That law is a human construct. It could be wrong.
Some of that may be due to how the question is framed. Fact of the matter is, none of us can afford to wait another 14 billion years, and our ignorance as to what astronomers â should any exist at that time â would see is a bit of a philosophical empasse, but arguably uninteresting for science as we have it. The point is, we could always question whether something that looks a certain way actually is that way, or merely appears that way, and there is no ultimate settling of any such questions, nor, indeed, any point in trying[1]. For it remains either way reasonable to come to and defend conclusions in accord with the state of the evidence as it is available to us, irrespective of whether any of it bears any ultimately relation to some sort of super-truth we have done nothing to establish the existence of. We have predictions to make, we have problems to solve, and holding ourselves up on philosophical possibilities like last-thursday-ism has not proven an effective means towards goals like that.
It could be right, too. And right-ness and wrong-ness are also human constructs, while weâre at it.
Meanwhile operating under the assumption that the law correctly describes at least some fairly accessible class of phenomena seems to work, as does recognizing the limits of its applicability. Speculating about whether anything and everything is âtrueâ, on the other hand, seems to have a⌠different scope of utility, letâs say.
In fact, given how utterly meaningless it would be, Iâm tempted to say these lines of thought arenât even âquestionsâ in the traditional sense to begin with. âŠď¸
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Literally nothing more than an assumption. We simply have no idea the extend to which the conservation laws apply, or what their true ontology is.
From a historical perspective the laws of physics are actually just descriptive. The idea that they cannot ever be violated, or that they apply only to ânaturalâ things (whatever that truly even means) are basically extrapolations. Theyâre not deductions, theyâre at best support by inductive arguments. Again, whether they always hold, or are constant, isnât truly known.
Your first premise everyone should be able to agree to.
Really? When was that established? What empirical evidence is there that the universe once did not even exist?
Itâs nothing but philosophy.
Science is a sub-discipline within philosophy. Philosophy informed by empirical evidence. If youâre doing arguments (deductive or otherwise), youâre doing philosophy.
Science is the act of doing observations, constructing hypothesis, putting them to the test, recording the results, and publishing the results for others to assess. Youâre doing none of that. Youâre just doing philosophy.
LOL. These are all just assertions.
We donât know that there was an ultimate beginning.
Even if there was, that might simply mean there was a first moment of time, which does not entail the non-existence of the universe and itâs laws.
Even if the universe did not exist, we strictly donât know whether the same applies the laws of physics (from our pespective we have just sort of âcodifiedâ our observations, we do know know the conditions under which they might hold or not).
Alternative possibilities are along the lines of Vilenkinâs proposal that the laws of physics have some sort of platonic or even necessary existence (in the same way theists define God to be necessary).
Yet another alternative is that they are just brute facts, or that the universe itself could be (like some of Godâs purported attributes).
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Ronald where are you getting these ideas? Itâs certainly not standard vocabulary in philosophy, or science.
But more importantly, who cares what you call things? Whatever might exist apart from/outside of spacetime isnât automatically God.
Again there could be facts about such a reality that still govern the function and emergence of the physical cosmos from such a state, that are not meaningfully equal to the divine and omnipotent mind postulated by theism.
I mention here again the proposal by Alexander Vilenkin, of the possibility of the laws of physics having some sort of platonic existence.
If spacetime did not exist that doesnât mean there was nothing at all (which you must agree to because you believe that God existed at least).
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I find that the mathematics, in isolation from facts, are frequently right. Iâve had some very strange arguments with creationists along those lines. Theyâll come up with some probability for something or other which relies upon some assumptions that range from âquestionableâ to âknown to be false.â And when I point out that the assumptions are wrong, theyâll tell me that Iâm denying math. I try to point out that if you assume I am 70 feet tall, it is a simple mathematical fact that I am 840 inches tall; to say I am not 840 inches tall is more an argument with the facts upon which the math is based than it is a denial of math.
There is a kind of strange assumption in a lot of these arguments. They suppose that certain things like math and logic produce results which are utterly unimpeachable. And thatâs pretty much true, IF the numbers, premises, facts, etc. on which the math and logic rely are both correct and amenable to the particular sorts of logical or mathematical operations performed upon them. But such things as the existence of gods do not reduce easily to numbers or to simple concepts capable of being moved around in logic like checkers on a checkerboard.
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To my understanding, a âQuantum Creationâ (Vilenkinâs term) is balanced, with positive energy being balanced by the negative energy of gravity (I canât explain that one, by thereâs a physicist in the house 
). New energy can be created, so long as energy is conserved.
Iâd call it an arbitrary distinction, defining anything before the Big Bang to be unnatural. We donât know what came before, but we know vacuum energy is natural, so there is no reason to think Quantum Creation should be unnatural. RC is trying to define this in a way such it could only be an act of Something. Of course we canât know that either, but he has makes the same Prior assumption P[God]=1.0, and viola!
That is in fact a perfectly fair accusation. Having studied both in university, I can tell you that Bayesian inference is a very different form of statistical analysis to, and more importantly far less rigorous than, Statistical hypothesis testing.
In particular Bayesian inference is highly susceptible to the selection of its assumed prior distribution. Although it may be useful for exploratory âmodel selectionâ as you suggest, this lack of rigor means it NOT appropriate for testing scientific hypotheses.
Further, I would not be in the least bit surprised if Vinekinâs proposal were to prove equally amenable to a Bayesian approach.
You are disingenuously avoiding my point. I was not extolling the virtues of the Aguirre model, but rebutting your repeated false claim that the BGV theorem âprovesâ that our universe had a beginning, by quoting both the original BGV Theorem article, and the Guth article you yourself cited, showing that they explicitly disavow your claim. Here they are again (this time omitting the mention of Aguirre â so that it does not trigger you into going into another irrelevant rant):
What can lie beyond this boundary? Several possibilities have been discussed, one being that the boundary of the inďŹating region corresponds to the beginning of the Universe in a quantum nucleation event [12].
There is of course no conclusion that an eternally inďŹating model must have a unique beginning, and no conclusion that there is an upper bound on the length of all backwards-going geodesics from a given point. There may be models with regions of contraction embedded within the expanding region that could evade our theorem.
Oh, sure. The first law of thermodynamics, if we wish to take it that seriously, does not state that energy cannot shift between reservoirs, and consequently change locally. What it says is that the total amount of energy does not change in a closed system (i.e. one, that cannot exchange energy with another).
And since you ask⌠
More accurately, there are only so many avenues energy can come in or out of a system: Heat can be exchanged with another, particles can, mechanical work can be done to or by the system. Perhaps chemical processes can capture energy into bonds, or release them thence, or imposing electrical and magnetic fields can transfer energy into or out of the system, etc. The point is, itâs always under control, there isnât ever any magical term of unknown value that will not be accounted for.
Whether that happens in nature may remain an open question to a hard enough sceptic, but they would be hard-pressed to cite an actual confirmed example in areas where the law is yet taken as that much of a given, or to propose an alternative modeling that would yield testable predictions for such cases as well as account for all of thermodynamics that seems to abide just fine by the law.
One should perhaps note here that Noetherâs theorem provides an alternative perspective on the character of conservation laws like the conservation of energy. Conserved quantities are a mathematical inevitability for problems that have some inherent symmetry. Energy (or, really, Hamiltonâs function, a generalization) in that formulation corresponds to an invariance of the system to translations in time. Personally, I find this less satisfying. For one, because it is much more technical and it is not readily obvious what the advantage of that is. More curiously to me yet, âconserved quantityâ is one that doesnât change with time, and where this is fine for things like momentum, which correspond to symmetries in spatial translations, something about the âdimension of symmetryâ being the same as the one wherein the quantity is conserved feels to me like, even within this generalization of conservation laws, energy is yet something special.