Its an entertaining read. The theory is based on work done by:

Richard Feynman a brilliant physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He proposed that a system got from a state A, to a state B, by every possible path or history.

Each path or history, has a certain amplitude or intensity, and the probability of the system going from A to B, is given by adding up the amplitudes for each path. There will be a history in which the moon is made of blue cheese, but the amplitude is low

So non-existence is posited merely as a state which can be moved from or to and is achieved by traversing all possible paths, including the one in which invisble pink unicorns tap daqce on pins at the restaurant at the end of the Universe. You are expected to take this seriously, even once you swallow the concept of non-existence as a valid state.

Hawking goes on

The picture Jim Hartle and I developed, of the spontaneous quantum creation of the universe, would be a bit like the formation of bubbles of steam in boiling water.

The idea is that the most probable histories of the universe, would be like the surfaces of the bubbles. Many small bubbles would appear, and then disappear again. These would correspond to mini universes that would expand, but would collapse again while still of microscopic size. They are possible alternative universes, but they are not of much interest since they do not last long

As I understand this, Hawking is talking about the expansion of the Universe from a singularity. Which seems to me that Hawking wants to have his invisible pink unicorn and eat it too. If the Universe is non-existent, where did the singularity come from ?

Perhaps I misunderstand the article? I am happy to be corrected.

But for now there you have “popping into being”. As might be expected from an untestable and highly entertaining idea from the realms of pure creativity it is full of preposterous nonsense and downright contradiction.

But because it is labelled “Science” many swallow it without bothering to read the
label. And for many on the Left anything that ejects God from the room is axiomatically justified.

It is not all at rational to assume God popped into being. God, by definition, is self-existent so does not need to pop into being, so the statement ‘God popped into being’ is self-contradictory.

And I didn’t say, contra to what you assert, that God popped into being.

As far as ‘turtles all the way down’, that’s as equally rational as ‘its black holes all the way down’.

As Barra says, much more rational to assume that God popped into being, popped himself some planet spanners (really good ones, like Kinchrome or something cause he’s GOD dude), and got busy.

It’s turtles all the way down.

In a nutshell: there was no shortage of water in the early solar nebula (or, presumably, corresponding dust ‘n’ ice discs around other stars). If a growing planet had enough gravity to retain volatile liquid/gaseous water, or was far enough out for the water to stay frozen, then that abundant primeval water stayed put. Hence the icy moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and the large amount of water present in the outer planets of our Solar System. Smaller, closer-in and hotter bodies like our Earth either were not able to retain water out of the primeval cloud or had it boiled off in the early days of the Solar System. The relatively thin veneer of ocean that we have now is the pathetic leftovers that have seeped out since, plus any additions from late-arriving chunks of outer solar system (i.e. comets).

A bigger planet, around a more feeble star, would be able to retain relatively immense amounts of water right from the start, and would look very like this Waterworld. This is even more the case if it actually started further from its star and then spiralled in due to tidal drag before the dust cleared, which is a popular mechanism for explaining the relatively large number of exoplanets that have been found to lie much, much closer to their stars than you’d expect, extrapolating from our locale.

Lots of people would like to think the Universe just popped into being. This avoids having to consider that God might exist and, more to the point, what humankind’s relationship might be with God.

Merry Christmas

Barra

friggin anarchist.

It was me.

I was watering the garden and just didn’t stop.