• Gregory
    4.7k
    Einstein's cosmological constant was a force that balanced with gravity in order for the universe to have always been in free fall. This I believe is the best interpretation. If the universe had always be falling, for eternity, gravity would be the non-intertial propeller of motion. Nothingness, the absence of something to hold up the universe, would be the cause too (i.e. like a cup). I've now been thinking about Hawking's no boundary hypothesis a lot. If space and time have a fuzzy relationship at the big bang, would it be possible to say that motion, caused by gravity, is the cause of the start of Time itself? Can we isolate Time like this? Imagine a ball on the edge of a board. It eventually falls to one way because of gravity. If the first motion of the universe was like this, then Time and all the alive parts of reality started one the
    momentum starts. So gravity caused time. There is no "Before" in any real understandable way.

    Now Fichte. He was the first truly Romantic idealist. He thought objects create us and we create objects. Mutual creation. In the position I've presented, we have something similar. That is, we have motion creating that which is dependent on. There is no contradiction here. If would be like an bacteria growing a leg in order to move.

    Conclusion: the world does not need anything spiritual in order to be explained
  • Gus Lamarch
    924


    Even when knowing that the universe can be explained without a "spiritual" concept, humanity (in its majority), would still cling to the doctrine of a metaphysical world, a "world beyond our own", that no one can explain and truly understand.
  • 180 Proof
    15.3k
    Conclusion: the world does not need anything spiritual in order to be explainedGregory

    e.g. Noether's Theorem ...
  • Gus Lamarch
    924


    "The only god that exists is yourself"
  • alcontali
    1.3k
    Conclusion: the world does not need anything spiritual in order to be explainedGregory

    Why would any of that necessarily follow from your ramblings on Einstein and/or Hawking?

    Do you really believe that your simplistic view on their work would be universal?

    Try to say something "difficult", which requires understanding other concepts that are "difficult", which can then be considered somewhat original.

    Seriously, there are good reasons why liberal-arts people and their ramblings are derided and wholesale treated with contempt. What they do, is just too easy. When everybody and their little sister can also do it, why would you, or your ramblings, deserve any respect? The reason why you do not get any respect, is simply because you do not deserve any.
  • OmniscientNihilist
    171
    Conclusion: the world does not need anything spiritual in order to be explainedGregory

    what world? you mean sense data? which is made of qualia, which is consciousness, which is immaterial, which is spiritual.

    haha
  • Pfhorrest
    4.6k
    The physical world may be reducible to mental stuff inasmuch as physical means empirical means experiential or phenomenal, but minds in turn are instantiated in the functionality of physical things. The physical is mental and the mental is physical because there is no clear division between the two, just two literal perspectives (first and third person) on the same one kind of stuff: information encoded in energy.
  • Wayfarer
    22.4k
    Einstein's cosmological constant was a force that balanced with gravity in order for the universe to have always been in free fall.Gregory

    Hey I'm only a popular science reader, but I think this is wildly innaccurate. The cosmological constant was introduced by Einstein as a counter to the effect of gravity, so as to prevent the equations from showing the Universe collapsing on itself. But it was later called by him 'his greatest mistake', and he finally abandoned the idea altogether when Hubble showed the Universe was expanding.

    From the 1930s until the late 1990s, most physicists assumed the cosmological constant to be equal to zero. That changed with the surprising discovery in 1998 that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, implying the possibility of a positive nonzero value for the cosmological constant.

    Since the 1990s, studies have shown that around 68% of the mass–energy density of the universe can be attributed to so-called dark energy. The cosmological constant Λ is the simplest possible explanation for dark energy, and is used in the current standard model of cosmology known as the ΛCDM model. While dark energy is poorly understood at a fundamental level [but, nevertheless, a splendid 'explanation for everything!'] the main required properties of dark energy are that it functions as a type of anti-gravity, it dilutes much more slowly than matter as the universe expands, and it clusters much more weakly than matter, or perhaps not at all.
    — Wikipedia entry on Cosmological Constant

    as if that amounts to 'an explanation of everything'.
  • Gregory
    4.7k
    Every shred of absolute time has to be abandoned in order to make sense of the universe without positing an eternity of time
  • Banno
    24.9k
    Without the mathematics, it's not physics.
  • Gregory
    4.7k
    The first movement of the universe is beyond math, unless you are a Pythagorean
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