Topic: Why does the cosmos exist at all? (Read 241 times)

I should have been clearer, sorry. You're talking about a curved path in three dimensions. I'm talking about a straight line in three dimensions, but with curvature applied through an inaccessible fourth dimension.

We can only conceive of three spatial dimensions, so have to proceed by analogy using one dimension fewer. If you travel direct - the shortest distance - between two points P and Q on the surface of a sphere, you are travelling in a straight line, d... but that line curves through three dimensional space. The equivalent straight line in three dimensional space, C, cuts through the surface of the Earth. You can see below that if your straight-line travel 'd' continues (the dotted black line) you end up approaching your starting point from the opposite direction.



This is what I mean - if (disregarding expansion) you travel directly 'up' into the air and then into space from the Earth's north pole, then if you continue in this straight line, eventually you would see the Earth's south pole coming into view above you. Same as if you travelled due East on Earth - eventually you'd arrive back at your starting point, from the West... same thing but one dimension higher.

Imagine the universe as the three dimensional surface of a four dimensional hypersphere. A straight line across a three dimensional volume returns to its starting point from the opposite direction, if that three dimensional volume is the 'surface' of a 4 dimensional hypersphere. We can do the 'd' journey, but we can't do the 'C' journey because our travel within the universe is restricted to the three dimensional 'surface', we can't tunnel through the fourth dimension.

Gravity, yes, can be conceived of as a higher dimension, in the sense that it can be explained not as an attractive force, but as a curvature of spacetime. For simplicity I think we should consider this a separate topic, because it is distinct from the 'straight line across a thing that is one dimension higher' argument, which holds regardless of gravity.

But wouldn't this be achieved by gravity? To slowly turn around to reach your starting point you would have to be affected by a pull that would over the course of millions of km make you turn by a degree or so, so that in the long run you wouldn't really be travelling a straight but a curved line. For you it would be straight, but if someone had the ability to watch you from a distance they'd see you travel through and around at the same time.
Yes space is expanding and we can observe this in a smaller scale by watching our solar system. We are slowly moving away from the Sun and our Moon is moving away from us.

Not necessarily. In fact it is simpler if it has no spatial edge - a finite but unbounded universe, where if - in theory - you travel in any direction in a straight line, you end up approaching your starting point*. Finite unbounded is the simplest shape - consider walking around the edge of a circle, it has no end, but has finite extent. This is one dimensional travel in a two dimensional space. Increase dimensionality by one, and you have the surface of a sphere - the surface of the Earth, finite yet without an edge, travel in any direction in a straight line and you end up approaching your starting point from the other side. This is two dimensional travel in a three dimensional space. Now increase dimensionality by one again, and consider the three dimensional 'surface' of a four dimensional space, a hypersphere, and you have the simplest possible shape for the observable universe. For simplicity this ignores any curled up additional dimensions as we see for example in string theory.

The analogy makes even more sense if we consider the established fact that the universe is expanding. This doesn't mean it is just accumulating more 'space' at the edges, rather space is expanding at every point. The common illustration (in one fewer dimensions) is the surface of a balloon - draw on some dots to represent galaxies, then start to blow the balloon up. The surface gets bigger, and every point on the surface moves away from every other point.


_{*In theory. But in practice this is an expanding universe, and even travelling at maximum possible speed c, it is difficult to ever return to your starting point because it would have expanded away from you.}

Why does it exist is one of those existential questions philosophers like to dwell upon. Why do we exist? Why do we have 2 hands instead of 4? Why do we live less than 100 years? Were we made by a godlike being, or maybe another, more advanced race... We could go on and on.
What interests me more is how big space really is. Is it possible to move through it from one end to the other? We know that even if it is spherical there has to be an outer edge. Would it be possible to warp it to travel through to te other part in an instant?

I'd not heard of that. I've just had a quick look, but I'm not remotely convinced by this theory. I don't want to be rude, but it reads like something out of the flat earth thread. It has zero evidence to support its claims, and disregards established and experimentally verifiable and reproducible physical laws and phenomena. It's also vague, which is a huge red flag in anything purporting to be scientific: Electricity is real! Therefore the big bang is false! This is patently nonsensical. It's almost as if someone started from a supposition that the big bang didn't happen, then scrambled some random pseudo-science and buzzwords together and said: here's why it didn't happen!

It's fine to want something to be true or false, but in order for it to be taken seriously it needs to be supported by a solid theoretical and ideally experimental framework, and - more than anything else - it needs to built from mathematics.

How can you prove that constants were the same as they are now, a million years ago?

Light that appears to come from thousands of lightyears away, might be totally changed by the distance to appear to be something that it is not.

Electric Cosmos theory shows flaws like these could easily exist.

We don't know. We only know by desire that our assumptions be correct.

Not really. We can trace everything back using current physical constants and known and experimentally reproducible laws. The only real anomaly is the inflationary period, which appears to suggest that during this time the universe expanded faster than the speed of light... but this I think is more a consequence of 'normal' physical laws not holding at vast energies. The inflationary period after all lasted from about 10^-36 to 10^-32 seconds after the big bang. We can trace the history of the universe with some confidence back to this point. Once you hit the inflationary epoch, you are sufficiently close to the bb itself that we can consider this beyond the current scope of our knowledge.

We do not know whether the big bang happened, it's a singularity, a backwards extrapolation to an isolated point. Singularities involve mathematical infinities, involve the exponential progressing to the vertical, an asymptote. Same with black holes. We can't define the singularity other than as a mathematical end point. It may not in fact be an end point at all, just a phenomenal concentration of energy that requires laws that we don't - and perhaps can't - understand (coming back to my earlier point about spatial extent and temporal progression being the framework of our perception rather than anything 'objective'). Perhaps the bb is the outpouring of a super-massive white hole, perhaps time flips into an 'earlier' universe on the other side... perhaps the bb is a collision between two lower dimensional universes within a higher dimensional multiverse, giving birth to our own... we have no idea.

But... we do know that the universe of today expanded from a tiny tiny point, right back at around 10^-32 seconds after the unknown/unknowable event that we term the big bang.

^^^ Right.

Nobody knows for certain what God's plan for man might have been. Adam and Eve, the first people, messed God's plan up right in the beginning, before He even had a chance to tell them His plan. So, the plan changed, and we don't know what it originally was. One idea of what God's original plan might have been, is that God made the universe for man to expand into.

Originally, God made man perfect. Man would not die, because everything in his system and on the Earth acted in a perfect way. Man was healthy and active, and probably could procreate faster than rabbits. So, what might happen when there was standing room only on Earth? Long before this happened, man would have found ways to travel to the stars, and terraform whatever planet-sized chunks of rock he found out there.

Just a thought. God might have done it some other way. But, even though we die before we can go far, it seems that we have this urge to go to the stars... maybe part of our original programming.

The cosmos is beautiful, just because there are no people there cosmontics has an infinite future and its possibilities are as infinite as the universe. Which proclaims the glory of God and shows him to be endowed with infinite knowledge and wisdom. and that which has taken on a new form of knowledge to men the sun for daylight and the moon and stars in the night light which constantly propagate the glory and knowledge of the Lord consistently and consistently. Everything was made to worship God.

Because if there was no universe, there could be no bubble gum.

Then this movie couldn't have been made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du5YK5FnyF4

The Cosmos exists for one basic reason. It's to show people and angels the glory of God (Who made the Cosmos) so that they/we can praise and worship Him.

Does God need our praise and worship? NO! Then why does He want us to do it?

God wants us to praise and worship Him because He is love. And in His love, he knows that it is to our best benefit to praise and worship Him because He is so great. So He gave us the Cosmos to look at so that we will be prompted to do the thing that will benefit us (not Him) more than anything else... to praise and worship God.

I think the problem is that we understand the universe only from our human reference frame. The concepts of space and time are the sensory framework within which human cognition works - through which we apprehend existence. Space (physical extent) can only be defined in relation to two objects (or two parts of an object). Time (temporal progression) can only be defined in relation to two events, something happening 'before' and something happening 'after'. This is how we understand reality. It is impossible to understand something objectively if you are situated within it. I would contend that we can only ever truly understand what reality is if we are able somehow to step outside it.

Beyond this, theoretical physics provides us with tantalising mathematical truths that afford us glimpses of a reality that we may never be able to comprehend. As our understanding of elementary particle physics and quantum physics progress, the level of abstraction increases as the reality is increasingly divergent from our everyday understanding. Quantum chromodynamics and the 'colour' force. Particle 'spin'. Indeed 'particles' themselves. Mass being a manifestation of an excitation of the Higgs field. The uncertainty principle. And on and on.

What I am saying is that we can't answer the question in the thread title because the word 'exist' is deeply subjective and problematic.

There is no exact answer.
Scientists are trying to build physical models of space, just like a child who made a paper boat with a sail blows on it and understands how a large sailing ship generally moves. Scientists compare these models with what they see in space. Since light from distant objects has traveled to us for billions of years, this means that we can see the distant past of the cosmos and check if the “models” fit what we see.
All theories of the origin of the cosmos describe what we see in the past of the cosmos and in its present. For example, we see that the entire sky is evenly lit in the "radio channel". That is, radio waves are pouring on us from everywhere. The radio brightness of the sky is about the same in all directions. And the properties of this radiation are explained (besides many other phenomena) by the so-called theory of inflation. She tells us about the extremely rapid expansion of space in the first fraction of a second of its existence. And this expansion continues to this day! Galaxies scatter, and at large distances - with anomalously high acceleration.
We can say that it all started from emptiness: space appeared from a vacuum. For physicists only, emptiness is not exactly emptiness. Particles constantly appear and disappear in it, providing a zero sum of energy in each “piece” of vacuum. But under certain conditions that arise by chance, just such a process is possible - the birth of the cosmos. This is how the most successful scenario for the birth of space looks like. But it does not mean at all that this is exactly how it was. We still have so much to study to get closer to real understanding.

There is no exact answer.
Scientists are trying to build physical models of space, just like a child who made a paper boat with a sail blows on it and understands how a large sailing ship generally moves. Scientists compare these models with what they see in space. Since light from distant objects has traveled to us for billions of years, this means that we can see the distant past of the cosmos and check if the “models” fit what we see.
All theories of the origin of the cosmos describe what we see in the past of the cosmos and in its present. For example, we see that the entire sky is evenly lit in the "radio channel". That is, radio waves are pouring on us from everywhere. The radio brightness of the sky is about the same in all directions. And the properties of this radiation are explained (besides many other phenomena) by the so-called theory of inflation. She tells us about the extremely rapid expansion of space in the first fraction of a second of its existence. And this expansion continues to this day! Galaxies scatter, and at large distances - with anomalously high acceleration.
We can say that it all started from emptiness: space appeared from a vacuum. For physicists only, emptiness is not exactly emptiness. Particles constantly appear and disappear in it, providing a zero sum of energy in each “piece” of vacuum. But under certain conditions that arise by chance, just such a process is possible - the birth of the cosmos. This is how the most successful scenario for the birth of space looks like. But it does not mean at all that this is exactly how it was. We still have so much to study to get closer to real understanding.

Except for the fact that nobody knows how much of what Hawking said is fact and not fiction. For example, the whole idea of Big Bang is based on the idea that math of a billion years ago is the same as the math of today. BB suggests such great changes in the past that math might have been quite different a billion years ago, and physics, as well.

This means that the whole BB idea is an exercise in circular referencing. It also means that the distant stars might not be stars at all, but simply beautiful views of something that was totally different... views that are reaching us through the distortion of ever-changing math and physics of what might be or might not be distant outer space.

The spacetime expansion was triggerred by some other natural process that we do not understand. 
It is nonsensical to even be asking for a cause in the absense of spacetime.

Why the hell do we have Black Holes in our universe?  Maybe we are on the other side of one such Black Hole.   
Is the cosmos an infinite Swiss cheese of recursive Black and White Holes, with frequent Big Bangs causing new universes to be born?

Our Big Bang could be an expanding White Hole, creating chemistry that created us, capable of asking this question.

If you can imagine Physics without a spacetime, you might be getting closer to building a model of how our spacetime came to exist.

The short answer: "The answer lies 'beyond' our spacetime.  The 'beyond' being undefined."

Hawking answered this and similar questions.

IIRC it was like "What is time or distance at the moment of the singularity, before the big bank?"

His answer was "Undefined."

That's true,  in the absence of the physical universe, space or time do not exist.

Thus no "why" question, presupposing causes and effects, which completely depend on space-time continum's existence.

Since you ask the "Why?" question, your post becomes philosophical. After all, the vast majority of science about the universe has not been discovered. And much of what has been discovered is theoretical promotions that may easily be wrong... as has been proven regarding many theoretical promotions of the past.

For example, the idea that stars are nuclear engines has not been entirely proven. Our observations of the activity of stars also fits electrical physics. The stars might be electrical phenomenon. See: https://www.electric-cosmos.org/summary.html; https://www.electricuniverseuk.eu/; https://duckduckgo.com/?q=electric+cosmose+universe&ia=web.

Since we know so little about the cosmos, when we believe what we think we know, without having solid proof of it, we have formed a religion/quasi-religion for ourselves. This means that when you ask that we not post "religious mambo jumbo," all you are really doing is telling folks to not post info about religions other than the one that exists in this thread.

Hi everyone!
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This question is for some heavy thinkers.

The multiverse theory is probably correct.  Many-Worlds Interpretation is also probably correct as well.
Talk about infinities!!!

But the bigger question is why, not how, the cosmos exists at all?

I've been thinking about it lately and the only explanation I can come up is that there no reason.  It just does.

What do you guys think?

PS. Please refrain from posting your religious mambo jumbo. I am talking about the cosmos, not just our universe.  Why is it there?
Thank in advance.