I could not resist putting this report on this subject, as the similarity is astonishing between the two:
12'EK: I think that what distinguishes cosmogonies from cosmologies is the fact that in cosmogonies the origin of the world is part of the world, that is to say that there is already there, a beginning of the world, it can be a primordial egg, a primitive egg, it can be a chaos, the formless matter, it can be a lot of things according to the cultures in which one is interested, but the idea is that the The origin of the world is already in the world, it is immanent to take a philosophical term. There is a story that moves from this immanence origin to the world we know. While in cosmologies or even in religious narratives, in the genesis of the three monotheisms the origin of the world is not part of the world, it is transcendent in relation to the world, which makes the world contingent elsewhere, it that is to say, it is arbitrary.
If god in the Christian or Muslim genesis, for example, had not decided to create the world, there would be no world, so the world was not necessary whereas in cosmogonies it is necessary in the sense that the initial conditions determine the rest of the story, in a way.
TB: And from a cosmological scientific point of view, is it contingent?
EK: In contemporary cosmology there is a problem, which in my opinion is a metaphysical problem that will never be solved, that is when you talk about the origin of the universe, as a physicist, you always do it by invoking physical laws or a physical theory: what is the status of physics in relation to the universe?
is it transcendent or immanent ? Are physical laws part of the universe, or is the legislative arsenal of the universe pre-existing at its onset? if you think that the universe really had an absolute origin, it means that it was preceded by nothing since if you put something upstream of the universe that something by its very status contradicts the idea that universe to an origin; in other words, every time you name the origin of the universe precisely, you contradict the fact that it has an origin. If I say, for example, the origin of the universe is not a black hole, the quantum vacuum, a collision between I do not know what with I do not know what, a brane for example, you name the origin of the universe, you produce a narrative that will logically be incoherent because either this thing that you put upstream of all others to always there, in which case there is no origin since there has always been some thing, or else this thing has not always been there, which means that it is itself the effect of a cause that preceded it and it is not the origin and therefore, for example when you are a physicist, you must -
but we never do it obviously, because we do not want to be embarrassed-precise the status you accord to the laws of physics. For example, Hawkins, who is eminently respectable as a theoretician and popularizer, has written books and others have written for him, which are a little ambiguous on this point, for example in the last he says: "
we do not need to create the universe, the laws of gravitation have been enough But where were the laws? Were they transcendent? and how can transcendent laws create an empirical universe that obeys them?
We should tell ! and so the question of the status of laws, physical laws, in my opinion, is an issue that makes the more general issue of
the origin of the universe is a question, in part, metaphysical.(...) I know that the transmission of knowledge, you know it better than me, is something that we can not do well, we see every day that it does not perish, that it is distorted, that it is misunderstood, that it may not be interesting elsewhere! in any case the record that can be drawn from popular science is not extraordinary, the efforts to make it are much greater today than they were in the past, but the effects produced are weird, very very weird. Can we explain that? I do not know, maybe we have to invent new modes to transmit, maybe we have to give ourselves more time to transmit because when we transmit briefly,
we USE, WHETHER OR NOT WE SUGGEST AUTHORITY ARGUMENTS which can be challenged by a sharp critical mind in the name of the critical mind because we have not had time to give the arguments that make it possible to convince of this or that result. Now on the origin, what you have to see is that, at the 20 ° century in particular, but in fact it started a little before, physicists, scientists, in general, I put in the biologists obviously, they understood the origin of many things. We have understood with incredible precision the origin of the chemical elements, how the atoms were formed in the history of the universe, the lightest in the primordial universe, the longest to the iron in the stars and then heavier in explosions of stars called supernovas (17'58 '' ... ..)
but when we say that we have understood the origin of the chemical elements, in fact what we are saying is that we are able to tell all the stories preceding the appearance of the chemical elements whose chemical elements are the result. In other words, for a scientist, THAT'S THE AMBIGUITY OF THE THING, the word origin does not mean beginning but completion, origin is synonymous with conclusion. To tell the origin of a thing, is to tell the story preceding this thing which this thing is the conclusion (...) but you see that this way of
telling the story by his genealogies stumbles on the origin of the universe which is considered as an absolute origin and thus escapes the ordinary status of the origin since if to tell a thing is to tell the story of what preceded that thing and of which this thing is the end; and when it is the universe that you speak, that is to say that to tell the origin of the universe is to tell the story that preceded the universe whose universe is the end. But how did a story precede the universe?
And so the usual way of telling the origin fails, when it comes not to something that is in the universe, but to the universe itself.TB: Is the big bang the origin of something?
EK: not at all, (...)
51 ': we can describe the interactions between quarks in primordial soup as we say, the plasma of quarks and gluons and show how in this plasma are formed the protons and neutrons, after: where do the quarks come from? and the quarks the elementary particles
and there we can not describe their origin therefore those particles that are born under X, one could say, and therefore there,
the historic canal gets clogged. At a moment the origin falls on
the question of the absolute origin which it is not thinkable, it is the transition between the not being and the being (...) (54'58 ''): origin has for anagram religion!
(... 1h05 ') TB: do we have pseudo sciences? We have a lot of people with smoky theories: do we have pseudoscience, in quotation marks, installed and that we can call pseudo sciences on the question of origins in physics, in chemistry, on the functioning of matter or of the universe ?
EK:
Well, I know it's your specialty, but when a scientist speaks, he's the one who talks. Imagine what SCIENCE would say if it could talk, it's something that no one is really capable of, so every time you comment on SCIENCE, you probably say something else that SCIENCE could talk about. So we could say that any scientific discourse is already a form of pseudo SCIENCE. It's just to tell you that it's not easy on what we can say when we talk about SCIENCE. (...) I often quote Wittgenstein, it is the one who has alerted as a philosopher about the games of language and the fact that when we speak we say things we do not really think about and that you would clandestine with her a priori that we do not master and suddenly, even when you speak and suddenly, even when you talk about time: is your way of talking about physical time is not contaminated by all the speeches that are heard that come languages as they are spoken daily. That is to say, are you sure that you are not injecting into your speech on SCIENCE things that come from language and not from SCIENCE? This, in my opinion, is a delicate question and as science has created a break with language. In his words Newton, physical time is a time that has none of the properties that language attributes to time: it is independent of what happens in time, it does not change over time, its way of being time, we can not even put a qualifier, because it is the same for all phenomena, etc ... (1h08'10 '')
etc ...
"We make science with facts, like making a house with stones: but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a pile of stones is a house" Henri Poincaré