Last week’s Blog highlighted an interview with “renowned cosmologist,” Lawrence Krauss, a professor at Arizona State, concerning his recent Big Bang book. My only comment was in the title of the Blog, where I suggested that it was a good example of mainstream confusion. Turns out that I am not the only critic disgusted with the media’s pandering to such claptrap. Here is an adamant man-in-the-street response from the leader of the Rock and Roll band, “Tricks,” from Michigan. I couldn’t have written it better myself:
Rick Dutkiewicz
Quotes
from the interview are in bold letters:
“I think it is virtually certain that everything we
see came from empty space,” Krauss exposited. “And all the physics I know is
highly suggestive that our universe popped into existence as a quantum
fluctuation.”
All of
this because Einstein thought that light could travel through a "vacuum."
Did they suck the air out of a flask and shine a light through that
"vacuum" to prove this idea? All that proves is that light waves
travel through a medium that is smaller than air molecules. Einstein admitted
this later in his life.
No one
had the balls to ask if maybe a laboratory "vacuum" is not the
"empty space" envisioned in mathematical models? I guess a few did,
but they were drummed out of the Good Ol' Boys club.
"…because of the laws of quantum mechanics and
special relativity, empty space consisted of a bubbling brew of virtual
particles spontaneously popping in and out of existence on timescales too small
to notice."
There is
no such thing as "empty space" except in mathematical equations. I
figured that out in 5th grade.
I've
been listening to a podcast dealing with the general history of mathematics.
Some of the earliest mathematicians were very careful to point out that
irrational numbers, negative numbers, and zeros do not exist in actuality. DESPITE
their usefulness in equations that seem to accurately predict phenomena in the
actual universe.
Science
went off the rails when people stopped being careful about conflating the meal
and the menu, the road and the map, the analogy and the actuality.
When
mathematicians like Godel and Turing came up with proofs that showed the limits
of mathematics as a logical model, the indeterminists in the scientific
community seized upon that uncertainty to "prove" that if you look at
the universe closely enough, you will find chaos and an "Uncaused
Cause" (but modern indeterminists took away the capital letters and
stopped calling it "God").
They
aren't humble enough to say that this only proves that our measurements and
models are limited and full of holes. No. They proclaim that this proves that
the universe we observe as "reality" actually comes from a chaos that
is causeless and empty, but filled with random fluctuations of being and
non-being.
If that
isn't equivalent to religious thinking, what is it? It pisses me off when I
hear scientists asserting that religion and science are somehow compatible.
It's the mirror image of religionists' claim that "if god didn't exist, we
would have to invent him.”
Funny
that so many educated people want their cake of indeterminism, but they don't
want to call it "God.” So, they came up with a new flavour of
indeterminism. They're only fooling themselves.
“I’m not interested in classical, logical descriptions
of nothing, but rather what science tells us about nothing."
That
shows how much confusion lives inside the mind of an indeterminist. Only
mathematics and fantasy can tell us something about "nothing.” Science
cannot tell us about nothing, because nothing does not exist. Science deals
with existence. Only math and fantasy and religion deal with non-existence.
Science
deals with reality, not with something that can become nothing, or nothing that
can become something.
"purer form of nothing"
I'm in
awe! Where do I light my votive candle to this "purer form" of "nothing.”
A thing that is not a thing. What does he mean by "pure"? What does
he mean by "form"? What does he mean by "nothing.” Doesn't
"form" imply the opposite of "no thing"? How does one argue
against such insanity?
"if ... quantum mechanics was applied to gravity,
space and time would have become dynamical and so would have spontaneously
appeared. So you wouldn’t have needed pre-existing space. Instead the space
itself would have arisen.”
So, in
this model we have empty space before space and time exist? Fluctuations occur
before time occurs or matter exists? He keeps
emphasizing how small and fast these fluctuations are. And all of this occurs
in "empty space.”
What
kind of reasoning leads one to insist that if something is small or fast
enough, we should say it doesn't exist? I think his reasoning has random
fluctuations of insanity.
"If you wait long enough, no matter how small the
probability is, it must arise. If you have particle pairs with a gravitational
attraction that is just right for their total energy to be zero, you’re guaranteed
that something will arise from nothing."
But,
but, ... how can you "wait" if we're talking about "before time existed.”
Krauss is even blind to the internal
contradictions of his model.
This is
simple to point out. I think the block is not intellectual, but psychological. It has to do with lack of imagination and ability to
think outside of the model. All the while they pretend to be radical thinkers,
but they are rehashing the same old debate of "how many angels fit on the
head of a pin.”