A Question from a Non Scientist

[Daphne Bagshawe]

Dear Marcus Exciting to hear from you again . I suspect I should have started a new thread but I wasn't sure how to do it ! I will contact Roy Maartens after all the worst he can do is say no. Although I am no longer with them I did become chairman of the Entire County Council as well as our SACRE and now head up a body of people known as the East Sussex Ambassadors where I continue to do what I can for interfaith work. I am a Catholic and the Pope awarded me the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice Cross for my work in this area. I would like to move on to encourage religious people to be more willing to listen to the analytical and logically founded arguments of Scientists. After all nothing that is true can contradict any religious view provided the religious perspective is correct. Only a fool continues to believe something which reason proves to be false.Coming back to my latest ramblings if all thought takes time then I wonder how we can know that we ourselves are?It seems to me that we can only know that we have been. Cogito ergo Sum should perhaps be Cogito ergo Eras. Also even if there may have been time before the Big Bang my real question is can there be time if nothing physical exists? That becomes more complex if we ask what is the situation if things existing cease to be. Their previous existence remains a fact so we would seem to be entitled to have time past even in a matter free universe. Thank you for the recommended articles I will read them . A Bientot Daphne

 

[marcus]

I will contact Roy Maartens after all the worst he can do is say no.

Excellent. We will try to do a prep session with you here, to sharpen your questions---if you are so inclined.

and the Pope awarded me the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice Cross for my [interfaith] work...

I would like to move on to encourage religious people to be more willing to listen to the analytical and logically founded arguments of Scientists.

IMHO the award is a considerable honor! and also it speaks well of the Church that it recognizes interfaith work.

After all nothing that is true can contradict any religious view provided the religious perspective is correct.

I believe you are right, however working this out in detail is going to be a big job.

BTW I noticed a statement by Guy Consolmagno S.J. a year or two ago which impressed me. I am happy to see that his book is a best seller at Amazon.co.uk. The book is a guide to the heavens called "Turn Left at Orion" or something like that. I haven't seen the book, and don't imagine it has any relevance to what we are talking about, but I really liked the seamless way he fitted together his work as a professional astronomer with his spiritual life as a Jesuit.

Now I think we should focus on talking science in this thread. My attitude is that I assume you will be talking to Roy Maartens one of these days, or someone like him---some cosmologist. You might be looking for a speaker for some lay organization of people concerned with sprituality and science, or some such thing may come up. What we should do is help you sharpen your questions ahead of time.

this is a fine thread for that sort of thing, as long as we are talking science.

You can also start threads in Philosophy subforum, it is easy to start threads: there is a button for it at the top of the menu of any forum. But as far as I can see this one is fine right where it is.

Also even if there may have been time before the Big Bang my real question is can there be time if nothing physical exists?

You have mentioned several times that as you see it TIME requires MATTER. I agree entirely. I cannot imagine time without some physical process. And I cannot imagine measuring time without some kind of real material clock.

Thank you for the recommended articles

I am glad you are interested! Please don't be discouraged if I recommend looking at an article and you find it too technical. I think when articles are available online it can be helpful to a layperson to take a look at them just to get a rough idea of what the scientists are talking about. there is usually some general discussion right at the beginning, and again sometimes at the end, in the conclusions section. No need to get bogged down.

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Here is a slide-show talk that Sir Roger Penrose gave in 2005 at Cambridge. He draws his own slides with colored felt-tip pens to illustrate his ideas. They are mostly intuitive pictorial, without very much in the way of mathematical formulas. And yet the talk is not for lay audience! He has an interesting style of talking to fellow mathematicians and physicists.
The subject of the talk is Before the Big Bang---some crazy ideas

http://www.Newton.cam.ac.uk/webseminars/pg+ws/2005/gmr/gmrw04/1107/penrose/

He starts the talk by saying that if someone had asked him two months earlier if there was anything before the big bang he would have said NO.
The very idea of "before" the big bang, he would have told them, does not make sense. this was the conventional view. (and he mentioned Stephen Hawking as a popular proponent of that view).
But then, said Penrose, two months earlier he changed his mind and began thinking of it differently.

I gather that quite a lot of people are currently thinking about this and they have different ways of picturing it. To me, Bojowald's picture makes more sense than Penrose's, and I don't think that the objection Penrose raises to Bojowald's idea are convincing. But that is at the level of detail. the main thing to notice is that the old view, that the idea of "before" doesn't make sense, is developing some cracks.

So I think people of religious faith need to be on their toes these days and should be cautious not to identify the moment of the big bang with the Creation. A Creator could also be outside of time and could have created a world where time goes back farther than we can see!

So our universe might just have a kind of bounce at that moment 14 billion years ago and we might actually not KNOW how far back in time it actually goes. (maybe even for ever)

then the bounce event would be a very interesting process for scientists to study and to marvel at---but it would not be appropriate to identify it with creation.

what I am presenting is what I would call a radical view. There would still be conservatives who hold to the belief that the idea of "before" the big bang has no meaning----they use a cosmological model which breaks down at that point and refuses to go back any further. And the conservative view can accommodate people who want to equate the big bang with the creation of the universe.

If you try clicking on Penrose's talk, then if you have a fast internet connection you should immediately see his first slide and hear the applause from the Cambridge audience, and then he should immediately start talking.

If this doesn't happen then please let me know. He has given the same talk other places and I may be able to get a link that works on your computer.

If you CAN get Penrose talk, don't think you have to watch and listen to the whole thing. Only as much as you need to get a taste and find entertaining. It is a fantastic talk and may have puzzled the physicists at Cambridge almost as much as it does us. He is quite an entertaining speaker I think, whether or not one understands everything he has to say. A few minutes taste should suffice.

 

[Daphne Bagshawe]

You are marvellous and very kind to a non scientist , but I am a scientist in spirit ! I just lack any scientific knowledge ! I will follow up all your suggestions and then I will reappear ,to get prepped up and to ask more questons I have no doubt. Best wishes D