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sam_handelman writes "The nytimes has another astrophysics article up. Free subscription etc. It talks about how inflation predicts multiple universes, this week. Dennis Overbye wrote the article, which is nice if lightweight. More info on the theory of inflation. Inflation, which is harebrained on first examination, actually predicts stuff, giving it credibility. Want to be the Right Pinky of God? It may yet be possible."
Is there anything in science that isn't?
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
> 50 years from now high school physics students will laugh at us. "Ha, these idiots believed in all sorts of kooky stuff".
Do today's highschool physics students laugh at the scientists of 50 years ago?
> This theory is just that, a theory.
And that's all a theory is supposed to be.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
AFAIK, one of the advantages of this theory is that it explains why the universe seems to be "flat". And the answer is that we just percieve a tiny fraction of the universe, so it's not surprising we see the universe as if it was flat.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
universe here means the area of the universe that we can (possibly) see, communicate with, and/or do physics experiments in. Since physics is limited to that region of the universe in which we can do physics experiments, then it is conceivable that there exist regions of spacetime that are inaccessible to us, by virtue of distance or some other parameter.
Whether it is meaningful for physicists to talk amount these regions as _seperate_ universes comes down to what you think universe means, and what the values of the cosmological parameters are this week.
Unfortunately, the big-brained ones have now copped onto the Sci-Fi idea of these alternate universes (small 'U') and have seen that using a model such as this explains (and hence predicts) some of the observable behaviours, and, better than that, it seems to be a tighter fit that the previous ideas.
Sorry Bud, but it looks like they just changes the (dictionary) meaning of Universe ...
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
By the very nature of the word, an atom cannot be divided.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
This definition was created when we discovered that they in fact could be divided. Words mean whatever you understand of them. Dictionary can, and will be, changed. Language is a changing beast, and you can screem all you want that "hacker" is not an evil computer genius, that people will continue to use the word as they learned. This is culture. :-)
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
And he'll suceed, by most accounts. ;-)
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
The laws of physics as we know them are the laws of physics for this universe and this universe alone. A different universe would have different laws of physics altogether.
The theories and the article both state this very clearly. That's one of the fascinating things about our universe: that it's laws are so precise as to allow stars, and subsequently life, to form. Only a narrow range of laws allow such formations, and our universe is one of the few (although possibly infinite) number of universes with laws capable of creating and sustaining life.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
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Some groups of people used to think they were the center of the world(e.g. Zhong Guo==Middle Kingdom)
- Bigger groups used to think that earth was the center of reality and everything literally revolved around humans.(A belief vigorously defended)
- Leewonhoek's microscope revealed a smaller scale of reality than we knew, and it was quite some time before people accepted it.
- Newton's theories seemed to describe how all reality worked until we realized different things were going on at very small and very large scales.
- Now we have a much greater understanding of things at the quantum scale and the universal scale, but it seems obvious that that is not the end of it.
Why do we seem to assume that the scale of reality is finite and coincidentally matches the same scale at which we exist? I think that based upon all of our prior fumblings we would be more likely to conclude that reality extends to a much smaller scale than the quantum and a much greater scale than that of the observible universe; even that it is infinite in both directions."Once you've discovered it's easy to make a universe out of an ounce of vacuum, why not make a bunch of them?" asked Dr. Craig Hogan, a cosmologist at the University of Washington.
Show me "an ounce of vacuum", and I might start taking you seriously.
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
But kevlar's point above is a much more important one, namely, at what point does science become philosophy or religion or whatever, but no longer science.
The standard philosophy of science answer is that a theory is scientific not when there is evidence supporting it, but (and the difference is slight, but not inconsequential) when it is falsifiable. Basically this means when you can describe an experiment that would create evidence that could (depending on the results of the experiment) contradict and invalidate the theory. (Philosopher Karl Popper came up with this defition of a scientific theory, and it is still widely used.)
In other words, if something can't ever possibly be proven wrong, it isn't science. If it could be, it is, even if you haven't yet done the experiment, or even lack the technology (as opposed to pure science) to do it. (Yes, this does create a grey area, since some experiments may not ever be realistic, or not in the next several centuries . . . .)
Many theories in physics and astrophysics have been put forward without empirical evidence to back them up at the time of their creation, and then later, improved technology has made it possible to do the experiments that either falsify them or else support them. Particle accelerators are the prototypical example. Others are observations of the effects of gravity on light (by viewing stars during an eclipse), or careful examination of small variations in planetary orbits, both of which were understood as providing potential falsifying evidence of general relativity well before they were able to carried out. (Of course, both have since been conducted, and neither did provide falsifying evidence.)
Note that this understanding of science means that nothing is ever really definitively proven true. More and more empirical evidence can support a theory, but you never know when some other observation will provide falsification. Here, the obvious example is Newtonian physics, which sure looked good for an awful long time, but now we can observe exceptions at extreme speeds and energies that demonstrate the need for relativity.
So (to get back on topic), does this mean that this theory is absolutely unscientific? Well, let's do something radical, and look at the article.
Here are a couple of specific examples which the author calls confidence builders, but which are in fact potential falsifiers. So, at least in principle, it is scientific.The problem is that there are other theories which work with the same sets of observable scientific results which are, potentially, much simpler and less messy. So now you get into an Ockham's razor issue, which let's you argue that this is a lousy scientific theory, but not that it is unscientific.