Does True Randomness Actually Exist? ( ^&*#^%$&#% )

Well, he did try to be more explicit about it, but his language is maybe too technical.

Earlier, IIRC, he did some bijection of sets. One is the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4) and one is an infinite string of H and T. Bijection just means to, for example, put the lists side by side and link the first entry of both lists together, the second entry of both lists together, etc.

Elroch was answering your question "how do you know ALL of them are heads when there are infinite of them?" He was saying you can make a well defined list of all coin flips and it's no more mysterious than the fact that we accept there are an infinite number of positive integers.

(So 1 is heads, 2 is heads, 3 is heads, and so on, for all positive integers).

You said it yourself, that infinity allows anything that can happen to actually happen.

So either you claim that at some point flipping heads is impossible, or you admit that flipping heads on flip number __  is a 50% chance no matter what number we use to fill in that blank.

And yes, a coin that always lands one way appears to not be fair, but that doesn't have much to do with anything. If you want an answer for how to prove it's a fair coin, you could repeat the experiment many times. The more times you repeat the experiment, the more sure you can be that it's fair. In any case, we can define the coin as fair from the beginning so while it might be a fun question to ask, it's not necessary.

Your question was "how do you know ALL flips are tails if there are infinitely many of them?"

His answer is "pair the result of one flip to one number in an infinite list of numbers, and in this way we account for an infinite number of coin flips."

I know next to nothing about theoretical physics, and I tend to not care since it's impractical. If you can't measure it then it's fake science Yeah I'm kidding, but that's my bias. Big bang or not, I couldn't really care less about it.

Epistemology is something I've enjoyed thinking about on my own. It's fun when you independently discover some of the basics... of course if I actually read important books on the topic I'd get the whole 1000s of years of human discovery treatment, but I'm not interested enough for that.

Sure, that stuff is fun to me.

@Optimissed, state a scientific proposition that you believe is false that is part of the Big Bang Theory.  Saying you don't believe in the Big Bang Theory sounds a bit daft, like you believe none of the propositions that are part of the theory (such as that the general statements about graphs of mass density, temperature and so on, over the early history of the Universe).

The I Ching, or turning over Tarot cards are excellent sources of random data.

The procedure for generating a reading is random much like with Tarot cards, but using triple coin flips! You can even do it online, based on random number generators, of course.

They were surely puzzled why you thought there were different Big Bang Theories. Technically this is true, but it is fair to say there is a widely accepted standard model - the Lambda-CDM Big Bang cosmology. Alternatives like Modified Newtonian Dynamics and entropic gravity are treated seriously but do not have the same standing.

There is a lot of agreement on most of the timeline. There is a standard cosmology which leads back to a standard model of the Big Bang which is very widely accepted. It's actually rather well understood up to a temperature similar to that associated with the collisions in the Large Hadron Collider, which is where empirical knowledge of physics dries up.

As I understand it, the extrapolation very early on is simple because a highly uniform, dense expanding Universe at a given (very high) temperature can only feasibly arise from an even more highly uniform, higher temperature, denser universe.  This reasoning extends back to the strongly hypothesised inflationary epoch, which would be capable of providing extremely high uniformity required.

There is certainly work in progress on the evolution of the early Universe after the Big Bang, after the time of last scattering. But this falls outside of the Big Bang Theory and within cosmology.  I understand there is also a big mystery about the origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry: it may be explained by physics at higher energies than can be studied yet.

Let's put this another way: what do you disagree about in this chronology? Or Lambda-CDM?

I accept that there are a range of alternative models that typically don't involve dark matter and replace relativity.  Some of these have terrible theoretical problems such as failing to satisfy conservation laws. Others have huge problems with some of the empirical data. But it is true that there is active, peer-reviewed work hypothesising that these models are true.

I have to say that any model that gives up the beautiful balance in the observed Universe, where the sum of the energy in mass, dark matter and dark energy is perfectly balanced by the gravitational energy seems implausible.

Please note that you have failed entirely to turn your expressed hatred for "the Big Bang theory" into anything approximating a scientific statement about a proposition that is not true.  You have however revealed imperfect understanding of the Big Bang Theory.

It certainly does NOT involve the Universe coming from a point.  It involves the observable universe coming from a very tiny region at the time after the Planck epoch. It does not assert the observable Universe came from a smaller region than this, because understanding of physics does not permit significant understanding of that time, when energies were enormously higher than any ever seen and quantum gravity replaces anything close to the physics that is understood (eg involving 4-D space-time).

Note also that the BBT does not have anything to say on how big the Universe as a whole was at this time. Even though the observable Universe came from a tiny region, the Universe as a whole could have been any larger size at this time.

It sounds like it has already been explained to you that this is what the BBT says, but you thought it was a new idea. It's not: that's the way it's been understood since the 1970s at least. Moreover, the term "the Big Bang Theory" refers to the Universe having once been very dense and hot and having expanded fairly uniformly before cooling and later forming stars and galaxies.  Only the most eccentric and rare cosmologists doubt this, as evidence has got better and better. See Big Bang cosmology from the 1990s.

I am not familiar with what you are referring to, but I gather it is a 60-year-old book on cosmology. Suffice it to say understanding has advanced.

No, "my idea" of science is Science. The application of the Scientific Method to the real world. Doesn't involves things like "I think that the Big Bang is stupider than people realise, but that it's a God-replacement theory".

The Scientific Method

Disliking BBT because it disagrees with a literal reading of the Christian Bible?

(Otherwise there's nothing "God-replacement" about it)

No.  The correct version is "Elroch agrees with the Scientific Method".

Here it is again. Have another look.

I don't even know where to begin. Determinism isn't part of any scientific theory and scientific theories don't seek to answer metaphysical questions... and deism is also a separate entity.

So, for example, you can have the BBT with or without determinism, you can have a creator-God with or without BBT, not to mention the entire ethos of science is removing "psychological compulsions" from the process.

"God does not play dice" was not a religious (or deistic) objection. Things like non-locality and superposition are bizarre to anyone, deist or not.

And also you say not to error on the side of ultra-simplicity, but "they're trying to replace God without knowing it" is exactly that. You simplify 3 things at once: religion, philosophy, and science.

The Big Bang Theory is the very opposite of "miraculous". Rather it attempts to explain the entire history of the Universe since it was an astonishingly dense, hot, uniform, rapidly expanding maelstrom beyond our understanding of physics.  The key is that it attempts to explain this history using only a set of laws of physics and observations about the state of the Universe.

Some (almost always fundamentalist religious) people take the entirely false position that the Big Bang Theory is about how this initial state arose. That is literally the only thing it is not about!  It's much the same as fundamentalists who try to argue against evolution by going straight to the question of how the first cellular life arose - the very thing it does not address! (The theory of biological evolution is of course about how every organism on Earth has arisen since the common ancestor of all life existed).

It is true that the Big Bang Theory is not yet complete. And it is unlikely that it will be in our lifetimes. The reason for this is that there remains a need for new physics to explain certain aspects of our Universe, and there is no prospect of having experimental capabilities that could probe that new physics in the forseeable future (the energy involved is way too high).

Right, BBT doesn't deal with the universe before matter and energy existed, the same way evolution doesn't deal with biology before living organisms existed. There are plenty of religious people who accept modern science.

It's only the fundamentalists, who insist on a literal reading of their holy text, who take issue.

No more comments and references to religion please.

Harmless as it is, I feel it's a slippery slope. Thank you.

@Optimissed compared the disagreement with him to disagreement with his disbelief in the Big Bang Theory.

Other than that, it has no substantial relationship.