Just ask the Fish
Jeffrey Weiss, blogmeister of The Dallas Morning News Religion blog, links to a Time magazine review of Ben Stein's new anti-evolution movie "Expelled." An excerpt:
"More dishonestly, Stein employs the common dodge of enumerating all the admittedly unanswered questions in evolutionary theory and using this to refute the whole idea. But all scientific knowledge is built this way. A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish.That led to a long exchange between the blogmeister and me about the Big Bang. Yeah, I know evolution is a different scientific problem than the origin of life, which itself is a completely different problem than the origin of the universe, but all of these scientific problems tend to get wrapped up in each other any time laymen start discussing any one of them. Anyway, I reproduce here part of that long exchange, triggered by a comment by another reader:
JohnFranc: "What makes me a theist and not an atheist is the question of 'where did it all begin?' Science can reconstruct Creation back to a fraction of a second after the big bang, but not before. That's all it takes to convince me that God is real."
Ed Cognoski: "JohnFranc, science doesn't reconstruct Creation back to 'before' the Big Bang because the word 'before' has no meaning in that situation. An analogy is in order. Explorers can create maps all the way to the North Pole but no farther north. Asking what's north of the North Pole is as nonsensical as asking what happened before the Big Bang. Literally, nonsensical."
Blogmeister Jeffrey: "Ed, my understanding of the Big Bang is that it purports to describe a physical event that happened 'within' time. That is, time itself did not begin with the bang. For various reasons, it may be impossible to ever answer the question of 'what happened before.' But that doesn't make the question itself nonsensical."
Ed Cognoski: "Time came into existence with the Big Bang, a singularity at which the distortion of space-time was infinite. There was no pre-existing infinite, eternal void into which all matter of the universe instantly exploded. Not just matter, but space-time itself was created with the Big Bang. The weirdness isn't confined to the Big Bang. Even today, the universe is not infinite. It's finite, although unbounded. Time is not absolute. Experiments with atomic clocks flown in jets have experimentally demonstrated that time moves at different rates depending on motion. Time and space are both warped by the presence of gravitational fields. Black holes are real and time and space does very strange things in their presence. Quantum physics describes events for which cause-and-effect do not have our everyday meaning. The notions of 'before' and 'after' are meaningless in some situations today in the quantum realm, not just in relation to the Big Bang."
Blogmeister Jeffrey: "Not so fast, friend. Google for 'before the big bang' to get a sense for just how NOT settled that question is. And I'm not talking about the busted crockery sites. Lots of .edu and .org level conversation on the topic..."
Ed Cognoski: "Blogmeister, I didn't mean to leave the impression that the physics of the Big Bang is settled. It's far from it. I'm aware of models that include multiple parallel "universes" (an infinite number?) or multiple cyclical universes (an infinite number?). None of these is going to restore our traditional Newtonian concepts of an infinite Euclidean space or an absolute time. They might give us the ability to talk about what happened 'before' the Big Bang, but only using weird notions of what might be called meta-time, defining 'before' in a way that is even weirder than our already weird concept of time in Einstein's general relativity or quantum mechanics. To return to my analogy, such theories are trying to provide an answer to the question, what's north of the North Pole. If they answer that, it'll be with a concept of 'north' that is beyond any everyday notion of north that ever guided mapmaker or sailor."
Blogmeister Jeffrey: "Well, at least some of the theories seem to include something like what we understand as time: A parallel universe has a wormhole pinch itself off and then form our universe (for a somewhat made-up example). That's a narrative with time's arrow in its familiar place. First this happened and then that happened and then KABLOOIE!!! Even a recurring cycle has a 'this happened then that happened' form. Maybe the comparison is more like Earth north with Galactic North. Not quite the same but using a lot of the same references. Or maybe not?"
Ed Cognoski: "OK. I can live with that. And if you want any more insight into this infinitely perplexing question, I fall back on the original article's suggestion, 'Just ask the fish.'"
Blogmeister Jeffrey: "BLOGMEISTER JEFFREY HAS THE ANSWER: '42.'"
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