Tuesday, July 26 2011: In The Beginning
"But what happened before all this cosmic fury? What happened before the beginning?
Astrophysicists have no idea. Rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science. Yet the religious faithful tend to assert, often with a tinge of smugness that something must have started it all: a force greater than all others, a source from which everything issues. A prime mover. In the mind of such a person that something is, of course, God, whose nature varies from believe to believe but who always bears the responsibility for starting the ball rollling.
But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition that we have yet to identify--a multiverse, for example, in which everything we call the universe amounts to only a tiny bubble in an ocean of suds? Or what if the universe, like its particles just popped into existence from nothing we could see?
These rejoinders typically satisfy no one. Nevertheless, they remind us that informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. And therein lies a fascinating dichotomy. 'The universae always was,' gets no respect as a legitimate answer to 'What was around before the beginning?' But for many religious people, the answer, 'God always was,' is the obvious and pleasing answer to 'What was around before God?'"
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, "Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution", pp 44-45
Astrophysicists have no idea. Rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science. Yet the religious faithful tend to assert, often with a tinge of smugness that something must have started it all: a force greater than all others, a source from which everything issues. A prime mover. In the mind of such a person that something is, of course, God, whose nature varies from believe to believe but who always bears the responsibility for starting the ball rollling.
But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition that we have yet to identify--a multiverse, for example, in which everything we call the universe amounts to only a tiny bubble in an ocean of suds? Or what if the universe, like its particles just popped into existence from nothing we could see?
These rejoinders typically satisfy no one. Nevertheless, they remind us that informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. And therein lies a fascinating dichotomy. 'The universae always was,' gets no respect as a legitimate answer to 'What was around before the beginning?' But for many religious people, the answer, 'God always was,' is the obvious and pleasing answer to 'What was around before God?'"
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, "Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution", pp 44-45
