Entropy Levels and the Big Bang

[The Mad Hatter]

A few days ago at my university, I went to a lecture on the existence of God, thinking it would be some neutral thing examining both sides of the issue. Of course, it turned out to be organized by the school's Christian club, and I should have known better. The speaker gave the usual arguments for God...the Kalam cosmological argument, the fine tuning of the universe (yes, even the watch argument), some anti-evolution arguments like irreducible complexity, moral objectivity, and that strange "I believe in God and I'm not insane and I haven't been brainwashed; therefore God exists" argument.

I refuted almost all his arguments in the Q/A section after, and pointed out all the fallacies he made, which might have been rude, but I didn't have much patience. I usually stay quiet for these things, but sometimes I can't help it.

But there was one argument that had me a little curious. He said Roger Penrose calculated the odds for the initial entropy levels (at the big bang) to be just right for life to occur later on to be 1/10^1270. I asked him about this after the lecture to see where he got that, and he said he could email me a source if I wanted, but I passed. When I got home, I googled it, but found nothing.

This later got me thinking - he also mentioned in the fine-tuning arguments that if the universe was expanding at just a slightly different speed, it would have collapsed. I'm sure smarter people have considered this, but what if there were some "trial" big bangs before the last one? (Although I guess it wouldn't make much of a difference in our current universe).

So basically, I'm curious about two things - Was his statement entropoy levels correct?
And is it possible that there was a big bang earlier, with the wrong entropic levels or wrong speed, that resulted in a big crunch before the latest big bang?

 

[brettDbass]

According to http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/003/26.44.html

Fine-tuning the universe
The first recent number that points to God is 1 in 10 to the 10 to the 123. This number comes from astronomy. Oxford professor Roger Penrose discusses it in his book The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind. It derives from a formula by Jacob Beckenstein and Stephen Hawking and describes the chances of our universe being created at random. Penrose spoofs this view by picturing God throwing a dart at all the possible space-time continua and hitting the universe we inhabit. The Beckenstein-Hawking formula is too complicated to discuss here, but another approach to the same problem involves the fine-tuning of the universe and the existence of habitable planets.

The book on Amazon.

This particular exercise seems to be nothing more than the frivolous use of maths and statistics to no positive benefit, IMO.


Re your second question, there are an infinite number of possibilities of what came before the big bang and we will never ever know what actually happened.

 

[to.by]

Any computation of the probabilties are sensless after the fact. All right! So the probability of the universe having the right values of the parameters at the start is vanishingly small. Nevertheless the universe exists today. Calculating that probability after the fact means nothing. If I buy one of a billion tickets I don't have much of a chance of winning. That doesn't mean that nobody wins.
You could turn the argument on its head too. The reason the universe is as it is, is simply because the initial conditions were as they were (many "is" here)

 

[Shrinker]

So basically, I'm curious about two things - Was his statement entropoy levels correct?
And is it possible that there was a big bang earlier, with the wrong entropic levels or wrong speed, that resulted in a big crunch before the latest big bang?

I'm not at all knowledgable about these things, but I'd say the logical conclusion is that there are, or have been, many universes. The ones which couldn't support life didn't. One which could, did.

 

[Arkan_Wolfshade]

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time addresses this. Chptr 3 I believe http://www.physics.metu.edu.tr/~fizikt/html/hawking/b.html

 

[jj]

A few days ago at my university, I went to a lecture on the existence of God, thinking it would be some neutral thing examining both sides of the issue. Of course, it turned out to be organized by the school's Christian club, and I should have known better. The speaker gave the usual arguments for God...the Kalam cosmological argument, the fine tuning of the universe (yes, even the watch argument), some anti-evolution arguments like irreducible complexity, moral objectivity, and that strange "I believe in God and I'm not insane and I haven't been brainwashed; therefore God exists" argument.

I refuted almost all his arguments in the Q/A section after, and pointed out all the fallacies he made, which might have been rude, but I didn't have much patience. I usually stay quiet for these things, but sometimes I can't help it.

But there was one argument that had me a little curious. He said Roger Penrose calculated the odds for the initial entropy levels (at the big bang) to be just right for life to occur later on to be 1/10^1270. I asked him about this after the lecture to see where he got that, and he said he could email me a source if I wanted, but I passed. When I got home, I googled it, but found nothing.

This later got me thinking - he also mentioned in the fine-tuning arguments that if the universe was expanding at just a slightly different speed, it would have collapsed. I'm sure smarter people have considered this, but what if there were some "trial" big bangs before the last one? (Although I guess it wouldn't make much of a difference in our current universe).

So basically, I'm curious about two things - Was his statement entropoy levels correct?
And is it possible that there was a big bang earlier, with the wrong entropic levels or wrong speed, that resulted in a big crunch before the latest big bang?

It's circular, in the cases where it didn't happen that way, we weren't there to see it happen, eh?

 

[The Mad Hatter]

Thanks for the replies. I usually try to explain that probabilities are pointless with historical events when people bring up the odds of life spontaneously forming, (for some reason it completely slipped my mind this time), but usually that goes nowhere. I usually explain that it's like rolling a 1000-sided dice, having it land on a 485, and claiming that's impossible, because the chances of that happening were only 1/1000. But then I get strange replies, sometimes even as dumb as "but you can't make a dice with 1000 sides!" Maybe someone could give a better analogy.

Arkan, thanks for the Hawking chapter. I read "A Brief History of Time" a while ago, apparently not carefully enough.

It's circular, in the cases where it didn't happen that way, we weren't there to see it happen, eh?

Well, I guess there's obviously no evidence that could possibly support it historically. I'm just wondering if it's possible - if so, and I assume there's nothing making it impossible - it would mean these probabilities would not have such "divine" proportions.

 

[Arkan_Wolfshade]

It's circular, in the cases where it didn't happen that way, we weren't there to see it happen, eh?

Yeah, the anthropic principle sometimes makes my head spin, but some of the offshoots from it make a lot of sense.

 

[Ziggurat]

But then I get strange replies, sometimes even as dumb as "but you can't make a dice with 1000 sides!"

Yes you can. It won't be a regular polyhedron, but you can easily make one even with 1000 equivalent sides. Just look at how they make 10-sided dice: they're not regular polyhedra either, they're kind of funny looking, but all the sides are equivalent. No reason you can't do exactly the same thing with 1000 sides - might be hard to actually read off the numbers, but that's a different problem.

 

[drkitten]

But then I get strange replies, sometimes even as dumb as "but you can't make a dice with 1000 sides!" Maybe someone could give a better analogy.

I like roulette wheels, because they can (obviously) be made with any number of number that you like.