[lbo-talk] Neo-Lamarckianism???? Come on!

Matt lbo4 at beyondzero.net
Wed Jan 16 10:46:27 PST 2008


On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 12:28:23AM -0500, Shane Mage wrote:


> And beyond that, the "Big Bang" postulates the origin of this universe--
> governed by natural laws that have remained absolutely unchanged
> (because by definition uniform throughout spacetime) since its very
> first moment (that is how they retropredict the "inflationary" first
> moments
> of the universe)--in a "singularity." But just ask the question: "HOW
> did the supposed singularity, in which no natural laws applied, give
> birth to a universe governed by the precise (to "many decimal places")
> laws supposed to govern it today?" I defy anyone to come up with an
> answer that makes more
> sense than the Big Banger theory.

Your question is nonsensical.

When you ask "how did X occur?" you are asking for the cause of an event, and a cause/effect relationship presupposes a concept of linear time (e.g. a thing is caused by something that preceeded it).

Yet what you are vaguely understanding as the "Big Bang" is a cosmological model that has been well tested and is well understood back to some point in the past - roughly .02 seconds or so from the beginning of time.

Note what I wrote: the beginning of *TIME*. So you are asking for an answer to a question that *requires* linear time but for something which is defined explicitly by that concept of linear time not existing.

I hope that makes some sense. "What happened before the Big Bang?" is the same as "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" I suppose if you feel these questions require answers you are free to invent some kind of god to point to as an answer. But it would be wrong to conflate a psychological need to examine such a question with an inherent limitation in a scientific theory.

Asimov framed the question to be "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" and he had quite a charming little story about it:

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Matt

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