How Heavy is the Universe? Conflicting Answers Hint at New Physics

The world’s oldest analog computer and one of the most remarkable scientific objects of antiquity ever found, the mechanical model of the solar system is thought to date to between the third and first centuries B.C. Now fractured into 82 known fragments, there is surviving evidence of 30 bronze gears. A strength of cosmological arguments from contingency is that their conclusions achieve more than arguments from causation. They can establish God’s necessity, meaning inability to cease existing, which is a key element of Christian theology.

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In 1916, Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity, which provided a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time. At the time, Einstein believed in a static universe, but found that his original formulation of the theory did not permit it. This is because masses distributed throughout the universe gravitationally attract, and move toward each other over time. However, he realized that his equations permitted the introduction of a constant term which could counteract the attractive force of gravity on the cosmic scale.

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Aquinas understands necessity to mean the inability to cease existing, which fits with the concept of omnipotence. Copleston attempts to show that Russell is assuming that there isn’t a cause and Russell attempts to show that Copleston is assuming that there is. Ultimately, defenders of the cosmological argument are the ones making the positive claim about reality, so they have the burden of proof. It looks like for cosmological arguments from contingency, the conclusion that God exists as the explanation/cause of the universe cannot be reached without assuming that the universe has an explanation/cause.

Modern science’s rejection of the cosmological argument

The inconsistency, it turned out, might be explained by some additional force layered on top of gravity and dark energy—a force that would add to the tendency of dark energy to tamp down structure formation. Or it could suggest that dark energy itself became stronger at some point, Caldwell says.

Besides LIGO, many other gravitational-wave observatories are under construction. The first of these to be discovered, dubbed Maisie’s Galaxy after Finkelstein’s daughter, appears to be just 380 million years after the Big Bang, the researchers reported December 1 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The most distant galaxy in the team’s survey might lie as much as 130 million years earlier than Maisie. Those galaxies’ distances still need to be confirmed with spectra, but the team expect to get those data in the next few weeks. JWST observed this region of the sky that includes and extends a region observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists used the new space telescope to take multi-wavelength measurements of some of the most distant galaxies ever seen, confirming their extreme remoteness. The history of cosmology is a grand story of discovery, from ancient Greek astronomy to -space telescopes.

These findings were a first step to rule out some of many alternative cosmologies. Modern scientific cosmology is widely considered to have begun in 1917 with Albert Einstein’s publication of his final modification of general relativity in the paper “Cosmological Considerations of the General Theory of Relativity” . General relativity prompted cosmogonists such as Willem de Sitter, Karl Schwarzschild, and Arthur Eddington to explore its astronomical ramifications, which enhanced the ability of astronomers to study very distant objects.

Or if dark energy strengthens, there would be a “big rip” when galaxies, stars and even atoms are torn apart. Scientists long assumed this process was seeding planets—and possibly even life—around stars other than our own sun. But we did not know for sure whether planets existed outside our solar system until the 1990s, when astronomers developed clever methods for identifying worlds that are too dim for us to see directly. One technique looks for tiny periodic changes in a star’s movement caused by the gravitational pull of a planet orbiting it. In 1995 Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz used this strategy to detect 51 Pegasi b, the first known exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star. The technique can reveal a planet’s mass, the length of its “year” and the shape of its orbit.

This doesn’t mean the universe itself as a whole must also be contingent . Leibniz improves on Aquinas’ 3rd way by removing unnecessary reasoning about nothing once existing. So, there must be more than this finite series of contingent beings, i.e., a necessary being. If this finite series was all that existed, then before it would be nothing.

“After that, the universe kept expanding and they couldn’t find each other, and before it was too hot.” Most generally, it illustrates the arc of the observable universe as it thinned out and cooled down from an initially dense, hot state.

However, another theory with more evidence for it is Alan Guth’s inflation theory. Laurence Krauss, a physicist, explains Guth’s theory that the universe came from nothing because it actually is nothing. Gravity has negative energy, the total amount of which in the universe happens to exactly cancel out the positive energy of the matter in the universe, so the total energy of the universe is zero; it is nothing. Krauss claims this answers Leibniz’ question of why there is something rather than nothing. Quantum mechanics has existed eternally and causes quantum fluctuations which can create a zero-energy universe from nothing because such a universe requires zero energy to create.