lost, sorrow for the influence that unbelievers have on others, and a renewed desire to share the good news of Christ with all. May we who believe teach and offer hope to our dying world. May we speak the truth in love.
Stephen Hawking, the brilliant world-famous physicist who died March 15, 2018, never accepted the simple truth, “In the beginning God.” Note what he preached instead, with great certainty and confidence. What follows are excerpts from a BreakPoint post, then two posts taken directly from Fox News.
Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time, became a global hit, selling more than 10 million copies. He made regular appearances on television, including hit shows like “The Big Bang Theory” and (in animated form) “The Simpsons.” The film about his life, “The Theory of Everything,” did more than $100-million at the box office and produced five Academy Award nominations and one win.
Stephen Hawking didn’t stay in his lane. He was a scientist, but in each of his books and nearly all of his media appearances, he ventured into philosophy, masking metaphysical observations and proclamations in language of scientific certainty.
Hawking regularly opined on what are known as the “ultimate questions,” such as “Where did everything come from?” “Why are we here?” “What’s the meaning of life?” “Who are we as human beings?” and “What is our ultimate destiny?”
He said:
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”
“There is no heaven or afterlife… that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
“The scientific account is complete. Theology is unnecessary.”
Stephen Hawking says he knows what happened before the dawn of time (Fox News)
It’s the biggest question in the universe. What happened before the Big Bang? Now world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking says he has an answer.
“The boundary condition of the universe ... is that it has no boundary,” Hawking tells the National Geographic’s Star Talk show this weekend.
In other words, there is no time before time began as time was always there.
It was just different.
He tells physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that amid the almost infinitely small quantum foam of the singularity before the Big Bang, time existed in a ‘bent’” state.
It was distorted along another dimension — always getting fractionally closer to, but never becoming, nothing.
So there never was a Big Bang that created something from nothing.
It’s just looks that way from our point of perspective.
“All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago,” Hawking says in one of his lectures.
“There must have been a beginning. Otherwise, the universe would be in a state of complete disorder by now, and everything would be at the same temperature. In an infinite and everlasting universe, every line of sight would end on the surface of a star. This would mean that the night sky would have been as bright as the surface of the Sun. The only way of avoiding this problem would be if, for some reason, the stars did not shine before a certain time.”
But things were different at the Big Bang.
“The density would have been infinite,” Hawking says.
“It would have been what is called, a singularity. At a singularity, all the laws of physics would have broken down. This means that the state of the universe, after the Big Bang, will not depend on anything that may have happened before, because the deterministic laws that govern the universe will break down in the Big Bang.”
This has long posed a serious problem for physics, he says.
“Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang. Events before the Big Bang, are simply not defined, because there’s no way one could measure what happened at them.”
But there are ways to figure out what came before, he says.
“Quantum theory introduces a new idea, that of imaginary time. Imaginary time may sound like science fiction, and it has been brought into Doctor Who. But nevertheless, it is a genuine scientific concept. One can picture it in the following way. One can think of ordinary, real, time as a horizontal line. On the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future. But there’s another kind of time in the vertical direction. This is called imaginary time, because it is not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just as real as what we call real time.”
This has enormous implications when it comes to the Big Bang.
“James Hartle of the University of California Santa Barbara, and I have proposed that space and imaginary time together, are indeed finite in extent, but without boundary. They would be like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions. The surface of the Earth is finite in extent, but it doesn’t have any boundaries or edges. I have been around the world, and I didn’t fall off. “
There’s no raw physics that supports his idea. Yet.
But Hawking’s insight has proven right before.
What we do know is that when it comes to the Big Bang — and black holes — our understanding of physics breaks down.
The only certainty about the infinitesimally small quantum building blocks of our universe is that they are uncertain. Simply observing them can cause them to change. They can be in two places — or two states — at once.
They seem to be a physical embodiment of probability and potential: elements of reality that haven’t quite yet decided what they’re going to do.
While it dictates our lives, we still don’t know what time is. Or exactly where it comes from.
We know how it works. We know its effects.
It’s like gravity.
It doesn’t entirely seem to fit in the ‘big’ world of the physics we experience, nor the ‘weird’ world of the subatomic.
But, like the strange behavior of quantum physics, perhaps time has a lot more left to tell.
This story originally appeared in news.com.au.
Quotations from Stephen Hawking (Fox News)
LONDON –  Physicist and author Stephen Hawking possessed an uncanny ability to come up with memorable phrases and sayings that summed up his world view. Here is a short selection of his many famous observations:
— “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special.”
— “Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.”
— “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
— “For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.”
— “My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”
— “I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.”
— “Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free.”
— “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
— “We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.”
— “My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in. I have managed, however, only because of the large amount of help I have received from my wife, children, colleagues and students. I find that people in general are very ready to help, but you should encourage them to feel that their efforts to aid you are worthwhile by doing as well as you possibly can.”

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