Friday, September 3, 2010

Stephen Hawking Blows Minds with Controversial Remarks




Kudos to Stephen Hawking for at last having the courage to come out and say what he should have clearly articulated in his book, A Brief History of Time. Maybe now, the fundies and their pesty friends will cease invoking his words to support their codswallop.

In case you missed it, Prof. Hawking in his new book, The Grand Design, has come out flatly to assert "There is no place for God in theories on the creation of the Universe" and also:

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."


You see that, you dumb fundies? Now will you leave Prof. Hawking alone (except maybe to toss him into your little Hell cartoon pits with the rest of Humanity intelligentsia)? Cease to invoke him any further for your pretentious supernatural bunkum!

Why didn't Hawking come out and say as much earlier, since it was clear his book Brief History of Time was leaning that way, with its "boundary free universe"? Well, probably because of the sheer difficulty of the subject matter, which doesn't exactly make for light bedtime reading. Also, Hawking wanted to keep the equations to a minimum since he nted that every one he might include would mark a loss of about 100,000 sales. Well, I'm under no similar constraints here, so here we go, as to why Stephen is correct, though the brainless legions will howl he's gone bonkers.

Let’s admit that most critics still doesn’t grasp what is meant by the energy-time uncertainty principle, or how it applies to spontaneous inception of the cosmos. To briefly recap for those without physics backgrounds: We already have a rough analogy in pair production processes wherein particles are created then quickly destroyed with energy release. For example, the pi mesons.

The typical pi meson (call it pi) lasts 10^-16 sec then vanishes yielding two gamma ray photons in its wake, viz.

Pi -> gamma + gamma

Thus, rest energy is real energy and is capable of doing work. In the case of the pion above, the total mass 2.4 x 10^-28 kg, is converted to electromagnetic energy.

The magnitude of the energy can be computed from the uncertainty:

delta (E) ~ h-bar/ delta(t)

where delta (t) is the undertainty in time, and h-bar = h/2 pi with h = 6.62 x 10^-34 J-s, the Planck constant. Then:

delta (E) ~ { 6.62 x 10^-34 J-s}/ (10^-16s) = 6.6 x 10^-18 J



In addition no one says that time (as a fundamental property) is “external to the physical universe”. The negative pressure- vacuum bubble was no less physical than the universe it spawned on expansion – when the negative pressure fluctuated and incepted a non net-zero mass-energy effect, which result we now perceive indirectly in the cosmos accelerated expansion.

In his paper, ‘Universe Before Planck Time’ (Phys. Review D, Vol. 28, No. 4), T. Padmanabhan is careful to explicate (Sec. IV) the acausal quantum and classical limits (with alpha = 0, the classical limit, and classical time, limit). As he notes:

“We assume the universe made a transition from a quantum to a classical limit around eta = eta-bar, which is taken to be close to zero. Correspondingly, we take (alpha)' to be ~0 with alpha(1) >> alpha(2).

By assuming the universe to be an empty, quantum gravitational spacetime for eta >> eta-bar one can accommodate matter creation in the theory. Continuity of the metric across eta = eta-bar leads to the condition:

1 + 2(eta-bar)^2 = 2 (eta)^2[(rho)^2/ 2(alpha(2) v)]

i.e. (eta-bar)^2 = [alpha(2) v/ (rho)^2]”

Since as he notes, continuity of all derivatives of the metric exists at: eta = eta-bar, then it follows there is no “external” or discontinuous region.

Given this, and the condition of zero net mass energy, the spontaneous and acausal inception of the cosmos is actually the simplest formulation for its origin. Even the smallest fluctuation in the vacuum whereby delta E ~ h/ delta tleads to an instantaneous local deviation in mass-energy and the explosive origin of a cosmic expansion predicated on negative pressure.. As noted by Crowell ('Quantum Fluctuations in Spacetime', p. 134):

"A net zero cosmology is the most economical one that can emerge from the vacuum state".

As Crowell also observes (ibid.):

"The recent discovery that the universe is accelerating outward is the latest of important results, which indicates the universe could well be a net zero (mass-energy). This then indicates that the observed universe is the result of a fluctuation in the quantum gravity vacuum"

It is important to note here that the preceding does not mean that the universe spontaneously creates mass-energy within its normal space-time. So, it does obey the first law of thermodynamics such that dU = - dW + dQ, where U, W and Q denote the internal energy, the work done on the system, and the heat absorbed by it. Assuming a closed cosmology, dE= 0. The main point here is that the universe absorbs work by virtue of the negative pressure (p = -rho) acting on it, as opposed to a positive pressure that does work.

Thus, for consistency one needs:

dW = - p = rho (energy density) and dQ = rho_vac c^2.

Again, the negative energy assures us that the zero point energy of the quantum vacuum will "tunnel through" to create an unstoppable expansion on fluctuation. The best evidence yet for an acausal cosmos and acausal origin.




Next: The reactions to Hawking's remarks.

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