aley_watt
Atheist: most of them claim to know that God does not exist.
And they shouldn't be. I claim that I don't believe, but I don't "know" whether one exists or not.
Quote:
Agnostic: To be truley agnostic you just don't know.
ag·nos·tic
–noun
1. a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.
2. a person who denies or doubts the possibility of ultimate knowledge in some area of study.
Agnostics are atheist or theist, not inbetween.
Quote:
I've heard of quantum tunneling, but nothing means :an indefinite pronoun indicating that there is not anything, not a single thing, or not a single part of a thing. So how did the particles come from nothing?
This was written by deludedgod:
"I once found it difficult to overcome my prejudice against ex nihilo, which clearly violated the iron laws of thermodynamics. However, that all changed one day when I was abruptly reminded by Alan Guth, the founder of the inflationary hypothesis, that the actual matter/energy content may be very low because the false vacuum has negative energy, which cancels out the huge positive total of the energy present in the universe. He pointed out that since matter is interchangeable with energy and vice-versa, the universe could have started out of a quantum tunnelling event which broke the singularity, and released a huge tide of positive energy, cancelling out the negative energy, albeit not with perfect symmetry, we still see a small excess of energy (symmetry breaking is poorly understood).
However, this quantum tunnelling event clearly would violate the laws of thermodynamics. That's OK though, since it is only for 10^-45 seconds, and such small, unpredictable events are allowable under the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (actually, they are demonstratable with the Casimir effect)
In a flash, Guth had blown my mind. I had forgotten about the negative energy of the vacuum. But in truth, he had pointed out something really obvious. After all, the solution to something that seemingly breaks the first law of thermodynamics would probably have to be so simple and obvious, because if it was monstrous and complex, it would probably be false, given how iron that law is.
Regarding the thermodynamics behind this, we need to understand spontaneous breaking. Imagine a dam holding back water. This dam is perched on top of a hill blocking a river. If the dam was not there the water would naturally take the path of least resistance and flow downhill. SImple. The water has progressed to a lower energy state, as nature commands. But with the dam there, the water cannot flow downhill. Nonetheless, the water cannot get over the dam, and thus, even though the water is not in its lowest energy state, the arrangement is relatively stable. It is for this same reason that organisms, which are extremely far from chemical equilibirum, do not spontaneously combust.
If the dam is cracked and bursts, the water will flow from the false vacuum, the dam, to the true vacuum, the water. This false vacuum may have been the original state of the universe and it is what victor refers to as "nothing". We also call it a singularity. A singularity is a point where mathematical relationship is not defined. The universe is believed to have been born out of a singularity after a false vacuum fluctuation, when all the essential forces were unified into one. As the four forces are unified into one, there is no coherent mathematical relationship, also called a singularity. This arrangement is extremely unstable, and as it spiralled asymptotically towards infinity and zero (because it has no mass), it breaks like a dam bursts, and the more stable arrangement (the four forces are broken thus producing the space time continuum) is born. Something can indeed come from nothing
The universe today is like a broken mirror, with the four forces ruling it disjointed and separate from each other. This is because the original vacuum arrangement is unstable. It broke, and from it gushed the true vacuum- the universe. This unified state, the vacuum arrangement, has another name- nothing."
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