Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

One of my big unfulfilled midlife-crisis wants. I don't even have space for one - but I want it.

I'll direct you to his own words. Here is Kraus talking about redefining what the word nothing means:

"And I guess most importantly that the question why is there something rather than nothing is really a scientific question, not a religious or philosophical question, because both nothing and something are scientific concepts, and our discoveries over the past 30 years have completely changed what we mean by nothing.

In particular, nothing is unstable. Nothing can create something all the time due to the laws of quantum mechanics, and it's - it's fascinatingly interesting. And what I wanted to do was use the hook of this question, which I think as I say has provoked religious people, as well as scientists, to encourage people to try and understand the amazing universe that we actually live in."

Here is Krauss describing how empty space could create the Universe:

Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them. Now, that sounds of course like counting angels on the head of a pin; if you can't measure them, then it doesn't sound like it's science, but in fact you can't measure them directly.

But we can measure their effects indirectly. These particles that are popping in and out of existence actually affect the properties of atoms and nuclei and actually are responsible for most of the mass inside your body. And in fact, really one of the things that motivated this book was the most profound discovery in recent times, and you even alluded to it in the last segment, the discovery that most of the energy of the universe actually resides in empty space.

You take space, get rid of all the particles, all the radiation, and it actually carries energy, and that notion that in fact empty space - once you allow gravity into the game, what seems impossible is possible. It sounds like it would violate the conservation of energy for you to start with nothing and end up with lots of stuff, but the great thing about gravity is it's a little trickier.

Gravity allows positive energy and negative energy, and out of nothing you can create positive energy particles, and as long as a gravitational attraction produces enough negative energy, the sum of their energy can be zero. And in fact when we look out at the universe and try and measure its total energy, we come up with zero.

I like to think of it as the difference between, say, a savvy stockbroker and an embezzler. The savvy stockbroker will buy stocks on margin with more money than they have, and as long as they get that money back in there before anyone notices, and in fact if the stocks go up, they end with money where they didn't have any before, whereas the embezzler, of course, is discovered.

Well, the universe is a savvy stockbroker. It can borrow energy, and if there's no gravity, it gets rid of it back before anyone notices. But if gravity is there, it can actually create stuff where there was none before. And you can actually create enough stuff to account for everything we see in the universe.

But, you know, it's more than that because some people would say, and I've had this discussion with theologians and others, well, you know, just empty space isn't nothing. You know, there's space. How did the space get there? But the amazing thing is, once you apply in fact quantum mechanics to gravity, as you were beginning to allude again in the last segment, then it's possible, in fact it's implied, that space itself can be created where there was nothing before, that literally whole universes can pop out of nothing by the laws of quantum mechanics.

And in fact the question why is there something rather than nothing then becomes sort of trite because nothing is unstable. It will always produce something. The more interesting or surprising question might be why is there nothing. But of course if we ask that question, well, we wouldn't be here if that was true.

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What he said in this video is completely misleading; I'll show you his slight of hand. When he says you can take away everything, even the laws and still get a Universe, he has redefined "absolutely nothing" as a complete absence of this Universe, but not as we will see, a complete absence of anything. To explain the laws of quantum mechanics popping into existence, he postulates an external entity: the multiverse:

Well, you know, that's something I deal with at the end of the book because, you know, it's not a concept that I'm pretty fond of, but it - we seemed to be driven there by our theories, and it does suggest the last bit, because some people, indeed when I debate this question of nothing, they say, well, look, you can get rid of space. You can get rid of stuff in space, the first kind of nothing. You can even get rid of space, but you still have the laws. Who created the laws?

Well, it turns out that we've been driven both from ideas from cosmology - from a theory called inflation or even string theory - that suggests there may be extra dimensions - to the possibility that our universe isn't unique, and more over, that the laws of physics in our universe may just be accidental. They may have arisen spontaneously, and they don't have to be the way they are. But if they were any different, we wouldn't be here to ask the question. It's called the entropic idea, and it's not - it's - it may be right.

It's not an idea I find very attractive, but it may be right. And if it is, then it suggests that even the very laws themselves are not fundamental. They arose spontaneously in our universe, and they're very different in other universes. And in some sense, if you wish, the multiverse plays the role of what you might call a prime mover or a god. It exists outside of our universe.

So, again, the question is not answered. In his book, some chapters of his book are: "Nothing is something" and "Nothing is unstable". He has redefined nothing as empty space or a quantum vaccum, and when pressed, he offers up a multiverse, but fails to explain where the multiverse came from. Nothing is not something, it is not unstable, it is not empty space, it is not a quantum vacuum, and it is not a multiverse. Nothing is nothing. From nothing, nothing comes. It has no states, no properties, no existence. He has not explained how something came from nothing. All he has done is redefine nothing into something. Of course something can come from something. All he doing is playing a masquarade with definitions





>> ^xxovercastxx:
16:08-16:38

"...you could start with absolutely nothing; that means, unlike the Cardinal said and unlike some people argue, no particles, but not even empty space -- no space whatsoever, and maybe even no laws governing that space and we can plausibly understand how you could arrive, without any miracles, without any need for a creator, without any supernatural creation, you could produce everything we see."

16:08-16:38

"...you could start with absolutely nothing; that means, unlike the Cardinal said and unlike some people argue, no particles, but not even empty space -- no space whatsoever, and maybe even no laws governing that space and we can plausibly understand how you could arrive, without any miracles, without any need for a creator, without any supernatural creation, you could produce everything we see."

@BoneRemake, @packo. I think people often make the mistake of thinking that the universe started as a bunch of energy/matter suspended and then exploding into an existing, infinite 3D space; but that is not the theory. It seems to me like the video that @packo linked to is partially suffering from this error--especially when it shows the universe as floating and expanding into a sea of "outside" stars (but it gets many things right--I am still glad you posted it, thanks). As I understand it, the big bang is meant to have *created* the dimensions (including time) and it is the dimensions themselves that are expanding, possibly "into" a higher dimensional space that we are not equipped to perceive.

The usual metaphor (presented by Steven Hawking, among others) is to think of the 2-dimenstional surface of a balloon as it inflates. 2D beings trapped on the surface of the balloon would observe that all points on the expanding surface are moving away from each other, but such people would be incapable of imagining into what, since they have no intuitive understanding of a third dimensions. The balloon also illustrates the concept of "finite yet unbound." The 2D balloon-surface citizen could travel forever in one direction on the surface and never find the boundary; instead he just goes eternally round and round on the balloon which, never the less, still has a finite area even though the border remains imperceptible to the 2d resident. It is possible that the universe is a 3d version of this.

Because it is space itself that is expanding (not matter expanding into existing space), the speed at which two objects "move" away from each other increases in relation to how much expanding space their is between the two objects. In reality, the objects are not moving apart as we normally think of it--space itself is just getting bigger in between them. This means that regardless of where you are in the universe, it will look like you are at the center of a huge explosion with everything else rushing away.

All points (and all space) in the universe were once at exactly the same place, a single point, which means that all points in the universe began in the center and, in a sense, still are at the center from their own perspective. At large distances, this speed adds up until it exceeds that of light, which means we will never see or visit objects that are currently more than X light years away; and the value of X is shrinking so that, in fact, the entire universe will eventually fall behind a relativistic curtain until all the galaxies and even stars disappear eternally from each others' view, with space filling in faster than light can catch up. This does not violate relativity, again because the objects are not actually moving faster than light, there is just a huge area of space growing between them.

I am less sure about this, but I think even the space between the atoms and subatomic particles might take on properties (such as an expanded Plank length) that eventually prevent such particles from getting close enough together for the electromagnetic/strong/weak/gravitational forces to function and that's the end of chemistry.

>> ^packo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV33t8U6w28&feature=related
about 3:35 is where it gives answers
sorry about the long intro before anything starts

@westy

In that situation, however, you'd have someone else to spray it on for you. A coach or someone else. And I doubt they'd wear this because it doesn't seem all that aerodynamic to me. It looks very fluffy, not anything like the skin-tight suits that athletes wear.

Also, the more I think about it, the sillier a "booth" idea is. There's no way a booth can estimate your exact dimensions to properly give you a shirt, so you'll either end up with this in your hair, or have some form of tube top.

Also:

You:
"what are you on about vacume rapping ?"
"for example if u wanted to protect something as a way of rapping things quickly could be equivelent to vacume packing"

There's no way this material would be able to vacuum seal anything, it's a FABRIC, fabrics BREATHE. Even Astronauts space-suits have a layer of rubber and kevlar. Surgeons already have skin-tight gloves, it's a requirement, and how do you expect this to act as a raincoat when it doesn't repel water?

If you're in a survival situation, why wouldn't you already be prepared with thick gloves and a thick jacket, and even still, how would a paper-thin fabric retain enough heat to stave off either hypothermia or frostbite?

The only thing this opens up is field-bandaging, as anything else it basically flops.

Before you start opening up with more things it could do, think about that for a while. What practical use could it serve, and how would it achieve that?

>> ^StukaFox:
Even in space, Techno sucks.


That's what I had to say. It sucks so much so hard that the point of this subject has been missed by the same distance as the biggest star's diameter known to Man.

Even in space, Techno sucks.

I'm not alleging that most Christians are Westboro types , nor that they hold crazy views that are nearly as damaging as the crazy crap those people are up to (you jumped to that all by yourself)... I'm just saying, that the typically 'Christian' attitude regarding sex and everything surrounding it, is often at odds with the current attitudes and practices of modern society and has only served to fuel arguments such as this one, or in other cases, hinder proper responses to situations, am thinking of abstinence based sex education as an example.

In any case, in regards to overpopulation, I was not speaking of the here and the now, but the future. If we continue to reproduce at the rate we have in the last 100 years (highly inflated due to innovations in medicine and agriculture) we will undoubtedly begin to run out of resources, and I'm not talking about food, but other, less renewable ones, like oil, water, rainforests, and yes, even personal space. I also never said anything about stopping to reproduce altogether (quit inferring so damn much from my statements!) just help curb its seemingly run away growth and find some sort of balance as a species within our environment.

My argument though, that gays would be a boon to meeting this end, however, is based on the assumption that homosexuals do not breed or somehow lack the impetus to, and last night, when I was doing something completely non-Sift related, I realized that this assumption was false and in the end my dream of a population equilibrium was yet again dashed. You see, we are forgetting here that many gays and lesbians do in fact still have that desire to bear offspring and nurture children (lesbians perhaps more than gay men), and seek out alternative methods to attain this goal of procreation... granted, many do adopt (when they are allowed to), but a good many others use artificial insemination, surrogates, etc.

I still don't think, however, that one can effectively argue that homosexuality just should not be solely because the parts don't fit, or because they cannot reproduce in the 'natural' sense, or that it is immoral based on something written two millennia ago, which its followers only cherry pick passages to follow in the first place. We could go around and around about this forever, but I'm afraid none of us would budge on our viewpoints.

4.1 Mb, i don't think that's even enough space to hold this video. oh man, the good old days