real life wrote:All I am doing is pointing out that the universe did not come into existence by 'natural' means,
And I'm pointing out that your assertions are flawed. If I can come up with counterarguments using known physics and/or facts within the realm of physics, then you should try a bit harder.
Quote: which you seem to admit when you appeal to a process outside the bounds of scientific law;
The only thing I speculated that was outside the "bounds of scientific law" was the conditions within the singularity with which most scientists believe the Big Bang originated from. There, I stated that according to physicists, the laws of physics breaks down. What I should have said, however, was that the known laws of physics breaks down.
Classical laws, for example, don't hold true on the quantum level. Before we discovered quantum mechanics, we couldn't explain the movement of an electron.
So it may be with the singularity, which is commonly believed to be the state of the Universe. Its existence is done through extrapolation of the expansion of the Universe backwards in time using general relativity.
Quote:Such is , by definition, a belief in the 'supernatural'.
Only if you take supernatural to mean "Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces."
Except, if we use that definition, that would mean that at one point in science's history, quantum mechanics was a description of supernatural occurences. After all, the movement of an electron would appear to violate natural forces (you can't go through two doors at once, but an electron can).
Before we knew about nuclear fusion, the Sun would have been supernatural, because it appeared to violate natural forces.
Granted, my speculations are merely that, speculations. And yes, you did hit the nail quite rightly on the head, that my speculations are no different from yours. But therein lies the death knell for your arguments. They are nothing more than speculations and if the ones I came up with are flawed, merely speculations and therefore not true, then so are yours.
It was an insanely roundabout way to get to my point, but we got there in the end.
Furthermore, I was wrong to take the position that the Big Bang violates the first Law of Thermodynamics. (In other words, I shouldn't have played by your rules). This would only be true if the energy before the Big Bang and after the Big Bang were different, however, scientists know that the Big Bang resulted from a singularity of infinitely dense matter. The calculations show this to be true. So nothing is violated. All that was in the singularity is still here, albeit in a different form.
You may, however, argue that the singularity coming out of nothing would violate the first law of thermodynamics, because nothing has zero energy and this Universe does not.
However, you are wrong there.
I've just taken a little bit of a read and I've found out that you can have negative energy, so it is possible that the Universe has net zero energy.
E. P. Tryon (Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?,
Nature 246 (1973) 396) sketched an argument where the negative gravitational potential energy of the Universe has the same magnitude as the positive energy contained within the Universe's contents (matter and radiation) and hence the total energy of the Universe is zero.
This explanation uses known physics to prove that the creation of the Universe does not violate the First Law of Thermodynamics, so it does not fall into the same pitfall as my previous speculations. Thing is, though, the above explanation only applies to classical physics.
However, further reading showed me that gravitational potential energy and the laws of conversation of energy do not hold up in General Relativity, which is what the Big Bang Theory is based on. Therefore the first law of thermodynamics doesn't even apply to Big Bang.
I tried reading the detailed explanation
here, but found it way too difficult to understand.
