58 lines
2.1 KiB
Plaintext
58 lines
2.1 KiB
Plaintext
.SECTION_NO_NUMBER Preface
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.PARAGRAPH_INDENTED
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The preface is about what simplistic ideas we have of the creation of the universe, mostly religious ones.
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Religion argues for an infinite regression that could only be solved by some magic being that conveniently appears to be
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.I infinite
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and
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.I eternal
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so our universe doesn't have to.
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Theologians and religious people are a bit mocked for their many, many dishonest arguments to keep their beliefs.
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For example, the
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.I "Intelligent Design"
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concept, which not only requires to ignore a lot of what we actually
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.B do
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know about life on earth, but also serves as a magic all-in-one concept without any consistency to reject evolution.
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Invoking a god to explain
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.I how
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stuff appears is intellectually lazy and is at best irrelevant.
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Science is our best effort to understand our universe, and it follows three key principles\*[*]
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.FOOTNOTE1
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The following definition really is simplistic and only covers the general idea behind science.
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Do not take it for an absolute definition.
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.FOOTNOTE2
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:
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.BULLET
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.UL "follow the evidence"
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wherever it leads;
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.BULLET
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.UL "theories should be tried to prove wrong"
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as much as we try to prove them right;
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.BULLET
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.UL "experiment is the only truth" ,
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not beliefs nor mathematical elegance of a model.
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.ENDBULLET
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Science can make people uncomfortable since it changes how we view the world, and this happened quite a few times in history.
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With recent discoveries, one may even wonder if the
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.I "laws of nature"
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really are fundamentals.
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Krauss introduces the concept that maybe the universe could come from nothing.
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And
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.I nothing
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is something rather odd, and we don't actually have experienced it so we can't make much assumptions on it.
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First we thought that
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.I nothing
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could be a simple
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.I "quantum vacuum"
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but now we know that a vacuum (a space without any material entity) isn't really nothing since there are still space and time applied to it.
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Even then, we know that space and time can spontaneously appear.
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Since the concept of
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.I nothing
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isn't by any mean trivial to understand, the book
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.[
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a-universe-from-nothing
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.]
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will explain it in details later.
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