A Philosophical Approach - Cosmology

By Garrison Clifford Gibson

It is fine for ordinary people that have not drank the kool aid of professional cosmological atheists to consider the Universe from a personal and philosophical viewpoint informed with information from reputable physicists and some perhaps less so in addition to theologians and philosophers. A few physicists and evolution scientists with a legion of herd followers have taken up atheism as a consequence of scientific insight. I do not share that unsupportable line of thinking.
Herein are my recent posts related at least generally to the field of cosmology. One might readily compare and contrast select ideas from theology on topics like pre-destination inclusive of macro-cosmic determinism with the opinions about modern physics on pre-determinism in the post-Newtonian era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365387227

Book preview

A Philosophical Approach - Cosmology

A Philosophical Approach – Cosmology

Copyright

A Philosophical Approach – Cosmology ©²⁰¹⁷ Garrison Clifford Gibson

I.S.B.N. 978-1-365-38722-7

Space images credit: The Hubble Legacy

Forward

It is fine for ordinary people that have not drank the kool aid of professional cosmological atheists to consider the Universe from a personal and philosophical viewpoint informed with information from reputable physicists and some perhaps less so in addition to theologians and philosophers. A few physicists and evolution scientists with a legion of herd followers have taken up atheism as a consequence of scientific insight. I do not share that unsupportable line of thinking.

Herein are my recent posts related at least generally to the field of cosmology. One might readily compare and contrast select ideas from theology on topics like pre-destination inclusive of macro-cosmic determinism with the opinions about modern physics on pre-determinism in the post-Newtonian era. In this book I have only hit upon such subjects in passing rather than systematically.

It would be worthwhile building up an inventory of questions from theology that could be compared with comparative fields of study in physics and physical cosmology to find where they are in agreement or disagreement; if they happen to overlap in shared concerns. If I ever get to that sort of project it would be in the future, God willing and the Higgs field permitting.

A philosophical approach to analyzing human experience might be regarded as a process of discovery. Finding the experience of existing a given and good fact, thinking individuals may inquire regarding the nature and way of being and its process of changing in a continuum of form and reform. In writing these informal essays and comments on contemporary interests I wanted to put some philosophical intention on it for the good.

Descartes contemplated a method of affirming existence from first principles; an epistemological investigation of self-awareness. Aristotle presented numerous categories of classification of substance and logic. Socrates and Plato thought of the ideal state and of truth. They looked into what concepts are such as the good anticipating the utilitarian question.

Individuals considered by others as philosophers have examined many of the same matters concerning individual actualization, language, government of the many and the way people interact phenomenally (e.g. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason). Confucius, Hobbes and Marx presented new social theories while Hume examined causality. Philosophers of history like Arnold Toynbee have considered recurrent social-historical cycles. Individuals of countless generations have inquired into the destiny of spirit, mind and matter that are considered to be essential elements of a human life. Philosophers may try to find some practical applications of learning in the midst of the great population of the world inertially proceeding with more than 7 billion contemporary souls empirically coexisting.

The world may be a stage as Shakespeare commented in Hamlet, upon which people strut and fret their hour upon the stage. Philosophers may demure from the point that it is no more than sound and fury signifying nothing. The Bible; a work of little books with revealed knowledge from God, offers the wisdom of Solomon presenting the humble condition of mankind who is like a blade of grass under the eternal existence and glory of God. Faith in God as the true wisdom and reason life has meaning in society today is set against a social abyss of godless materialism as an end-for-itself without belief In much of anything besides science. Since science means knowledge, scientific method ought to mean a method. Today an individual pursuing knowledge should include wisdom rather than to cut himself off a priori and instead just follow preconceived atheistic lines. A philosophical approach through science is challenged with a profusion of cosmological avenues of approach and tools for investigation that are self-evident and not improved with select biases against the idea of God.

My philosophical approach to various issues in-the-world follows from decades of interest in philosophy and its development over the course of history. The history of philosophy quite early coincides with and often informs the development of civilization, intellectual history and leadership flowing with it. Thus the title selection of these four books reflect my own philosophical regard for select issues occurring in contemporary history.

There are perennial questions in philosophy of interest to specialists, generalists and ordinary people that many or even most people are familiar with concerning the soul, life after death, free will, the difference between good and evil, forms of governance, ethics, metaphysics, cosmology, physics, language, epistemology, memory, the meaning of language values and so forth. After a student of philosophy has familiarized himself with these issues reading the classics of western and eastern philosophy and religion, he may still wish to consider contemporary history and its instantaneous concerns distributed globally on the Internet each second of the day since the start of the third millennium at least. The approaches to considering live issues of contemporary history with a philosophical sense of detachment yet with active concern for 'putting intention on' the politics and public perceptions of those issues, in order to promote the good of humanity – a Socratic concern with Christian ethical points about the welfare of one's fellow human being, might be generally reduced to four.

A Philosophical Approach – Practical Vol. 1

A Philosophical Approach – Practical Vol. 2

A Philosophical Approach – Theoretical

A Philosophical Approach – Theological Vol. 1

A Philosophical Approach – Theological Vol. 2

A Philosophical Approach – Cosmology

The material of the books were essays and comments posted on my blog www.garycgibson.blogspot in real time were later sorted into these general categories. I cannot say that they were of much use for moving American society in a better direction away from its feminist-homosexual, globalist, plutocratic evolutionary dismal. atheistic entrenched swamp.

One must try to keep a society reasonably well informed and moving in a positive direction. It is too easy alternatively, for a society to take up bad ideas and ethics and to go to places where wicked societies have gone before.

Maybe science is relative truth, and conditional. One cannot demand that science produce absolute truth after Einstein's transcending implications of the general and special theories of relativity brought physics to the threshold of an ocean of temporal change.

In the 20th century linguistic philosophy developed through the Vienna Circle and with the rise of symbolic logic started by Frege continuing on to Strawson, Quine and Kripke it was possible to comprehend the nature of meaning and meaning of epistemology along with subjective ideas about it. Prior to the 20th century philosophical advance the history of philosophy might be found best in a few giants from Pre-Socratic philosophers to the peripatetic philosophers, early scientific philosophers like Pythagoras and Democritus to theologian greats such as Augustine to Descartes, Hegel, Kant and a few others.

Science before the rise of observational and experimental methods of verification in the field of cosmology was in a sense metaphysics. If people such as Parmenides and Heraclitus didn't have much accurate technical knowledge of the cosmos they could make logic-based inferences some of which resonate with more modern thought such as the spinning bucket paradigm of Newton and gravity. If five theories explaining the origin of matter and energy equally share claim to validity it might be fair to call the paradigm one of metaphysics-even though the individuals are excellent particle physicists. Metaphysics is about conjecture of explaining cosmology theoretically without directly confirming or validating tests. Science alternatively looks to tangible, material avenues of advance of confirmation.

I mentioned above that science need only confirm its theories on reasonable logical grounds rather than exhaustively and exclusively of any other explanation. Conditional and relative truths that are logically consistent with their premises may be the best of scientific certainty about reality that is possible. The epistemological grounds of knowledge; human knowledge, is not absolute or infallible and is immersed within a physical media of being it cannot view from outside as a flying fish might regard the ocean in which it swims.

The Lord Jesus Christ transcended what is seemingly impossible for humans. The savior could love those that persecuted him, while humanity finds it quite challenging to actually love those that do so. Christians may employ metaphysical paradigmata themselves these days in reinterpreting the Old Testament in light of the shifting sands of temporal knowledge while knowing that God is greater than they.

Essays

Questions of Matter, Space and Gravitons

18 Feb. 2017

Are gravitons attracted to mass or vice versa? Are there states of mass that do not attract gravitons (such as neutrinos) such that one might say it is in a state comparable to that of monatomic elements?

If gravitons overwhelm matter condensing its implicit forces and structure to a state of matter unique to gravitons; in fact a stable state of mass, it might have finite size. It also might have warped space around it in such a configuration that when released with the monatomic phase of the graviton solid it unfolds with an apparent faster-than-light speed.

Monatomic elements http://www.zptech.net/science.html

Of course gravitons might be something that push  space. They might be something like virtual particles surrounding a particle wave like a digital field that activates into being briefly then switches off. Gravitons may be embedded within space and when drawn to mass release a certain amount of weight from space taking it to mass.

One wonders about being and nothingness. Smallest particle-waves theoretically like strings or membranes perhaps with virtual fields of their own. It seems though that all particle-wave are emergent characteristics of potential energy unpacking from a big bang-inflation field possibly emitted by the monatomic equivalent state of the graviton solid. Or not.

The idea that a digital field without space is entirely subject to the will of God is interesting.

If extrapolating from a finite mass at t=0 singularity, and a singularity is of no dimensions; time, mass and energy too might be of zero dimension or size- even as all are reducible to infinities of scale of no size.

On the other hand it is reasonable to extrapolate that as an emanation or scalar field from zero dimensions emerges the entire Universe’s future history implicitly is pre-determined in its space-time dimensional presentation from T=0 to omega.

A Matter of the Size of the Universe

15 Dec. 2016

I found a good video on the size of the Universe and it raised some questions. To recapitulate some points from the video…

The observable Universe is 13.7 billion light years in size in one direction because of the age of the star viewed (they did not exist earlier than that). Of course twice that distance is the diameter of the Universe, except because space itself expanded to as a result of dark energy the actual distance in diameter is 92 billion light years.

A cosmologist named Alan Guth invented something called inflation theory to explain how the Universe could have expanded to such a size in such a time consistent with math. Inflationary theory is that some sort of faster-than-light speed inflation of the early Universe occurred in the first second of its existence. As a result the actual size of the Universe beyond the observable could be a billion trillion light years or more. Therefore the observable Universe would be just a tiny bit of a far more vast Universe.

Most people I ever talked with about the Universe thought it was infinite in size logically, rather than of a finite size. One wonders how there cannot be something beyond any conceivable edge. So the cosmology discussion of today is really about how far the matter and energy of space go rather than is there an end to an infinite empty space (or perhaps not so empty).

Today cosmology shows tend to expect to wow people with how they have discovered how much bigger the Universe is than was known before, and that people formerly thought the Earth rode on the back of princess turtle-down who charitably turned in a circle each day to share the light with the just and unjust too, perversely as that may be, suggesting to Aristarchus and later, Kopernicus, the idea of buttered popcorn. The heavens above were regarded as a sphere where super-beings lived such as X-Men, The Mummy, Beverly Hillbillies and Thor the Thunder-kid, although not those from the Kolobian star system. As I mentioned above though many people have thought of space as infinite even if not the local matter and energy.

The cosmic background radiation charted by wmap of 2.8 degrees kelvin I believe the number is, and its pattern across the early universe and space observed in the most ancient light of the observable Universe more than 13.6 billion light years distant (it took that long for the light to reach today's Earth and surrounding telescopes), was in theory imprinted across the entire inflationary Universe even beyond the observable Universe. If one was a trillion light years from Earth looking out at your own observable Universe (different from this one), it should in theory look approximately the same with similar patterns of development caused by the same nearly instant inflation of the complete Universe.

One wonders if the big bang didn't have unequal patterns that were hidden by inflation in unobservable regions of the Universe. One also wonders if physicists can make any sort of calculation of the total amount of energy released in the initial big bang based on the age of the observable Universe, its cosmic micro-wave radiation patterns and quantity and the total mass of stars and matter perhaps plus dark matter and energy.

How much energy it did it take to drive inflation (that last for just a few nano-seconds or so apparently), why didn't inflation break up the cosmic microwave background pattern, and why did that inflation affect space, matter and energy together without distortion. Did inflation remove all of its energy from the Universe or spend it all accelerating energy and space?

Patterns within Fields (poem)

10 Jan. 2017

The infinite status of quanta within fields

simultaneously singular and at every possible position

is a duplication of being and nothingness at each when

Feynman diagrams become three dimensions plus

every possible time

the infinite journey of mass calculated

as quantum packet-loops

strings along dimensions

with Newton and Einstein forming theories of gravity

before the third true theory revises

the enigmatic behavior of mass and energy

from energy entering a network of controls

branching into forces and places of mass

with time and a half quanta within an infinite field

renormalizes to forever

dimensions with vector directions

lattices, waveforms

singularities with hearts of bubble verses renormalizable too

quantum fields of pluralism

reduced to monism

infinite journey within a circle

expanding inwardly

spiritually saved from the original sin

of thoughtlessness.

G.R. and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems

Nov. 6, 2016

Gödel's incompleteness theorems have many applications to fields besides mathematics. The characteristic feature of a set of all possible sets that includes itself as impossible is analogous to the problem of getting a finite number to define an infinite series. Einstein's General theory of relativity and its equations providing data describing the curvature of spacetime and the past and future of the Universe without extraneous factors such as dark energy entails similar problems. Because the equations are made with mathematics embedded in space-time itself the formulas must collapse with the collapse of space-time toward the singularity.

If a set of all sets inclusive of itself were possible, if G.R. could describe the entire Universe's history, if the principle of identity were transcended such that one being could view itself entirely as other yet include the independent view of each for-themselves, it would be a different Universe. It is remarkable that Kurt Gödel's and Albert Einstein each worked at the same time at Princeton University's center for theoretical physics.

Could God have a fate? For the Unconditional to let himself become the conditional, where the non-contingent being reduced unto the Universe of contingencies, that was bold. That was the Lord Jesus Christ being born of the virgin Mary predestined to crucifixion as the perfect lamb of God atoning for the sins of the elect. Jesus Christ took a deterministic spatio-temporal role in the steady state of a material Universe alongside his fellow humanity. The presence of omnipotent God filled even a contingent Universe of his creation.

If G.R.'s equations had a platonic validity such that they could exist to describe space-time independently of the material-energy space-time Universe that would be great. Mathematical physicists such as Max Tegmark have theorized about a Mathematical Universe (M.U.T.) wherein purely abstract mathematics actually are the foundation of particle-waves, mass and energy. Yet rather than presenting a continuum of scientific validity narrowing into infinite reduction in singularity, G.R. may itself be a phenomenon of the space-time in which it is embedded that terminates at a select scale of reduction, maybe where the first appearance of a dimension entity in nothingness occurs and time itself vanishes.

Before the First Virtual Particle in Any Possible Universe

26 Oct. 2016

About the first virtual particle...virtual particles so far as i know are flexes of the non-locality positions of quanta such as electrons. So there needs to be a primary particle or field for the appearance of a virtual particle.

Ideas taken apart from matter- that is spirit- just wouldn't be matter or energy or even a virtual particle. Math is an idea-even if it were taken as having some kind of Platonic reality.

I gave some thought to dimensions and wonder if even a theoretical first virtual particle without a primary source could have existed without a dimensions. Empty space would need to have dimensions or perhaps none at all and not exist either.

A Math Universe could exist in the context of a kernel presentation from an Omniscient Spirit. Yet what could sustain the idea otherwise, if it must be something other than what the apparent Universe of energy-mass is?

Maybe the first dimension coincided with a first idea from God. I like the theological dimensions of the line of conjecture, for I think it easy to make categorical errors about what is required for anything to exist or not in the basic Universe before expansion or inflation.

This is an excerpt from a short story I wrote named Pt. Omni- (its about