Why physicists can't avoid a creator

I believe the online article in the NewScientist, linked below, has our endorsement. As the author intimated, not the greatest birthday present for Mr Hawking.

Why physicists can't avoid a creation event - physics-math - 11 January 2012 - New Scientist

"I wasnt aware this thorny question could be answered by invoking the hand of a supernatural creator, unless we mistake the non-answer of "goddidit" as an actual answer even though it tells you absolutely nothing thus not answering the question."

Well, for the present perhaps the scientific certainty that the universe had a beginning will be a step in the right direction. Although how you can imagine that the world just emerged from nothing, as well as designing itself, eludes me completely.

Nabobalis said:

I don't fancy signing up just to read that article. Could I get the gist please?

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Giving the gist, with the relevant passages would be too labour-intensive for me, as well, but here is the body of the article:

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.
For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.
However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.
His first target was eternal inflation. Proposed by Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, inflation says that in the few slivers of a second after the big bang, the universe doubled in size thousands of times before settling into the calmer expansion we see today. This helped to explain why parts of the universe so distant that they could never have communicated with each other look the same.
Eternal inflation is essentially an expansion of Guth's idea, and says that the universe grows at this breakneck pace forever, by constantly giving birth to smaller "bubble" universes within an ever-expanding multiverse, each of which goes through its own initial period of inflation. Crucially, some versions of eternal inflation applied to time as well as space, with the bubbles forming both backwards and forwards in time (see diagram).
But in 2003, a team including Vilenkin and Guth considered what eternal inflation would mean for the Hubble constant, which describes mathematically the expansion of the universe. They found that the equations didn't work (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.90.151301). "You can't construct a space-time with this property," says Vilenkin. It turns out that the constant has a lower limit that prevents inflation in both time directions. "It can't possibly be eternal in the past," says Vilenkin. "There must be some kind of boundary."
Not everyone subscribes to eternal inflation, however, so the idea of an eternal universe still had a foothold. Another option is a cyclic universe, in which the big bang is not really the beginning but more of a bounce back following a previous collapsed universe. The universe goes through infinite cycles of big bangs and crunches with no specific beginning. Cyclic universes have an "irresistible poetic charm and bring to mind the Phoenix", says Vilenkin, quoting Georges Lemaître, an astronomer who died in 1966. Yet when he looked at what this would mean for the universe's disorder, again the figures didn't add up.
Disorder increases with time. So following each cycle, the universe must get more and more disordered. But if there has already been an infinite number of cycles, the universe we inhabit now should be in a state of maximum disorder. Such a universe would be uniformly lukewarm and featureless, and definitely lacking such complicated beings as stars, planets and physicists - nothing like the one we see around us.
One way around that is to propose that the universe just gets bigger with every cycle. Then the amount of disorder per volume doesn't increase, so needn't reach the maximum. But Vilenkin found that this scenario falls prey to the same mathematical argument as eternal inflation: if your universe keeps getting bigger, it must have started somewhere.
Vilenkin's final strike is an attack on a third, lesser-known proposal that the cosmos existed eternally in a static state called the cosmic egg. This finally "cracked" to create the big bang, leading to the expanding universe we see today. Late last year Vilenkin and graduate student Audrey Mithani showed that the egg could not have existed forever after all, as quantum instabilities would force it to collapse after a finite amount of time (arxiv.org/abs/1110.4096). If it cracked instead, leading to the big bang, then this must have happened before it collapsed - and therefore also after a finite amount of time.
"This is also not a good candidate for a beginningless universe," Vilenkin concludes. "All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning."


For copyright reasons, I'd better give the link again here:


Why physicists can't avoid a creation event - physics-math - 11 January 2012 - New Scientist

Exiledoomsayer said:

I can't imagine how everybody in the world knows about santa if he didnt make his rounds every year, but that does not mean my failure of imagination is an indication that santa is actually real.

The same applies here, except I also cannot imagine how anyone can create anything out of nothing much less where that someone came from and and why that someone exists in the first place. (But to be fair, I also cannot imagine how sleds fly, why red noses glow and how santa avoids being burned up by friction considering the speed he'd need to go at.)

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And I'm sure you're imagination is every it as boggled by quantum physics. But that rather spoils your little fantasy, doesn't it, with its fabled 'promissory note': that one day, science will explain everything.

Cosmology and quantum physics increasingly abound with paradoxes, while every single paradox, in whatever sphere of knowledge, is an absolute mystery. So, in that regard, physics has zero advantage over Christianity, with its trinitarian God, and Saviour who was true God and true man at the same time. Sorry to spoil your party.... but you had to learn one day. And better now than later.

'You seem to be suggesting that missing 1 detail of a field of knowledge puts it on the same plane of uncertainty as the entirety of christianity?'

You ascription of the term, '1 detail' confirms that you are not apt to understand any of this.

More pabulum, folks:

"The more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work. So theoretical physics has given up on that. - Richard Feynman, Quantum Mechanics"

"I think it is safe to say that no one understands Quantum Mechanics. - Richard Feynman, Quantum Mechanics"

"One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much. - Richard Feynman, Quantum Mechanics"

"The universe is not stranger than we know, its stranger than we CAN know." - Feynman again.

... and a review of Quantum Enigma by Guardian reviewer, Steven Poole:
Quantum Enigma, by Bruce Rosenblum & Fred Kuttner (Duckworth, £9.99)


Physics has an embarrassing problem. It affects to be a rigorous, hard-headed science, yet quantum mechanics, its most successful theory (it has never made a wrong prediction), seems to rub up inevitably against the problem of consciousness, and even quasi-mystical interpretations of the universe. Why? Because of the extremely odd fact that you can choose to demonstrate either of two contradictory possibilities simply by deciding which experiment to perform. And it is not just "observer-dependent" in a weak sense; by observing a photon, you cause the photon to be there and nowhere else. Before you observed it, it wasn't just in some specific location of which you were ignorant, it was in no particular place at all, or in many places at once.
This excellent book provides patient and luminous explanations of the weirdness, and a critique of the normal pragmatic reply: "Whatever works." The physicist-authors agree that it works (lasers, transistors and so on), but argue that the "enigma" of what it means has been swept under the carpet for too long. They end with a series of fascinating speculations as to what it might imply, if taken seriously, for theories of consciousness and cosmology. The physicist Niels Bohr said that if you are not shocked by quantum physics, you don't understand it. Rosenblum and Kuttner have done a brilliant job of shocking the reader anew."

Exiledoomsayer, what would be the upside for me in laboriously trying to convey truths to you which are so fundamental that they would require a major change in your world-view - which no-one does ultimately on the basis of rational argument. Please don't ask me to explain that to you, since you seem unable to distinguish between a baseless belief in Fr Christmas and a belief in the often literally nonsensical truths of quantum physics: paradoxes.

Another brief but pointed article, this time specifically on intelligent design:

Uncommon Descent | Cosmology: Why the future belongs to intelligent design

Love the last two sentences:


"Read the whole thing. What Lightman is saying, without directly acknowledging it, is that science, as we have always understood it, now belongs to intelligent design. To those who accept that the universe is what the evidence shows it to be.
As for the others, they and the multiverse have found each other."

Hilarious! Spot on.

And from a poster to the above site, called, Bantay:

Next time an atheist claims the universe came from nothing, by nothing and for nothing, just ask her or him…
“What part of nothing do you know the most about?”
I can guarantee you, they will pause and think about it.