Re: Cosmological Models and the Big Bang

Chris L Peterson <clp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 5 Jun 2009 09:57:38 -0700 (PDT), palsing <palsing@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Every time you replied with 'We don't know', perhaps you should have
said 'We don't know YET', because science learns as it goes along...

Perhaps. But questions about the cause of the Big Bang, what came
"before", what is "outside" the Universe... these things may be
fundamentally unanswerable by science, and therefore always remain
purely philosophical questions ("philosophy" = "we don't know" <g>).

Y'know... I wrote the exact same thing. Then I thought for a moment
about it and decided that the eventual understanding of such things is
not quite so ... improbable.

I think perhaps a better way to put it is that the question will
remain fundamentally unanswerable /now/, with our /current/
understanding of the nature of mathematics.

But who knows what our concept might encompass a millennia from now?
Or ten millennia, or a hundred? Mathematics coupled with the
scientific method have done some amazing things to expand our
understanding of the universe. It's not impossible that they could
one day surpass what we currently see as a fundamental limit to
inferential logic--i.e., the problem of answering the question of what
started the thing that started the thing that started the thing that
started the universe.
--
Dave
.

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