Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

Re:Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No... by onion2k on Thursday June 06, 2019 @11:42AM (#20115596)

That's only disturbing if you believe everything is simple enough that humans could comprehend it straight away. If you accept that some stuff is beyond our understanding, and will be for quite a while yet, everything is much less bothersome. Accept that you are fallible and the universe is fine.

I'm not saying this is easy though.

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Re:Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No... by almost_usual on Thursday June 06, 2019 @11:46AM (#20115653)

This is how I view the universe. We make attempts to interpret it and probably never will fully comprehend it. The perceived boundaries of our universe is the edge of our consciousness and what we understand as humans. As we evolve so will our understanding and interpretations.

For me it is more of a humbling feeling than disturbing.

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Re:Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No... by chii on Thursday June 06, 2019 @11:58AM (#20115770)

> If you accept that some stuff is beyond our understanding

isn't that just an elaborate way to say 'give up'? I asked religious friends of mine about what god _is_, and the common answer is that it's beyond human understanding.

I don't believe that people should take things on faith, and accept that anything is beyond understanding.

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Re:Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No... by NeoBasilisk on Thursday June 06, 2019 @06:59PM (#20120048)

To some degree, it is the willingness to "know your place" in human history. No one in ancient Greece could have discovered cosmic background radiation or observed that all galaxies exhibit redshift, which would have provided evidence for the existence of a Big Bang.

Similarly, we have limitations to what we can observe and measure. We strive to continuously make improvements, but we also need to accept that not all questions will be answered within our lifetimes, and unless civilization collapses, schoolchildren will have a more complete understanding of the nature of the universe in 300 years than we do.

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Re:Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No... by onion2k on Thursday June 06, 2019 @12:38PM (#20116208)

isn't that just an elaborate way to say 'give up'?

Accepting that we don't understand something is a first and very necessary step to even realising there's something to understand. Believing that we have the answer (eg "God made the universe!") is exactly what shuts down scientific inquiry and makes people 'give up'. I'm saying literally the opposite of that - we have to realise there's something to out there to learn in order to try and learn it.

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Re:Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No... by jorangreef on Thursday June 06, 2019 @03:47PM (#20118341)

If we accept your logic, then believing gravity to be the answer to "why things fall" would shut down scientific inquiry?

On the contrary, it was belief in the creator that opened up scientific inquiry in the minds of Johannes Kepler etc.

That the universe was not chaotic, but created by a personal being, led them to think there must be some order to it that could be studied.

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Re:Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No... by BOBOTWINSTON on Thursday June 06, 2019 @12:50PM (#20116336)

He only said it was beyond our understanding "for some unknown amount of time", or that it might end up being too complicated/incompatible with our existence.

His comment wasn't at all about giving up, honestly the exact opposite. It was about avoiding/managing the disturbed/dreadful feelings that commonly accompany the thoughts and work in this domain.

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Re:Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No... by quotemstr on Thursday June 06, 2019 @04:31PM (#20118823)

There's good reason to believe that humans can understand everything that exists: we're Turning complete, and mathematics admits no higher category of functions than those that a Turing machine can compute. We may not be able to physically compute every function, but we can devise a plan for computing any function, and isn't that tantamount to being able to understand anything in principle?

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