- #36
Garth
Science Advisor
Gold Member
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As a point of information: the sum total of gravitational, matter and scalar field energies in SCC is zero, and always was.
Garth
Garth
How can existence be a flucuation of a field that doesn't exist yet? Doesn't that presuppose the existence of a field before existence itself arose?Chronos said:I think the point Thor raised is at least shared by some mainstreamers. The idea that the Universe may have appeared out of nothing and contains zero net energy, was first suggested by Edward Tryon in the 1970s. He proposed it might have appeared out of nothing as a vacuum fluctuation allowed by quantum theory. Steven Hawking, among others, has since echoed this sentiment. From a QT perspective, this is a very consistent explanation. The universe, as a quantum fluctuation, could only persist as long as it has by maintaining a near perfect balance between positive and negative energy. It is appealing at a certain level. I like symmetry in nature. I try to resist explanations that are intuitively correct, but don't always succeed. But I do still insist on observational evidence.
Chronos said:... The idea that the Universe may have appeared out of nothing and contains zero net energy, was first suggested by Edward Tryon in the 1970s. He proposed it might have appeared out of nothing as a vacuum fluctuation allowed by quantum theory. Steven Hawking, among others, has since echoed this sentiment. ...
I'm not so sure of that. It may be that these efforts will only apply to very tightly curled up space and we will not be able to compare with reality. It might be that more than one effort will give the same low energy results. Then what do we do?marcus said:either one or both of CDT and LQC could be wrong
both are getting extremely interesting results
both will pretty clearly be brought to the point where definite versions of them make unequivocal predictions
and they will be checked against the real universe
I expect to be able to watch, and feel lucky to.
Chronos said:...The answer may well be hidden inside black holes. Perhaps they do bud off new universes in an endless, eternal cycle. Which leads to an immediate problem. What happens to those universes when black holes merge, or evaporate? Is this universe in a death spiral with another incredibly massive black hole in another, vastly larger universe? Or perhaps our mother universe is in imminent peril in grandma universe. Are we embedded and imperiled by an infinite sequence of progressively larger black holes?
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