Physics alone can't answer the big questions

The blurry boundary between religion and science

When it comes to the biggest questions about the cosmos, physicists tend to either shy away from them or assert theories that have no real empirical backing. The Big Bang is a good example – a creation myth that physics will probably never be able to show is true. But these theories are also not simply equivalent to religious dogma, they lie in the undefined space between science and religion – not in conflict with science, but not supported by it either, argues Sabine Hossenfelder.

 

Many people have a bad start with physics in school. I did, too. Physics seemed all about magnets and atoms and balls rolling down inclined planes. I didn’t find it particularly engaging. And yet, today, I’m a physicist.

In school, we see only one side of physics, but it has another side. Physics is one of the best ways to make sense of our own existence: Does the past still exist? Do copies of us live in other universes? Can information be destroyed? Does science have limits? Those are some examples of questions that physics helps us answer.

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Mike Pollock 14 September 2022

The laws of our universe state that our universe was already here 13.8 billion years ago. Why wouldn't it be? Why would a human try to assume when the universe was created when it is impossible to do so? How does a universe begin time? It is obvious that our universe took what was already here and created an event that made the galaxies expand and gave them their energy. That event was the Big Bang, not some religious, Genesis explanation that created time itself.

The Big Bang was simply our universe turning itself into a gargantuan particle collider with two objects that contained the mass of the observable galaxies. The result was quark plasma shrapnel that are the galaxies we see expanding to this day. Each galaxy was initially created as a mass of quark plasma. This plasma is optically invisible and can make shapes. This is the plasma black holes are made of. Each galaxy had cooled ever since it was created 13.8 billion years ago. That's why so many galaxies are being observed already existing where they shouldn't be. That is because they were all created instantaneously.

Quark plasma uses the matter that makes up space that causes the force of gravity as the endless catalyst. This plasma also creates all the naturally occurring elements all by itself from the outside of the mass inward. Our planet and moon were a single mass of quark plasma when they were born. The smaller the initial mass, the faster it cools. That's why the black hole in the center of our galaxy is still a black hole and our moon is a solid rock.

When science made the Big Bang theory a fact, all upcoming observations were doomed to be misunderstood. Many scientists, including Hubble himself, wanted nothing to do with Lemaîtres expanding universe theory. The general public is not told this anymore. It seems the whole future of physics and astrophysics was decided by one priests assumptions. Any sane scientist would want to continue to study what they had found but this never happened. The expanding universe was made an utter fact. The laws were ignored. Now look what has happened. Nothing will ever be solved until science goes back in time and applies the laws to what Hubble discovered. That is what I've done and all the questions have been answered with my theory.

Andrew Robert Patterson 14 September 2022

The information is not lost, just scrambled by a massive encryption system with a key derived from all the previously inputted information. If Hawking radiation does radiate from a black hole then the information it contains relates to the state of the black hole at that time.

Niels Hoffmann 13 September 2022

If the divine exists then nature must be part of the divine and certain laws of the divine must also exist in nature. May I suggest that P=NP-complete is a mechanism which if proved in the natural world would suggest a mirror of the divine.

Brian Quass 13 September 2022

The Drug War outlaws precisely those medicines that hint at the existence of that thinking universe to which Sabine refers. That's why materialists feel safe in ignoring "the human" because they know that their philosophical opponents are hamstrung by drug laws which prohibit them from experiencing and investigating "other ways of being in the world." In my one experience using peyote, I was surprised to see (with "eyes wide shut") crystal-clear imagery of pre-Columbian iconography, an experience which materialism has great trouble in accounting for. Why would I behold such specific visions unless Wordsworth was right, that there exists "something far more interfused, whose dwelling," when all is said and done, is "in the mind of man"?

But until we end the Drug War's censorship of science and philosophy (or at least admit that such censorship actually exists!), materialism will remain our government-enforced way of seeing the world. This is why I believe that no article on these topics is complete which fails to mention the Drug War, for that modern project of substance demonization sets politically determined boundaries for what today is considered to be legitimate research.

David Simpson 13 September 2022

Ascientific - a very useful word, like agnostic.