Impossible for Universe/Existence to be Random?

[time traveller d]

is it mathematicly/statisticly impossible for the universe and existence (i'm talking from the moment of the big bang to when life first appeared) to have happened randomly? so many billions and billions of thing's had to happen just right from the big bang to when life first appeared without anything going wrong to have happened randomly. i was just wondering if it was mathematicly/statisticly impossible for all this to happen randomly?

 

[hypermonkey2]

I would think that its perfectly possible, but do not forget that even the big bang theory is not accepted by the whole world. If this is more of a philosophical question on your part, it might be wise to seek answers outside of mathematics and science as well. i would be interested to see other responses to this question though, as i am only offering my opinion.

 

[Joffe]

"God does not play dice."

 

[robert Ihnot]

So God does play dice with the universe. All the evidence points to him being an inveterate gambler, who throws the dice on every possible occasion. http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/dice.html

 

[Tide]

The Law of Large Numbers does not hold for N = 1. Moreover, statistical deductions on the basis of a single known event are a bit shaky. :)

 

[HallsofIvy]

so many billions and billions of thing's had to happen just right

No, that's not true. billions and billions of things did happen and we are the result of that. If some had happened differently, the universe might well be very different and we might not be here to ask about it- but the fact that things did happen that way and we are here doesn't mean that there was any "plan" to produce us.

You can't talk about probabilities a posteriori. If I pick one number out of 10 million, the probability that I would get, say, 123730 would be 0.00000001. But it would make no sense to pick a number and then say "look, I got 123730. That couldn't have happened by chance!"

 

[DeadWolfe]

^^^

The reason for that is that all the probablities are equal.

If there were 10 million red balls in a jar, and 1 blue ball (no puns please), then getting the blue ball would indeed give us cause to be suspect of the randomness.

 

[Tide]

^^^

The reason for that is that all the probablities are equal.

If there were 10 million red balls in a jar, and 1 blue ball (no puns please), then getting the blue ball would indeed give us cause to be suspect of the randomness.

That presumes that you know something about the distribution of colors in the jar - which we don't - and even then it does not diminish in any way what Halls said. It is entirely possible to be dealt a royal flush on the first draw and we cannot infer "design" on the basis of that single observation. It might be a different matter if we are repeatedly dealt the royal flush but we have only one data point and even that is somewhat dubious.

 

[benorin]

We live in the uni-verse, uni means single and verse means spoken sentence; thus we live in a single spoken sentence.

 

[Curious3141]

This ain't "General Math".

 

[master_coda]

^^^

The reason for that is that all the probablities are equal.

If there were 10 million red balls in a jar, and 1 blue ball (no puns please), then getting the blue ball would indeed give us cause to be suspect of the randomness.

Of course, we're the ones colouring the balls, and we've done so after the fact. Pulling a ball out of a jar of red balls, painting the ball blue and then exclaiming "Wow, what are the chances we would pull out a blue ball?" is basically what we are doing when we label the current state of the universe as a particularly special outcome.

 

[SGT]

You must understand that things don´t assemble randomly. They assemble according to the laws of physics and chemistry. As HallsofIvy pointed, things have hapenned following those laws.
A simple example can explain that. What is the probability of getting 100 aces in the toss of 100 dice? It is so small, that if someone started tossing the dice from the beginning of the Universe until now, one toss per second, the odds are that it would not have happened still.
But let´s change the laws. Instead of picking all the dice after each toss and tossing them again, we let all aces in place and toss only the other dice. In a few minutes we would have the 100 aces.
That is how things work in Nature. The winning combinations are kept and the loosing ones are repeated endlessly.

 

[benorin]

We live in the uni-verse, uni means single and verse means spoken sentence; thus we live in a single spoken sentence.

By this I mean to say that God spoke the universe into existence.

 

[HallsofIvy]

By this I mean to say that God spoke the universe into existence.

So your theology is based on a pun?

 

[Treadstone 71]

Any theology is based on a pun.

 

[benorin]

So your theology is based on a pun?

Let me rephrase that:

By that I mean to indicate that I believe that God spoke the universe into existence.

 

[time traveller d]

You must understand that things don´t assemble randomly. They assemble according to the laws of physics and chemistry. As HallsofIvy pointed, things have hapenned following those laws.
A simple example can explain that. What is the probability of getting 100 aces in the toss of 100 dice? It is so small, that if someone started tossing the dice from the beginning of the Universe until now, one toss per second, the odds are that it would not have happened still.
But let´s change the laws. Instead of picking all the dice after each toss and tossing them again, we let all aces in place and toss only the other dice. In a few minutes we would have the 100 aces.
That is how things work in Nature. The winning combinations are kept and the loosing ones are repeated endlessly.

how did the laws of physics come into being? wouldn't someone(god) have to have basicly written these laws? well anyway, what i was trying to ask is what are the odds/probability the universe just came into existence on it's own? are there any mathematicly equation's that prove the universe could not come into existence on it's own or that it can. it's just a curiosity i have.

 

[HallsofIvy]

Yes, we understood that was the question and that question was answered-
1) You cannot calculate odds of an event without postulating some apriori probability distribution.

2) Even if the outcome you observed aposteriori has very low probability of happening, that does NOT mean that it didn't happen randomly.

Suppose the procedure is "pick a number between 1 and 1000000 at random with every number being equally likely to be picked" (i.e. postulating the uniform distribution). The probability that the number 127312 will be picked is, of course, 1/1000000. But in fact the probability that any specific number will be picked is that. I can't wait until after the number is chosen, see that it was, for example, 127312 and declare that the probability of that be chosen was so low, it couldn't happen at random!

 

[Data]

And for a physicist's example of Halls' point,

You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357! Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!

 

[russ_watters]

Or to rephrase: the odds of seeing a unique license plate (or unique universe) are exactly 1. Guaranteed.

 

[Jonny_trigonometry]

You must understand that things don´t assemble randomly.

hmm... A chaos theorist might disagree with you. There are things that seem to assemble themselves, or maybe it's us thinking that there is some sort of structure in something that truly has none. Check out the distribution of the eigenvalues of a randomly generated hermatian matrix. How is there somewhat of a non-random nature to the distribution when it's parent matrix was generated at random? Conversely, the zeta function is clearly defined, but its non-trivial zeros are a real pickle to try to understand. Many non-linear differential equations turn out to border between periodic and chaotic.

 

[Castilla]

Hallsofivy, do you think that your reasoning invalidates
the so called "philosophical anthropic principle"?

 

[bao_ho]

Biết Chết Liền!

 

[SGT]

hmm... A chaos theorist might disagree with you. There are things that seem to assemble themselves, or maybe it's us thinking that there is some sort of structure in something that truly has none. Check out the distribution of the eigenvalues of a randomly generated hermatian matrix. How is there somewhat of a non-random nature to the distribution when it's parent matrix was generated at random? Conversely, the zeta function is clearly defined, but its non-trivial zeros are a real pickle to try to understand. Many non-linear differential equations turn out to border between periodic and chaotic.

That is not what I said. Random processes happen all the time and some of them present what seems to be order. But what I mean is that the energy present in the Big Bang coalesced into elementary particles and those particles assemble themselves into atoms according to the laws of physics. If the four fundamental interactions had different values, we would have different particles and atoms or none at all.
In the same way, the atoms assembled themselves into molecules to form rocks, bacteria and human beings according to the laws of chemistry.
Are those laws the product of chaos or of an intelligent creator? We don't know. The important is that we live in an universe where those laws are valid, so the probability that this Universe came into beeing is 1.

 

[HallsofIvy]

Hallsofivy, do you think that your reasoning invalidates
the so called "philosophical anthropic principle"?

On the contrary, it IS, basically, the "anthropic principle"!

 

[Castilla]

I had understood that what the anthropic principle said was: to obtain a universal frame which tolerate inteligent life, we need so many fortunate choices in the selection of a lot of physicial constants that said choices seem to be directed, "manipulated".

What you say, hallsoftivy, seems to destroy said reasoning.

 

[HallsofIvy]

According to Wikpedia:

the anthropic principle in its most basic form states the truism that any valid theory of the universe must be consistent with our existence as carbon-based human beings at this particular time and place in the universe. In other words, "If something must be true for us, as humans, to exist; then it is true simply because we exist."

 

[Aridea]

is it mathematicly/statisticly impossible for the universe and existence (i'm talking from the moment of the big bang to when life first appeared) to have happened randomly? so many billions and billions of thing's had to happen just right from the big bang to when life first appeared without anything going wrong to have happened randomly. i was just wondering if it was mathematicly/statisticly impossible for all this to happen randomly?

There would be an awful lot to take into account to even try to figure out exactly with a number if the universe and existence could have happened randomly (actually I shouldn't say randomly; let's say because of the laws of physics), and even if someone did try to take this on from a purely mathematical point, you could never get an answer that was absolutely correct. There are literally billions upon billions of things to take into account that you could never include in your calculations. Just to mention a couple issues; there's the entropy for every single thing in the unvierse, and the gravity that every single body exerts. Another thing to take into account that is a debate in Physics today is whether our universe is the only universe.

This would also be hard considering that we don't actually know for sure if the big bang was how the universe formed in the first place, thus we don't actually "know" how the universe formed.

One thing you must keep in mind, is that with the numbers and amounts of things that we deal with in daily life, a lot of occurences have a slim chance of happening, but dealing with something as vast as the universe the numbers you are dealing with are huge. For example: there is a drawing you want to enter, and it has already been predetermined there will be 100,000,000 tickets, you buy one. You now have a 1/100,000,000 chance of winning; which is 0.00000001%, therefore you probably won't win. With something as large as the universe and everything contained within it a percentage like 0.00000001% can actually translate into a rather large real number; In our galaxy alone there are about 100 billion stars, and there are billions of galaxys in the visible universe. 0.00000001% of 100,000,000,000 is 1000! Based on these numbers I have seen calculations for planets that could support intelligent life and the numbers were surprisingly high.

Yes we do live in many of what are commonly called "Goldilocks Zones", but with the numbers we are dealing with in the universe there is room for "us" to have happened. As far as what I have seen on the subject; it's not impossible that we are here purely because of the laws of physics. There doesn't have to be any grand design planned out by god, it is entirely possible that the laws of science and nature made this all happen.

I agree with what Hypermonkey2 was saying about maybe looking for answers outside of a math and physics forum. I guess it depends on what exactly you are trying to get out of the answer or why you seek it. For me it is interesting to think about the numbers and the vastness of everything in a scientific manner, but if you are trying to prove to yourself that god does or does not exist, that answer will be inside of you, not in here.