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• Included in the Stephen Hawking Posts List.
• In his book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Stephen Hawking flatly states: “The basic assumption of science is scientific determinism.”

Martin Winfree
January 13, 2023 at 4:02 PM
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(Part III)

The Big Bang theory of the beginning of the Universe has proved enduring, although the implications and the degree of precision have progressed considerably over time. Using what I gather is the same kind of thing that I mentioned in my last post, the “Lambda-CDM concordance model”, the age of the universe is estimated to be 13.772 ± 0.020 billion years – pretty precise for sure. Also, as I mentioned in my last post, science prides itself on having a good understanding of what has happened since the Big Bang, except under the most extreme conditions. But matters like the reason that there is so much more matter than antimatter remain unexplained.

In his book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Stephen Hawking flatly states: “I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science. The basic assumption of science is scientific determinism.” From Wikipedia: “Determinism is a philosophical view, where all events are determined completely by previously existing causes.”

I am not big on determinism of any type. Before reading that sentence, I previously had no idea even that A basic assumption of science is scientific determinism, never mind that THE basic assumption of science is scientific determinism. I am not sure exactly what Stephen Hawking means by that. To me, the whole idea of determinism seems invalid on its face – and certainly in view of such scientific concepts as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

Just as one obvious example (to me): Regardless of how completely and precisely someone might know the initial state of a given volume of air, even in a closed container, measuring where all of those particles might be a second, or an hour, or a year after that is utterly impossible. Even in the unlikely event that those kinds of measurements are even theoretically possible, actually being able to carry them out could simply not be done.

The popular perception, and I suppose, the scientific perception of the Big Bang as well, is that the only mysterious part is the very beginning. In some sense, the Big Bang is like a giant firework that expands into what we see today in the Universe. There is a well-known book about the Big Bang called The First Three Minutes (1977) by Steven Weinberg that describes in detail the early history of the Universe and implies, if not states outright that all is known except for the fill-in-the-blank tiny percentage of the first second of time. Here is the way that Wikipedia describes “the very early universe” in a section of the article on “Chronology of the Universe”:

“The first picosecond (10⁻¹²) of cosmic time. It includes the Planck epoch, during which currently established laws of physics may not apply; the emergence in stages of the four known fundamental interactions or forces — first gravitation, and later the electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions; and the expansion of space itself and supercooling of the still immensely hot universe due to cosmic inflation.

“Tiny ripples in the universe at this stage are believed to be the basis of large-scale structures that formed much later. Different stages of the very early universe are understood to different extents. The earlier parts are beyond the grasp of practical experiments in particle physics but can be explored through other means.”

A pico-second is one-trillionth of a second; and if you don’t mind my saying so, cramming all of the mysterious events in the very early universe into that small a period of time seems to me to be a little on the arbitrary side. Cosmic inflation, for instance, is said to have occurred during an even smaller period of time; per Wikipedia: “Cosmic inflation expands space by a factor of the order of 10²⁶ over a time of the order of 10⁻³⁶ to 10⁻³² seconds.” This is based upon detailed calculations, I am sure, that make the math work out; but equating that math to actual events and a timeline seems to be, shall we say, a leap of faith. For instance, as taken from Wikipedia:

“Although a specific ‘inflationary epoch’ is highlighted at around 10⁻³² seconds, observations and theories both suggest that distances between objects in space have been increasing at all times since the moment of the Big Bang, and are still increasing (with the exception of gravitationally bound objects such as galaxies and most clusters, once the rate of expansion had greatly slowed). The inflationary period marks a specific period when a very rapid change in scale occurred, but does not mean that it stayed the same at other times. More precisely, during inflation, the expansion accelerated. After inflation, and for about 9.8 billion years, the expansion was much slower and became slower yet over time (although it never reversed). About 4 billion years ago, it began slightly speeding up again.”

Cosmic inflation theory has been around since the late 1970’s and 1980’s, while the notion that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating dates from observations made in 1998. Thus, our knowledge continues to unfold over time, even though science likes to pretend that these are only minor refinements of what we already know. The details for the change at 4 billion years ago are unknown to me, but I dare say that a good reason for that change remains elusive. Overall, it is not that simple as I see it.

But, okay, let’s say that’s basically for real. There are other holes in physics that are still unexplained, often due to recent advances in science that are decidedly not minor refinements. Take the Standard Model of particle physics that was developed over the latter half of the 20th Century. As described in Wikipedia:

“Although the Standard Model is believed to be theoretically self-consistent and has demonstrated huge successes in providing experimental predictions, it leaves some phenomena unexplained. It falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions. For example, it does not fully explain baryon asymmetry, incorporate the full theory of gravitation as described by general relativity, or account for the universe’s accelerating expansion as possibly described by dark energy. The model does not contain any viable dark matter particle that possesses all of the required properties deduced from observational cosmology. It also does not incorporate neutrino oscillations and their non-zero masses.”

I don’t know what everything in that paragraph means, but having so much missing information makes the “Standard Model” much less complete than the name suggests. For starters, considering that dark matter and dark energy are not represented at this time, just 5% of the Universe is accounted for in the Standard Model. That much I do understand, more or less.