Question Cyclical Universe

Jul 13, 2020
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I posted this question a few days ago knowing it may be unanswerable but I think it relates to the question above:
"Is it possible the Big Bang was the result of a super massive black hole in a parallel universe that allowed matter to be ejected into what has become our universe?"
 
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Interesting posts #1-4. Here are five points that science must meet according to a 1982 Fed court and judge ruling.

The essential characteristics of science are:

1. It is guided by natural law;
2. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law;
3. It is testable against the empirical world;
4. Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word;
5. It is falsifiable.

Using points 1 and 2 of the definition of science, what natural law(s) explains a *cyclical universe*?
Using point 3, what test(s) show the universe we observe today is a *cyclical universe*?
Using point 5, how is a cyclical universe falsifiable?
 

Catastrophe

"Science begets knowledge, opinion ignorance.
"Is it possible the Big Bang was the result of a super massive black hole in a parallel universe that allowed matter to be ejected into what has become our universe?"
You don't need a so called parallel universe for this proposition.
 
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IG2007

"Don't criticize what you can't understand..."
Using points 1 and 2 of the definition of science, what natural law(s) explains a *cyclical universe*?
Well, no natural law does explain a cyclical universe. Or, does every natural law does?
Okay, according to my knowledge of universe (that's really less compared to you all), until now, there's no evidence that dark energy is not constant. As far as I know, dark energy is constant. And that means, the universe is gonna expand forever. Er, and that's why we can say that a universe cycle theory is falsified by this.

But there, logic says that a universe cycle theory is not impossible. I mean, the big bang happened. So, there might be a universe before this and before this and before this. So, well, the cycle goes on.

But there again, the first law of thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can transformed from one form to another. Well, there wasn't any energy at 0. (Please, no void potential energy, it isn't logical) So, the logic for a cyclic universe gets out of circle.
 
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Catastrophe

"Science begets knowledge, opinion ignorance.
Do not put too much trust in anthropomorphic "logic". It is filtered through our mechanisms of perception and our misguided ideas of the importance of our species.

You might "see" something through our eyes, and it might "appear" harmless. Put on a helmet which allows you to "see" other forms of electromagnetic radiation and it might really be highly dangerous. X-rays, or solar radiation. We live in ignorance afforded us by the limited senses we have developed and which "knew not" of radiations which did not tell our genes to beware. Man eating tigers did not emit dangerous stellar radiation.


Cat :)

Of course Rod is totally and completely correct. Those are the rules by which the "game" is played. Those who want to change the goalposts cannot claim to be playing the same game.

If anyone wants to imagine what would happen if we were to make the net higher, rhe penalty area smaller or the racquets made of spaghetti, then that is a different game and should be recognized as residing in a separate world of imagination where scientific logic does not apply.. It is not a world in which we would survive . . . . . . . . .
 
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Of course Rod is totally and completely correct. Those are the rules by which the "game" is played. Those who want to change the goalposts cannot claim to be playing the same game.

If anyone wants to imagine what would happen if we were to make the net higher, rhe penalty area smaller or the racquets made of spaghetti, then that is a different game and should be recognized as residing in a separate world of imagination where scientific logic does not apply.. It is not a world in which we would survive . . . . . . . . .
And this place of wild ideas -- where eschewing relevant objectivity is half the fun -- has a home town... Sillyville. ;)
 
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Jul 13, 2020
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"Is it possible the Big Bang was the result of a super massive black hole in a parallel universe that allowed matter to be ejected into what has become our universe?"
You don't need a so called parallel universe for this proposition.
Thank you for the reply. So what you are saying is that the big bang could be the result of a super massive black hole?
 
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Catastrophe

"Science begets knowledge, opinion ignorance.
Thank you for the reply. So what you are saying is that the big bang could be the result of a super massive black hole?
Yes. Have you seen my egg timer posts? Remember the old fashioned egg timers with sand running through? Still very effective - even in the 21st Century. I suppose I could use figure 8 but this may suggest a zero size nexus whereas the egg timer suggests some way through between.
 
If the Universe is indeed cyclical , how was the first one made ?

Sorry if someone covered this, but if the Universe is indeed cyclical, there is no "first one" or "last one." It is a continuous process.

What we see now came from the previous cycle, ad infinitum. By definition, there would be no "first one".

As noted in another thread, it sounds like a perpetual motion machine. Forget those laws of thermodynamics.
 
Sorry if someone covered this, but if the Universe is indeed cyclical, there is no "first one" or "last one." It is a continuous process.
“It’s turtles all the way down!” How can there be no beginning in a temporal universe?

What we see now came from the previous cycle, ad infinitum. By definition, there would be no "first one".
Assuming you’re not being facetious, are there other examples of first-free cycles?

As noted in another thread, it sounds like a perpetual motion machine.
I think the patent office has those designs in a special metal can. At some point, they banned their submittal.

Forget those laws of thermodynamics.
The universe does seem to put a twist to them, so I’ve been told, but I doubt their is adequate evidence that entropy can so easily be dismissed from one supposed cycle to another.
 
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The universe does seem to put a twist to them, so I’ve been told, but I doubt their is adequate evidence that entropy can so easily be dismissed from one supposed cycle to another.

Really glad you brought that up. It would seem that entropy does not rule all aspects of nature, or at least my interpretation of entropy. That is one reason I asked about Hierarchical Cosmology and the Big Bang, with galaxies in web-like clusters, highly organized, expanding into expanding voids. This is not very entropic - it is appears rather organized at all scales, although chaotic to a certain extent.

How do you get clustering if entropy rules? Would guess that it rules the nature of the universe that it inherits, or else there is something very strange that is going to happen in the distant future to maximize disorder. Entropy on a cosmic scale is not something I have given much consideration to. It all seems very mysterious.
 
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Really glad you brought that up. It would seem that entropy does not rule all aspects of nature, or at least my interpretation of entropy. That is one reason I asked about Hierarchical Cosmology and the Big Bang, with galaxies in web-like clusters, highly organized, expanding into expanding voids. This is not very entropic - it is appears rather organized at all scales, although chaotic to a certain extent.

How do you get clustering if entropy rules? Would guess that it rules the nature of the universe that it inherits, or else there is something very strange that is going to happen in the distant future to maximize disorder. Entropy on a cosmic scale is not something I have given much consideration to. It all seems very mysterious.
Yep, it's mysterious. I suppose some sort of anisotropic shock pattern that may have taken place prior to inflation, or perhaps during inflation, to favor such formation. But I'm just toying with it. It's beyond me.
 
Perhaps it might boil down to proton decay. If we have evaporating BHs, what we might end up with is some form of atomic structure or degenerate matter that ultimately decays into its subatomic particles. Once the proton goes, the neutrons follow. Then all to ER.

If so, clustering is not relevant, nor would be uniform distribution of matter. Entropy still rules by some mechanism.

For the mind-numbing - This is lifted from Wiki on Proton Decay*:

"According to the Standard Model, protons, a type of baryon, are stable because baryon number (quark number) is conserved (under normal circumstances; see chiral anomaly for exception). Therefore, protons will not decay into other particles on their own"

That is a hard quote. Other's have placed constraints on their half-lifes to at least 1.67 × 10E34 years. Which for infinity into the future is just around the corner. Protons should decay, as should their constituents, all to ER, if entropy rules all the way. High grade energy to low grade energy, with matter as a partial intermediate.

Also from Wiki**

"Assuming that a finite universe is an isolated system, the second law of thermodynamics states that its total entropy is continually increasing. It has been speculated, since the 19th century, that the universe is fated to a heat death in which all the energy ends up as a homogeneous distribution of thermal energy so that no more work can be extracted from any source."

You got me started! But don't expect much more.....


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay


** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
 

IG2007

"Don't criticize what you can't understand..."
Well, dfjchem721 , if the universe is really a cycle which continues and continues and continues and continues ad infinitum, then it must have a beginning. I mean, if you imagine, it's kinda W. I mean, the set of all Whole Numbers is called W, as far as I know. It's not like it's Z, the set of all integers which neither has a beginning nor has an end. It starts from one point and then goes on and on. That's what my logic tells me. Gary's point is right. If the Universe is really cyclic in nature, it must have a beginning after which it continues and continues.

I had just proved that the Cyclic Universe theory is baseless in my first post in this forum.
Well, no natural law does explain a cyclical universe. Or, does every natural law does?
Okay, according to my knowledge of universe (that's really less compared to you all), until now, there's no evidence that dark energy is not constant. As far as I know, dark energy is constant. And that means, the universe is gonna expand forever. Er, and that's why we can say that a universe cycle theory is falsified by this.

But there, logic says that a universe cycle theory is not impossible. I mean, the big bang happened. So, there might be a universe before this and before this and before this. So, well, the cycle goes on.

But there again, the first law of thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can transformed from one form to another. Well, there wasn't any energy at 0. (Please, no void potential energy, it isn't logical) So, the logic for a cyclic universe gets out of circle.
 

Catastrophe

"Science begets knowledge, opinion ignorance.
IG
" if the universe is really a cycle which continues and continues and continues and continues ad infinitum, then it must have a beginning"

No. You are getting trapped by anthropomorphic logic.

IG
I believe your next task is to overcome these anthropomorphic limitations.
Remember my flatlander on a sphere? The surface has no beginning and no end to the flatlander, BUT yes to the being of the next dimension. The next dimension always sees the limitation of the dimension below it.

I know what you are going to say next - but think again before you say it!

Cat :)
 
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IG2007

"Don't criticize what you can't understand..."
It seems that my brain is going haywire by the new logic. Whatever, it seems that the universe is just like a set of integers instead of a set of whole numbers. Okay then. Understood.
 
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Catastrophe

"Science begets knowledge, opinion ignorance.
Numbers are important, but they are abstractions, properties we abstract from groups. You may have 3 apples. Can you say that you eat number 3, unless you give it that label? Someone else may designate it number 2 of 3. You eat number 3, they eat number 2. Who is correct? What is reality?
We know that what we see is constructed within our brains. How do we know what another person sees? What we experience as blue they experience as green. What do our brains do with the wavelengths of light we receive?
Numbers are similar we experience the concept of 3 apples. How many apples are there 'in reality'. There are 3 but one has been processed and takes a different form.

Cat :)
 

IG2007

"Don't criticize what you can't understand..."
Numbers, in my opinion, are nought but a tool made by humans to comprehend the vast reality. It's true that whenever we go beyond good ol' numbers and go to concepts like infinity or eternity, the whole number system falls down and becomes useless and obsolete. But still, knowledge has no end. Who knows? Maybe, maybe, someday we will somehow find a way out to understand infinity and add the concept of infinity into the good ol' Mathematics. I am gonna quote Edgar Allan Poe now:

O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
 
IG2007, it just seems to me that a cycling universe has no beginning and no end. If it is just a "cycle", yes it does, but when you throw a cycling universe into the story (which suggests endless to me) , perhaps we need to qualify it by saying : "This will begin the endless cycle". There you have a well defined start, presumably without an end. I simply assumed it was endless.

We all have our issues with logic. I think Cat is handling this one rather well.
 
Going back to post #1 in this thread, it does seem that the definition of a cyclical universe assumes a starting point or beginning. Going back to post #5, we have a good, five point definition of science from a 1982 Federal court ruling in the USA concerning science teaching in the public schools and what defines science. Testing against the empirical world was a characteristic of science in this five point definition.

Currently the oldest H-R diagram dated star clusters are globular clusters (GCs), most dating 12 or 13 billion years old ago, according the the main-sequence turn-off ages plotted (this assumes all were at one time ZAMS plots).

Q: How many previous cycles of a cyclical universe took place before the origin of the GCs we see today? Example, one cycle, two cycles, ten cycles...
Q: What test(s) confirm that cycles of the universe took place before the origin of the GCs plotted on H-R diagrams we see today?

In the Milky Way, we have about 150 or so documented GCs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globular_cluster
 
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IG2007

"Don't criticize what you can't understand..."
Going back to post #1 in this thread, it does seem that the definition of a cyclical universe assumes a starting point or beginning. Going back to post #5, we have a good, five point definition of science from a 1982 Federal court ruling in the USA concerning science teaching in the public schools and what defines science. Testing against the empirical world was a characteristic of science in this five point definition.

Currently the oldest H-R diagram dated star clusters are globular clusters (GCs), most dating 12 or 13 billion years old ago, according the the main-sequence turn-off ages plotted (this assumes all were at one time ZAMS plots).

Q: How many previous cycles of a cyclical universe took place before the origin of the GCs we see today? Example, one cycle, two cycles, ten cycles...
Q: What test(s) confirm that cycles of the universe took place before the origin of the GCs plotted on H-R diagrams we see today?

In the Milky Way, we have about 150 or so documented GCs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globular_cluster
Well, no natural law does explain a cyclical universe. Or, does every natural law does?
Okay, according to my knowledge of universe (that's really less compared to you all), until now, there's no evidence that dark energy is not constant. As far as I know, dark energy is constant. And that means, the universe is gonna expand forever. Er, and that's why we can say that a universe cycle theory is falsified by this.

But there, logic says that a universe cycle theory is not impossible. I mean, the big bang happened. So, there might be a universe before this and before this and before this. So, well, the cycle goes on.

But there again, the first law of thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can transformed from one form to another. Well, there wasn't any energy at 0. (Please, no void potential energy, it isn't logical) So, the logic for a cyclic universe gets out of circle.
 

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