The laws of thermodynamics have constraints. So, one has to be careful how one applies them. One big issue is whether the law being referenced concerns a closed system. Earth is not a closed system. I'm just pointing out that one has to be careful with the laws of thermodynamics, as they do have constraints. Clearly, life is an incredible process. But, it's existence can't be ruled out as a natural phenomenon by the laws of thermodynamics - as some rather famous Christian apologist sites claim. In a particular region, entropy may decrease, given the characteristics of that region..
What was done by the ancients, with their limited tools and methodology is totally amazing. And, they did find reasonable answers to various questions. And, yes, they did fill in the gaps with their many various religious beliefs and philosophies. I don't see evidence of that being a rational approach, though. We almost never hear of anything other than the successes. We don't hear about the various crazy cosmologies, the notion that the purpose of the heart is as a house for the soul, the damage done by theories of humors and bleeding, the difficulties faced by those who learned truths that don't conform with dominant religions of the time, etc. We don't here about the total nonsense believed by Aristotle and others - we hear about his successes. Our scientific process today is far superior because it does not allow the introduction of ideas for which there is no way for testing to occur, and we require that testing.
Yes, it's a mind bender for sure. Einstein's special relativity shows the cosmic speed limit. It pertains to two objects that are close enough together that cosmic expansion is irrelevant. His general relativity includes the issue of the universe expanding.
I don't know what you mean by "in the concrete world". Math and other languages are used by scientists to describe what they find through observation and testing. That's the relationship between language and this physical universe. Does that work for you?
What ideas are "not allowed" to be introduced into science, and who is it that bars potential explanation that fit the evidence better than others simply because they are in some forbidden category?
Good question. What is not allowed is any hypothesis that can't be tested. For example, an hypothesis can't involve God, because there is no way to test for God or the effects that could be attributable to God. After all, God can do absolutely anything, so saying "God did it" is totally meaningless (in terms of science, of course). Humans can't test God - God tests humans, not the other way around. There are other cases, too. Anything that resulted in the singularity that kicked off this universe can't be admitted, because there is no way to test that. The same is true for string theory (where the strings are WAY too small to detect), multiverse theory (where there is no way to test for other universes), etc. Remember the "God particle" thing that was tested at Cern and found to exist? Before that machine was built, the idea was relegated to theoretical physics, because it couldn't be tested. Then, that collider was created and it became possible to test that idea. The result is that Higgs fields are now part of experimental physics, not relegated to theoretical physics. Hypotheses have to be testable. That is, it has to be possible to prove them false.
This seems pretty infected with verificationism. It takes a lot of thinking sometimes to devise a valid test, but, reality does not depend on our ability to test it. The Higgs Boson did not suddenly begin to exist when CERN verify it's existence, nor was there wide refusal to even consider it's existence prior to our ability to test it. I's existence has long been presumed in the standard model of particle physics. I love that what Peter Higgs, at his desk nearly a half century ago, predicted on the basis of certain mathematical equations has now been confirmed. I find it fascinating that math is the language of nature. Physicist Eugene Wigner famously described this as “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.” Confirming the Higgs boson is a prediction made by a theoretical physicist later confirmed correct by experimental scientists. The prediction did not just become correct with confirmation, the prediction was correct when announced, and the Higgs boson existed in reality long before we predicted it and confirmed what pretty much everyone already believed to be true. Of course you're free to chose to include or exclude whatever you like, but, I'm completely comfortable inferring the best explanation for an effect and only excluding those with no explanatory power.
OK, but that's not how science is designed to work. And, I'm damn glad. We need to know the difference between unverifiable opinion and what it is that is verified to the best of our ability. Take any of our current issues. We need to know what is known, not what some media outlet broadcasts as matching their political interests. Plus, our science is built on other science. If we allow our foundation of knowledge to be crap, how could we possibly expect what follows to have any validity at all?
Wait a sec, you said that entropy was "the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work" so what were doing is converting thermal energy into mechanical energy so that means you can't say because we're making mechanical energy not heat energy. The other thing is that time was slowing down (people moved slowly) in the long past when everything went faster but now things are going slower so time is speeding up (people are doing things faster) --all relative to some guy living for billions of years measuring us while he's sitting still floating in weightlessness.
Maybe you're noticing that those who are not conducting science don't use scientific process. For example, there are scientists who are religious. They just don't use their religion in their science.
I'm not clear on how those comments intersect with what I posted. You seem to be categorically excluding explanations for phenomena under study, not because they lack explanatory power, rather because it doesn't fit in with some category that you have erected which bounds what you will consider and you're free to do so, but, I'll not be joining you in that limitation. If a particular explanation has the best fit with the evidence at hand, I'll fearlessly admit that, to illustrate with a thought experiment: Say it is widely believed, yea, all the smartest and best scientists agree, that a particular set of remote islands has no intelligent life and never has. They all agree that this is a complete certainty. But, while I'm exploring it, I find a combination safe. I'm going to infer an intelligent cause for it. Could I come up with a just so story about how natural processes and the random distribution of the effects of natural law fashioned this safe complete with a combination lock? Sure I could, but it would not have greater explanatory power than it was intelligently devised for the purpose of securing valuables. If you then assured me that this explanation was forbidden and that I must select from the category you permit, I'd pleasantly humor you, but, I would not budge unless you came up with a superior explanation that was a better fit for what we were attempting to understand. My passion is a better understanding of the natural world and if I discover solutions with more explanatory power, I'm not going to ignore them because someone dogmatically insists that only certain classes of explanation are "allowed". Question for you: You seem to accept the confirmation of expansion as time advances, and if we mentally reverse the arrow of time, we should see a shrinking universe, and observationally this has been confirmed with our powerful telescopes, and as one goes back in time, in your estimation the universe shrinks to something the size of a volleyball. Why do you stop there, has Time=0 been reached at that point? Here from CERN - who confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson: "All matter in the universe was formed in one explosive event 13.7 billion years ago – the Big Bang" https://home.cern/science/physics/early-universe
I'm describing how scientific method works. You don't have to be a scientist. You can be a theologian or just an individual like me who takes interest in nature. I'd also point out that your "safe found on an island" example fits just fine. The "no life on the island" hypothesis is testable, so it is a valid hypothesis. And, then the island would have to be examined before someone could publish a paper saying there is no life there. And, if you found an object of non-natural origin there, then that would be significant wrt the hypothesis that there had been no life there. What doesn't work is stating that there is no life there without even bothering to look!
You are welcome to propose and follow any limitations you wish, but when Peter Higgs predicted the existence of the particle and the field that bears his name, there would be no means of testing it for nearly a half century. No one refused to believe it because it wasn't verified by experiment, rather, nearly everyone accepted that his prediction was accurate. Well, "God" is a pretty big word, certainly we can study and test and draw valid inferences whether a cause is intelligent or happenstance and such work goes on all the time. Take the SARS 2 virus that causes COVID 19 was that intelligently designed or did it come about through natural process is a very hot topic with scientists, frankly trying to determine which is the inference to the best explanation: Intelligently designed or naturally occurring. They know full well that it could have been intelligently designed, and at the lab in Wuhan, and that specific work was in progress, but, others think that someone could have been infected in a bat cave by a mutated strain, and then driven back to Wuhan, and if SARS 2 was found in the wild, it would add a lot of validity to that explanation, and just because it hasn't been found yet, doesn't mean it won't be. Others insist that the precision of the spike protein and the way it's inserted into the virus makes the natural explanation much more improbable and the intelligent design explanation much more powerful, I don't know the answer, but, certainly science does test probe and search for evidence of intelligent causation, all the time. I have no idea why you would think that the inference of intelligent causation is some kind of scientific "no/no".
The existence of the safe is the evidence of intelligent causation. If you are unable to find any independent verification of an intelligent entity on the island, or figure out how one could have arrived and left undetected, that's a description of your limits, not the limits of reality, and that the safe was intelligently designed still remains the most powerful explanation for its existence.
RE: What Existed Before the Big Bang SUBTOPIC; Before the possibilities ⁜→ Aleksander Ulyanov, et al, AGREEMENT: This is a fantastic Question. But it is one that will not be answered in my lifetime. At least, it cannot be answered in my lifetime using the transparent process of experimentally testing a hypothesis using procedures that adhere to the natural laws of the universe, as we understand them today. (COMMENT) This question is more than one simple question. It implies that at a point, along a timeline (uniform and periodic events), that being the "Big Bang" (whatever that event was) marked the beginning of time (natural cyclical processes). And these sub-questions are not all solid knowns. Can we say that the Big Bang marked the beginning of time? This is an assumption not in evidence. And was the fabric of space always the same in its dimensions? Then, there is the question of the definition of "energy" itself. Can we talk about energy as if it had a uniform definition from the point of the Big Bang? When we talk about the Scientific Method, we are implying that we are looking for a positive affirmation of the hypothesis under test. But when we make too many assumptions about what is true then we are in a function as it approached the mystical and supernatural (beyond the scientific method). I do not know if there is an answer of any value to the question. Although the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) seems to suggest that each legitimate question has an answer, it also implies that the answer may be beyond the capacity to resolve. Most Respectfully, R
I meant as mass flies apart in equal measure, the capacity of the heat generated by that mass cools down as the sources of the heat '(stars etc) can't reach so far. The universe is existing in a state of entropy (winding down and becoming less predictable). The heat generated by the stars etc creates mechanical energy...creation of planets, stars and galaxies. Less heat makes these creations less possible until there is stasis. Nothing moves. Perhaps this is what "was" before the BB. You may say then that time has stopped if you define time as change...(there is a before and an after something moves, so that implies time). I think that there is ALWAYS some movement somewhere, even if it is a tiny vibration...which means there is time before that movement and after it. At its simplest (where my understanding is stretched to its limit) this vibration is the essence of string theory. In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In string theory, one of the many vibrational states of the string corresponds to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries the gravitational force. Thus, string theory is a theory of quantum gravity. WIKI (a really intereresting read). So once you have strings, you have mass and gravity, defined by the vibration of the strings. and mass, charges and "other properties" which may be associated with thermal properties ( heat.) IF these strings existed before the BB, they could explain the instability of the strings needed to create the BB , so time did exist before the BB if again, we define it as change.
Here from CERN - who confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson: "All matter in the universe was formed in one explosive event 13.7 billion years ago – the Big Bang" Careful...whoever said that didn't say "all forces" .
Has anyone wondered if the BB happened inside another universe, so things like forces were already there?
Energy is neither created nor destroyed. Merely changes form. Now I am not a big study in the area of how the universe began. So, I just give a very low level lay person's opinion. But IMO, even the brightest of those who study this, have not much better answer.
