As an aside, T666, you know what's interesting? On the very page I asked you for the first and last words, Hawking notes that, according to even conservative estimates, during the cosmological inflation, the universe expanded by a factor of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001 second. "It was as if a coin one centimter in diameter suddenly blew up to 10 million times the width of the Milky Way." Isn't it a fascinating coincidence that your question and my question are addressed on the very same page? And you asked your question first. Still waiting.
You're pathetic. Your "explanation" shows ZERO comprehension. The first and last words on page 129 of the HARDCOVER version are "bang" and "big."
Same as the soft cover. I thought you might appreciate the word choice. Took you long enough, though. Bookstore nearby?
Did you not say I didn't read the book? Were you not the one taking your considerable time reading two simple words? (Run to the neighborhood bookstore, did you?) Did I not choose the page with the relevant first and last words ("big bang," no less) that also addressed the very question you asked? Tough crowd.
If you read the book, you didn't understand it from your pathetic answer to my question. And you were certainly full of shit about this: You're full of crap. You don't have the book and you didn't read it. You lie. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=3498361#post3498361
Possibly, but not necessarily. You took an inordinately and suspiciously long time furnishing me with 2 simple words.
No, wrong. A plea of ignorance is no explanation. Some take the time to understand the science behind it. Here is why Penrose is justified in saying its a collection of ideas and that M theory is hardly a science... so therefore the book is overstated. Penrose is telling you that Hawking just dreamed this stuff up, based on a unobservable, unverifiable conjecture tied to M theory that there could be 10 to the 500 universes. Understand this paper or shut up. If you really understand this... you will now understand why hawking states gravity causes the universe. In a way, if you follow along with the all the conjectures, it sort of does. If accept the conjecture you think because you are existing in one of the rare solutions which works amongst almost infinite possible solutions. ------------------------------- http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0602/0602091v2.pdf "But cosmology poses questions of a very different character. In our past there is an epoch of the early universe when quantum gravity was important. The remnants of this early phase are all around us. The central problem in cosmology is to understand why these remnants are what they are, and how the distinctive features of our universe emerged from the big bang. Clearly it is not an S-matrix that is the relevant observable 3 for these predictions, since we live in the middle of this particular experiment. Furthermore, we have no control over the initial state of the universe, and there is certainly no opportunity for observing multiple copies of the universe. In fact if one does adopt a bottom-up approach to cosmology, one is immediately led to an essentially classical framework, in which one loses all ability to explain cosmologyâs central question - why our universe is the way it is. In particular a bottom-up approach to cosmology either requires one to postulate an initial state of the universe that is carefully fine-tuned [10] - as if prescribed by an outside agency 3 See [6, 7, 8, 9] for recent work on the existence and the construction of observables in cosmological spacetimes. 1- or it requires one to invoke the notion of eternal inflation [11], which prevents one from predicting what a typical observer would see. Here we put forward a different approach to cosmology in the string landscape, based not on the classical idea of a single history for the universe but on the quantum sum over histories [12]. We argue that the quantum origin of the universe naturally leads to a framework for cosmology where amplitudes for alternative histories of the universe are computed with boundary conditions at late times only. We thus envision a set of alternative universes in the landscape, with amplitudes given by the no boundary path integral [13]."
Jem, why don't you just shut up. Don't pretend you adequately understand something in which you have absolutely no grounding. Just as you cut and paste shit you don't understand, I could have done the same by writing "The ultimate theory must be consistent and must predict finite results for quantities that we can measure. There must be a law like gravity, and for a theory of gravity to predict finite quantities, the theory must have what is called supersymmetry between the forces of nature and the matter on which they act. Supersymmetry is a subtle kind of symmetry that cannot be associated with a transformation of ordinary space. One of the important implications of supersymmetry is that force particles and matter particles, and hence force and matter, are really just two facets of the same thing. M-theory is the most general supersymmetric theory of gravity. For these reasons, M-theory is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe. If it is finite -- and this has yet to be proved -- it will be a model of the universe that creates itself, because there is no other consistent model." Do you actually have a working understanding of what I just wrote? I don't, and I very much doubt that you do since you don't even understand the general science behind evolution, which is much more accessible than astrophysics. So stop posturing with "my cut&paste is better than yours." Stop being a poseur.