Re: The new Clearances?

Thus spake Jane Gillett <j.gillett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
In article <NrPN24Lxg86GFwxf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Oh No <NotI@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thus spake Jane Gillett <j.gillett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
<snip>
I suspect that what we have learned about the way said universe behaves
gives us some ideas to extrapolate backwards:)

However, it's hard to see how such extrapolation can be more than
speculation.

Certainly in the current state in which science is incomplete, that must
be true. However, we do not know that science will always be incomplete.
It may well be that we ultimately find a single complete theory capable
of describing, in principle, all physical phenomena. Such a theory would
be able to tell us what happened in the big bang.

Haven't we been in roughly that position before? Not about the big bang but
didn't some scientist in the last 150 years or so say that science had
found all there was to know - there was nothing left to discover? We will
probably sometime have a theory of how the universe began but I doubt that
such a situation would last very long before someone found something which
set the cat among the pigeons again.

Not really. I am not convinced that those who were widely quoted for
this view really knew what they were talking about. If one considers the
trend in mathematical physics it is toward fundamental assumptions
(axioms) which become more general, more simple, more reasonable (harder
to contradict), and vitally, increasingly difficult to satisfy. It seems
to me that if the universe is consistent with itself, then we will be
able to tie down its properties exactly.


Regards

--
Charles Francis
moderator sci.physics.foundations.
substitute charles for NotI to email

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

.

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