The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything

He needs a better PR agent. His last attempt 2,000 years ago is wearing off.

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Originally Posted by LondonLadyboys

Oh I don't know! just when I think there is a god someone goes and write a bad bloody review! lol ;-)

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Originally Posted by trish

I have a very good friend and colleague who is in fact a theologian and she sometimes invites me to sit in on informal discussions with her colleagues. I give it a valiant effort but usually I have no idea what they're talking about.

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Probably mutual!

"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.”
Oscar Wilde

There's an interesting point here - it is often claimed by supporters of some divine intervention in creation that if some constant or parameter were slightly different then the universe or some aspect of it would not exist - certainly not in it's current form. What exists is what will exist given the laws of physics and its fundamental constants. That's all. The tendency to see causality is common. A trap that many fall into when discussing evolution.

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Originally Posted by trish

True enough. There are more believers among physicists than biologists, and they often lay out their reasons in books for laypersons, but very rarely if ever in refereed, scientific journals.

Fine tuning is indeed something that is discussed in professional papers and conferences. If the gravitational constant were a little smaller, matter would not have clumped into stars and galaxies. If the gravitational constant were bigger, the universe would have collapsed before life had time to evolve. The trouble is, all these exercises hold the other constants of nature at their known fixed values while fiddling with the one of interest. It has yet to be determined how large a domain of variation among all the constants together is tolerable to life as we know it (not to mention life as we don't know it). So we don't really know if there is a fine tuning problem. To know if there is or not we would first have to have a definitive calculation of how probable life is in a randomly chosen universe. We would have to specify chosen from what? Do we mean chosen from a prescribe set of models, or a real collection of multiverses? What do we mean by randomly chosen? What values of Planck's constant are possible choices and what distribution function applies? The basic physics is just not there to answers these questions and may never be there. Theoreticians and especially cosmologists do definitely do a lot of speculation in their professional papers...but they are usually honest about it and will warn you up front.

In almost everything people do there's a leap of faith. Scientific truth is not the same as 100% certainty. Indeed it knows better than to aim for certainty. It's content with approximations, refinements, revisions and muddling along.

Mathematicians on the other hand aspire to certainty. You gotta love 'em for the purity of their hearts. But even they make mistakes (oops...forgot to carry the one).

There is a faith that aspires to certainty, and a faith that is provisional and open to revision.

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Originally Posted by Prospero

"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.”
Oscar Wilde

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Skeptic that I was as an adolescent, I had recently come to believe in a Supreme Being after thumbing through a Victoria’s Secret catalogue.
~ Woody Allen

I know, I've brought the level of intellectual argument down to my level

causality in evolution ie intelligent design? The eye it is argued is far too complex to have "evolved"

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Originally Posted by Prospero

causality in evolution ie intelligent design? The eye it is argued is far too complex to have "evolved"

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Indeed, Charles Darwin himself acknowledged in On the Origin of Species—the 1859 book detailing his theory of evolution by natural selection—that it might seem absurd to think the eye formed by natural selection. He nonetheless firmly believed that the eye did evolve in that way, despite a lack of evidence for intermediate forms at the time. Now we have substantial evidence from three sources – the fossil record (which is patchy as soft tissues rarely fossilise), the taxonomy of living creatures and, more recently, studies of the genetic code across many species.
The simplest “eye” has to achieve three functions.

• Light detection
• Shading, in the form of dark pigment, for sensing the direction light is coming from
• Connection to motor structures, for movement in response to light

In some creatures all three functions are undertaken by a single cell - single-celled euglena, for example. Agreed this is not an eye in that some spatial image of the external world is formed. The most-basic structure that is widely accepted as an eye has just two cells: a photoreceptor that detects light, and a pigment cell that provides shading. The photoreceptor connects to ciliated cells, which engage to move the animal in response to light. The marine ragworm embryo has such a two-celled eye.

An eye with more photoreceptors has more power: it can detect variations in light intensity across its surface. A cup-shaped eye can better sense both the direction light is coming from and the movement of nearby objects. These improvements require only minor changes to the basic eye. Planaria (a non-parasitic flatworm) have such “eyes”.

Invertebrates followed the complex eye – a collection of individual photoreceptors each with their own light gathering structures including lenses. In sense, this was not successful path. Insect predators (eg Dragonflies) have over 30,000 segments in the their eyes – which are large structures. If we were to possess compound eyes of insects but with our existing ability to see fine detail (1 second of arc – a telegraph wire at a km) then the diameter of the eye would be 2 metres!

Vertebrates developed simple eyes with a single lens and a retina. Our abilities are close the physical limits in terms of sensitivity and ability to see fine detail.

Biologists have made significant advances in tracing the origin of the eye—by studying how it forms in developing embryos and by comparing eye structure and genes across species to reconstruct when key traits arose. The results indicate that our kind of eye took shape in less than 100 million years, evolving from a simple light sensor for circadian and seasonal rhythms around 600 million years ago to an optically and neurologically sophisticated organ by 500 million years ago.



Here ended the First Lesson

Normally, I would call the claim that atheism or science are religious belief themselves a bunch of bunk, but then I see the scientist refer to the non-scientist as "laity". Guess that's one of those linguistic problems.

The problem I have with so many theories about the universe are the assumption of limits. The "expanding universe", for example, would require that there be non-universe to expand into. I'm not willing to make that assumption. There's more, but it just seems that we're trying to measure what could be infinite with finite tools & assumptions. Same goes for continuum. There's no end in sight, so why assume there's a beginning to look for? Isn't the whole discussion just an effort to get our finite heads around the concept of eternity? Very entertaining. Carry on.

Pre big bang the universe was the size of a softball, finite, yet it had no edges. And Adam and Eve is hard to imagine??????

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Originally Posted by hippifried

Normally, I would call the claim that atheism or science are religious belief themselves a bunch of bunk, but then I see the scientist refer to the non-scientist as "laity". Guess that's one of those linguistic problems.

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Got me! I never thought of the origin of the word "layman" before and when I stop to figure out just how and why I use the term I'm embarrassed. I think I'll just refrain from using it outside its literal meaning. Thanks.

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The problem I have with so many theories about the universe are the assumption of limits. The "expanding universe", for example, would require that there be non-universe to expand into. I'm not willing to make that assumption.

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The models do not not require space to expand into. Space itself expands. This seems to be a really difficult conceptual point which is why I described the toy universe in post #149. I'll see if I can do better in some future post. So there is no assumption here that the universe is within another. There are assumptions though, assumptions with experimental and observational evidence. Namely the assume the laws of physics currently understood apply, most notably the Einstein field equations.

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There's more, but it just seems that we're trying to measure what could be infinite with finite tools & assumptions. Same goes for continuum. There's no end in sight, so why assume there's a beginning to look for? Isn't the whole discussion just an effort to get our finite heads around the concept of eternity? Very entertaining. Carry on.

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A religious person might say it's presumptive to think we're finite. Whatever our capacities we can only use what we got. But how much of a limitation is finite tools and finite assumptions? In elementary school a child learns her arithmetic tables and a simple algorithm and she becomes a master of division. There are infinitely many pairs of numbers she could potentially choose to divide, infinitely many different story problems she can solve. She hasn't conquered all of arithmetic, but she is a master of an infinite array of a particular kind of problem.