Okay, so first, the good stuff. A paper by Ahmed Farag Alia and Saurya Das, two Egyptian physicists, titled "Cosmology from Quantum Potential" was recently published in Physics Lettters B (741, no. 4 (February 2015), 276-79) that argues that the universe is, in fact, beginningless and that the Big Bang never happened. If you have access to ScienceDirect, you can read the paper itself here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 9314009381
And here is an alternative link -- I don't know if you have to pay or not:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.3093v3 (or http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.3093v3 for bibliographic page)
If these don't provide you access, and if you want to trust media reports (phys.org, in this case), you can read a summary of the problem and their argument here:
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantu ... verse.html
The thrust of their argument goes back to 1950, when a certain David Bohm argued for a change in the way we measure the shortest distance between two points on a curved space (using quantum trajectories). The upshot is that when you run the equations the way these authors do using, in part, Bohm's ideas, a Big Bang never happens because singularities never happen, and singularities never happen because particles never actually cross points.
Anyway, the conclusion of their paper is as follows:
- In summary, we have shown here that as for the QRE, the second order Friedmann equation derived from the QRE also contains two quantum correction terms. These terms are generic and unavoidable and follow naturally in a quantum mechanical description of our universe. Of these, the first can be interpreted as cosmological constant or dark energy of the correct (observed) magnitude and a small mass of the graviton (or axion). The second quantum correction term pushes back the time singularity indefinitely, and predicts an everlasting universe. While inhomogeneous or anisotropic perturbations are not expected to significantly affect these results, it would be useful to redo the current study with such small perturbations to rigorously confirm that this is indeed the case. Also, as noted in the introduction, we assume it to follow general relativity, whereas the Einstein equations may themselves undergo quantum corrections, especially at early epochs, further affecting predictions. Given the robust set of starting assumptions, we expect our main results to continue to hold even if and when a fully satisfactory theory of quantum gravity is formulated. For the cosmological constant problem at late times on the other hand, quantum gravity effects are practically absent and can be safely ignored. We hope to report on these and related issues elsewhere. (p.278)
As for my soap box . . .
I think this is exactly why Aquinas' reasoning process is infinitely better when arguing for God's existence. With all respect to WLC, I think we are setting ourselves up for a huge embarrassment in the next twenty or so years if we keep pushing the KCA as the fundamental argument for God. Most of you know that I've been arguing this for years. The fact of the matter is that if the second premise of the KCA fails (i.e., "The universe came into existence")--or even if others have warrant for thinking it fails--we don't want to leave ourselves open up to the charge of blind faith. The prolifigation of these models are giving more and more peope pause (with or without cause) for questioning that premise, too.
Once again, I direct you to what Aquinas said over 700 years ago:
- Now, these arguments [that the universe is not eternal], though not devoid of probability, lack absolute and necessary conclusiveness. Hence it is sufficient to deal with them quite briefly, lest the Catholic faith might appear to be founded on ineffectual reasonings, and not, as it is, on the most solid teaching of God ( SCG II.38.8 )
I'm not advocating, by the way, an absolute rejection of the KCA. I think it needs to be used in light of what it is (which I explain thoroughly in the paper linked above). I think, more than that, it should be used secondarily to the argument for God as provided by Aquinas. For those who are not terribly familiar with that argument, I would point you to these two threads, which offer some brief explanations/defenses of the idea:
http://discussions.godandscience.org/vi ... 19&t=39863 (shorter -- with a good schema provided by Byblos)
http://discussions.godandscience.org/vi ... =3&t=39894 (longer -- a different schema and a more detailed defense)
I am curious if any of our resident scientists could look at the original paper and offer their thoughts, too. Thanks much!
