Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?--Sean M. Carroll

BidenPresident said:
You insist on writing "magical" even though I showed it is empirical.
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If randomness was empirical, then it could be measured. Did I miss your reply to the question about proving it's existence and effects?

I even posted a physics link, which you obviously didn't look at, on the subject.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Excellent. Why do you think this distinction is important? Regardless if randomness can be measured or not, so what? How does that change our lives?
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First, I never believed in determinism in physics. I never experience the world as being deterministic. The quantification of randomness makes more sense to me.
Second, randomness is the absence of necessity. The universe does not have to exist and all events are conditional.

Third, I experience randomness all the time. As I was walking down the street today a car drove by. Nothing deterministic about my being there on the sidewalk and that car being there at the exact same time.
 
BidenPresident said:
Nothingness is not just the absence of things in space. Where is space?
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The large, expanding bubble around us.

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So we now know that a Laplace Demon is impossible, and for two distinct reasons. The old reason was that modern quantum physics is inherently indeterministic. The future is only probabilistic, though it may be "adequately determined."

The new reason is that there is not enough information in the past (none at all in the early universe) to determine the present.

The "fixed past" and the "laws of nature" pre-determine nothing, despite recent philosophical arguments.

Similarly, information at the present time does not determine the future. The future is open. We must create it.

It follows that determinism, the philosophical idea that every event or state of affairs, including every human decision and action, is the inevitable and necessary consequence of antecedent states of affairs, is not true.

https://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/laplaces_demon.html
 
BidenPresident said:
First, I never believed in determinism in physics. I never experience the world as being deterministic. The quantification of randomness makes more sense to me.
Second, randomness is the absence of necessity. The universe does not have to exist and all events are conditional.

Third, I experience randomness all the time. As I was walking down the street today a car drove by. Nothing deterministic about my being there on the sidewalk and that car being there at the exact same time.
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The X factor in each case was a human people. People make choices, asteroids and comets do not.

Asteroids and comet have been responding to the laws of since their origin. They won't change unless something forces them to change.

Earth is still in danger of "random" events that are not so random when looked upon more closely. What we do about it is up to us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Biospheric_effects
Although there is now general agreement that there was a huge impact at the end of the Cretaceous that led to the iridium enrichment of the K-T boundary layer, remnants have been found of other, smaller impacts, some nearing half the size of the Chicxulub crater, which did not result in any mass extinctions, and there is no clear linkage between an impact and any other incident of mass extinction.

Paleontologists David M. Raup and Jack Sepkoski have proposed that an excess of extinction events occurs roughly every 26 million years (though many are relatively minor). This led physicist Richard A. Muller to suggest that these extinctions could be due to a hypothetical companion star to the Sun called Nemesis periodically disrupting the orbits of comets in the Oort cloud, leading to a large increase in the number of comets reaching the inner Solar System where they might hit Earth. Physicist Adrian Melott and paleontologist Richard Bambach have more recently verified the Raup and Sepkoski finding, but argue that it is not consistent with the characteristics expected of a Nemesis-style periodicity.
 
BidenPresident said:
Not sure what you mean, exactly. I believe randomness is a property of the universe. I see it all the time. Life occurred randomly, for example.
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If randomness is a part of the Universe, why is it so hard to find? Computer programmers try all sorts of elaborate tricks to simulate randomness, but there's no way to really create something that doesn't exist.

Pseudo random numbers. https://www.cs.utah.edu/~germain/PPS/Topics/random_numbers.html
Random Numbers on a computer are not really random. They are a sequence of "pseudo" random numbers.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
If randomness is a part of the Universe, why is it so hard to find? Computer programmers try all sorts of elaborate tricks to simulate randomness, but there's no way to really create something that doesn't exist.

Pseudo random numbers. https://www.cs.utah.edu/~germain/PPS/Topics/random_numbers.html
Random Numbers on a computer are not really random. They are a sequence of "pseudo" random numbers.
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Right now I look out the window and see four people walking. The fact I am here, at this time, with four people walking, is random.
 
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