Re: Cosmological Models and the Big Bang

Chris L Peterson <clp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:35:16 -0400, Dave Typinski <möbius@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

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 didn't actually say "improbable", because there isn't enough
information to be that specific.

Oh, I know, Chris. I was just summing up the feeling of the issue,
not trying to reference anything you said specifically.

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.

I don't think math has much to do with it. Math is just a tool, and by
itself isn't very useful. There are all kinds of deep physical theories
that are based almost exclusively on math alone (string theory, for
example). To be scientific, you need some kind of testability.

I was using math in the sense that logic is a subset of math, math
being the broader term. Or so I thought. Maybe it's the other way
'round.

The problem with any questions that take us outside the Universe is that
they may be fundamentally untestable, and therefore fundamentally
unscientific. Or not. A few years ago, the idea of a "cause" for the Big
Bang, or the idea of something "outside" the Universe were seen as
unscientific. However, there are recent theories about [external]
mechanisms that could have produced our universe, and even though they
are forever outside our direct observation, they do actually produce
structural signals on the Universe that are potentially observable.
Thus, they become scientifically valid theories.

That, plus the fact that since they're observable, our definition of
"observable universe" just gets extended to encompass that larger
construct. Not directly observable today, of course, but observable
in the same sense that inflation is observable in the details of the
CMBR.

Which, inevitably, will lead to the question of what caused those
external mechanisms to exist... and then, philosophically, we're right
back to square one.

In any case, my intent wasn't to place some sort of probability one way
or the other on whether these very fundamental questions will ultimately
be answered, only to point out that their being unanswerable remains a
very real possibility.

Oh I know. I wasn't trying to be that literal either. I was making
more of a philosophical comment about the nature of the way we come to
understand how the universe works. Namely that we use certain tools
and as those tools get better, so might the limits to our
understanding.
--
Dave
.

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