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Parallel Universes Are Real
It's in Scientific American, it must be true. This month's cover story:
Parallel Universes.
"The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here." That number's a lot bigger than 10 to the 101.42 meters, which are the farthest observable objects in what we call our universe. And anyway, twin or not, anyone outside my light-cone is dead to me. That's just a rule I have. If you're skeptical of the multiverse, go read our discussion of a similar article from
two days ago.
but I can see a lot farther than 10^1.42 meters
What does religion have to say about multiple universes? Would this figure in somehow?
woo and in the universe too!!
From the article: ...The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on.
Nope, you mixed us up. I'm the one that skipped the prom to watch Worf's quantum-reality episode of TNG, so I've already seen enough of this sort of thing to know better. The other "me" went to the prom and skipped the episode, so he's still new to the concept. Ha, I'm such a loser in the alternate universe!
So Captain Ace Rimmer should be turning up any moment now?
What? 2 x 10^118 probablity of the protons matching up in a hubble space. The problem with this type of math in cosmology is no one knows where to set the baseline numbers. The fact that the COBE discovered 1/100,000 K difference in temperatures seperated across the survey accounts for theory of distribution accross our observable region only.
You might as well say that heaven exists X meters from here because of the probability that there is an equivalent 100 ly radius of space where I exist but my puppy dog is still alive and their is no war and I eat ice-cream everyday.
Man, I am going to have to sleep on this one...
What are the odds of me getting a date in this parallel univers? cause i dont want another place where hamburgers eat people and ./ love microsoft if i still cant get a date.
+-+-+-The folowing statement is true. The previous statement is false.-+-+-+
If you're skeptical of the multiverse, go read our discussion of a similar article from two days ago.
Two days ago? Timetraveling two whole days is always so painful, mixing my knowledge of both timelines will cause headache and makes my butt itch.
love slashdot. populate it. use it. abuse it. hate it. kill it. miss it. stop following links, they only kill servers.
Can anyone translate this to a human readable number?
(or is is that huge?)
If there are infinitely many universes and in each one I do something different and play out every possibility. Then one of the other me's will build a means to cross this space and enter mine. I could assume that I am in one of the universes where my double did not go. But why hasn't any other doubles been visiting us and telling us this? Is anyone else getting a headache?
Karma: Smeghead
Microsoft: good
/.: not slash doting
Bush: Not stupid
Al Gore: Not a robot
Canada: A war like nation
Me: superman
Has anyone else noticed that Scientific American has suffered some serious Omni-fication in the past couple of years?
I let my subscription lapse a couple of years ago and when I got around to re-subscribing last year I found quite a few unpleasant surprises.
The last page of the old rag was always the Connections column, which was really interesting and entertaining. It's gone.
Gone also are all of the even vaguely scientific articles. There seemed to be a slant towards ridiculous stories on the edge of pseudo-science, much like in Omni magazine (is that in print anymore?). And every issue featured a sensationalist story centered around the threat of terrorism - stories about dirty bombs, biological weapons, new wiretapping technology, etc. It felt like they were desperately trying to attract readers by featuring stories with the same kind of scare tactics that the 11:00 news (which I haven't watched voluntarily in many years) resorts to.
Needless to say, I've let my subscription lapse again. Too bad, I used to really like that mag.
The article asserts: In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere.
So there is a place where everyone on Slashdot is getting laid! Quick, let's fire up the old improbability drive and head out there and join them!
Seriously though, this is no major jump in thinking, and is rather flawed when you stick to the basics. Just because something may be infinite in size does not necessarily mean there are an infinite number of events taking place within that space. There is no such thing as a probability of exactly 1 or exactly 0. That's why we have probability theory in the first place.
mogorific carpentry experiments
He's a gotese.cx, first posting troll.
Thundercleze: I want to buy a computer, but I have no idea about these computer things
BB Employee: Well, you're going to need lots of RAM. I can recomend this model to you
Thundercleze: Does that have SD or DDR ram?
BB Employee: What? but I thought...
Thundercleze: Answer the question
BB Employee: I don't know
Thundercleze: McDonalds fired you and your brothers the manager here isn't he?
BB employee: I feel so ashamed
- Scientists debate on wether universe is finite or infinite
- There is debate on uniformity of matter also, mostly it is thought that matter is distributed uniformaly over observable space
So the debate lives on! And i guess calling these as parallel universe is a misnomer, this is the same universe, not in another dimension(like we have the in the movie "The One")My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
...there's a SLASHDOT where everyone LOVES Microsoft and hates Linux!
Best Buy can have you arrested
First they say that they have found the end of the universe and that one day it may pull back on itself and implode (rubber band effect) Then they say the universe actually folds around in an endless loop. Then they say there are parallel universes. Just wait another couple of years someone will disprove this. If there are more than one universe does that mean we are a multiverse. On another note god help us if there are more than one microsoft in this multiverse.
Which OS do people over there use?
If my twin is reading this, but reading it when he's younger (could happen, article says "There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices;" then for crying out loud, make sure you get more than some over-the-sweater action from Amy L. back in what-was-my-1991. She'll go for it.
blarg.
How come theories such as parallel universes, multiple dimesions, strings, etc in Physics are considered acceptable yet when someone suggests the possibility of extraterrestrials visiting the earth they are considered lunatics? We are willing to handwave aways so many instances of groups of people observing UFOs as weather balloons, swamp gas, ball lightnings or mass hallucinations. To me those physics theories seem more bizzare and unlikely than the possibility that with a zillion starsystems that there be many other beings far more advanced than us.
There is a planet in this solar system, in some universe. Thats like Vulcan!
when we find a humongous ball of mismatched socks that have traveled through the 4th dimension.
Long time back another scientist, David Deutsch[http://www.qubit.org/people/david/David.ht ml] proposed a similar therory to explain Young's double slit experiment. This theory indicates that there exists a universe for every possibility. Every time an event could have more than one outcome there is a universe created for each outcome. In our universe a meteorite caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. A parallel universe exists in which the meteorite missed Earth, and possibly several others in which the meteorite struck another planet or was not formed at all. In a parallel universe Hitler did not invade Russia and consequently won the Second World War. In yet another, Elvis is still alive. This theory explains the double slit experiment by saying that quantum phenomena are the result of interactions across universes. When a single electron passes through a slit it interacts with the electron from a parallel universe, in which the electron went through the other slit, producing the pattern. This explains the pattern produced by passing one electron through the slit at a time.
This theory applies to time travel in how it allows for reverse time travel to accommodate paradoxes. When one travels back in time, one travels back into a universe created for the possibility of time travel. This universe runs in parallel with the universe from which the traveller came. Everything will be identical to the past in the original universe, and alterations will have the same effect as they would have if they had occurred in the original universe. However, because it is a parallel universe, and not the universe that created the traveller, the traveller will not be affected by any changes he makes. He could kill himself, his father, his grandfather or whoever, and while he is erased from the parallel universe, he continues to exist because he is not from this new universe. Thus no paradox is created, and only the destruction of himself by suicide or personal attack, or his time machine, could see him affected by the outcomes of his actions, and even then no paradox is created. This provides a method by which paradoxes can be avoided and reverse time travel allowed.
This theory has parallels such as the alternative histories approach. This theory allows reverse time travel without consequences by having the time traveller travel back onto a different timeline and thus is insulated from any actions which should in theory affect him or cause a paradox.
The full text of this theory can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0104033
What's under yellowstone?
fyi -
parallel universes predict immortality. search for quantum immortality or read my own take, here.
K.
IMO the most important part of the article, though less headline-catching, is the claim that recent results indicate that our universe may be infinite in both size and mass.
I like that result, though I find it very surprising.
At any rate, it is this fact (or claim) that allows the author to conclude that a "level I" parallel universe exists somewhere. Indeed, an infinite number must exist, if the universe is in fact infinite.
He also offers levels II, III, and IV, which arise from more exotic causes. In Sunday's
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
this is the logical continuation of the ;) ..
premise that the universe is infinite.
this idea has been around for at least
20 years, and i Know i'm not the first
person to have thought this way
so once again, science catches up to
common sense
There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices.
So why wouldn't at least one of these people (well, I guess an infinite number of people) be able to travel into another universe? (Or all possible universes?... including ours).
Really, I know nothing about the subject... just a question that came to mind.
An infinite number of monkeys, at an infinite number of typewriters, would instantaneous produce the complete works of Shakespeare... along with every other piece of literature that has been written. (Not to mention, everything that has yet to be written).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is that twin EVIL?
It goes like this. There are approximately 10^120 particle positions (the smallest quantized unit of space) in the observable universe (and there are 10^90 particles in the universe). Assuming each "particle position" is a boolean (either a particle is there or it's not), there are 2^10^120 possible observable universes (a sphere of space 40 billion light-years across). Now, we have cosmological evidence that the entire universe goes on forever ... so using simple math we can derive a much larger sphere encompassing so many universes that, at some point, all possible particle position combinations are exhausted and there MUST be another 40-billion-light-years-across universe that is exactly the same as the one we currently inhabit. The distance they've calculated is around 10^42 meters. So, that far away, there should be an exact replicate of you, reading this exact post at this exact same instance, and modding it up as Informative :-)
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
once about a theory that these universes weren't actually distant in three dimensions as the articles suggests. The theory was that in 3 dimensions, these universes were in precisely the same places as the one we're in - they differed only in other dimensions (based on the theory that we experience 4 dimensions - X, Y, Z and time - but that there are many others that we cannot experience yet, and "travelling" in these dimensions would reveal these other universes).
Another theory speculated that, at any instant in time, an infinite number of parallel universes were simultaneously created, and began tangenting off in their own timelines - these corresponded to the infinite number of possible actions that could occur in each instant. The very next instant, each of these would experience a similar spawning of universes and tangents of possibilities.
Original No-Reg NYT Article Here
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Let me get this right: So this counts only on probability. Because space is big enough, whatever can possibly happen will happen?
Does that mean if I'm sweeping up a lab after a particularly unsuccessful party and I hook up a improbability generator to a strong brownian motion producer, like, say, a really hot cup of tea, then will I get a really neat spaceship that's shaped like a tennis shoe and piloted by a man with two heads and three arms and has a paranoid android abord with a shooting pain in all the diodes down his left side?
Here's to improbability!
Buddhism is the only 'old' religion (although some argue it's a philosophy as it has no god) which correlates and whose beliefs correspond with science all the way across the board.
The Buddhist concept of the universe's energy and rebirth of life actually tie in pretty well with science. The belief is that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be converted between types.
That's why Buddhists don't believe you diw and.. that's it, game over. They believe the energy ('lifeforce' for want of a better term) merely transposes into another form of energy, which then may be mix with other energy and turn into other life or matter later on. While scientists would not particularly go for the whole reincarnation game, there is a lot of logic in it, and obviously a lot of anecdotal evidence (how do the child prodigies know stuff they shouldn't know? etc.. how comes some people remember fragments of what happened in the past and then verify it to be true? and so on)
Buddhism also presents the theory of the 'middle way'. That is, it is not good to be swung to one side or another on issues, but to steer a middle path only. Our universe shows that nothing exists in a place that is too cold, or a place that is too hot. Psychology shows major issues with people who are too egotistical and people who have no sense of self esteem. The middle way works in all disciplines. You should not be too lazy, but you should not be a workaholic either. And so on.
Another concept is experimentation, which was prevalent in Buddhism way before modern science. Buddhists do not generally believe anything blindly, the Buddha said that it is unwise to believe what someone says without knowing it is true yourself. Therefore you must experiment and prove your own truths. Yet again, another bond with the modern scientific process. Even the Dalai Lama (as a spiritual head of a branch of the religion) has changed many of his views upon being exposed to the West and our different way of life.
Religions and science may never walk hand in hand, but if you pay attention you can find a lot of close bonds and even areas where religion has helped science, rather than hindered it.
Old post! My double in another universe saw this article a few days ago.
A. The universe is not solid. This may seem counter-intuitive, but quantum physics dictates that the very subatomic particles that comprise the universe are nothing more than complex knots, ripples & interference patterns in the fabric of space-time.
B. This isn't just 'our' space-time we're talking about. Quantum physics also tells us that there are multiple universes overlapping our own, but seperated from us by the fact that the knots, ripples and interference that makes them up is at a different 'frequency', (rather more complex, but that sums it up). Each time an event occurs on a quantum level that has more than 1 outcome, a split is created in the continuum. Each outcome actually does occur, each one gets its own branch of 'reality' to exist in.
C. Our minds operate on these same laws, and in fact our brains may use quantum effects to process & distill information. See Stuart Hameroff's work, penrose spin-traps, The Quantum Mind, etc. There is a tentative theory being kicked around that schizophrenia may be a side-effect of an extra-dimensional bleed-over internal to the brain. Since our brains use this multi-verse aspect of reality at a fundamental level, they are vulnerable to 'interference', or cross- talk. Our consciousness is nothing more or less than a side-effect of the way our brain uses its quantum structures or microtubules to process information. These microstructures give our consciousness access to information slightly ahead of our percieved location in time, on the order of microseconds. This short look-ahead feature allows our conscious mind to pick & choose the branch of probable outcomes most favourable to it. This happens internally for most people, externally for those who are aware of the process & have honed it. You might say that your mind charts a zig-zagging course through the multiple possibilities, attempting to choose the most beneficial.
D. Our brains take in around 1 Megabit of raw information each second. Our conscious mind has a 'perceptual datarate' of only 10-20 kbits per second, including vision. That is, we can only focus on a few things at a time, only make sense of so much information at once, and have an inability to immediately process most of the raw information our brain feeds us.
E. Our senses don't operate full-time, rather we have 'focus points' that we continually sweep around, refreshing our brains internally generated model of our surroundings. This is why sleight of hand works - to your brain, the magician's hand isn't moving, so your vision focuses elsewhere & your brain fills in the rest of your vision with what it expects to be there when you look back. Yes, most of what you see and hear on a daily basis is made up by your brain from the small amount of info trickling in via your narrowband senses.
F. Bell's Theorem proved that quantum action is non-local. You'll have to do your own research on this one, but it is quite relevant. Need more info? Try googling for quantum travel cults, nick herber, fred alan wolf, david deutsch, roger penrose, stuart hameroff, Hakim Bey, robert anton wilson, terence mckenna, the many-worlds model of quantum reality, legend of ong's hat, inculabula, orlin grabbe
Seriously, what makes us think that we even have the capacity to understand the universe, or whatever, in its entirety? Just because we know math? Holy crap. I've spent the past 5 years studying math & engineering and have some pretty good knowledge in quantum theory, and sometimes (i.e. NOW), and I get the pretty strong feeling that someone is just playing with numbers and equations.
Why can't we just do what we're best at... eating berries & stuff, sleeping, running around whacking rabbits, fscking a whole lot, etc. It can be a pretty good system.
Maybe there's a really really weird dimension where you're better looking than me!
"Derp de derp."
I know what I am about to write is radical, but please give it some thought before rendering an opinion on it. It's not exactly technological speculation as it is philosophical speculation on the ultimate limits (if there are any) of the technological metaphor.
Up to this point in nearly all discussions of extreme/speculative tech what we are trying to do is maximally stretch our imagination as to what is possible within the realm of currently known scientific law. And for those of us who've been frequenting transhumanist circles for any period of time, we know the current limits of science portend a lot - uploading, indefinite lifespans, traversible wormholes, jupiter brains, basement universes, etc.
Now lets assume that our current understanding of the known laws of physics are invariable. Lets assume that the Grand Unified Theory really is the grand theory they claim it to be.
I have been engaging in some discussion lately about the begining of the universe, and for the first time (amazingly enough) I pushed the 'Where did it come from' question through as far as it can go. And, not surprisingly, it doesn't go anywhere. No matter how you try to explain the origin of the universe, none of the theories can account for the cause of it. What caused the big bang? Where did 'God' come from? etc.
From this, i concluded that there cannot be a begining. If there was a begining, then something must have caused that begining, and so something was there before the begining.
This doesn't answer anything, but I am yet to see another way around the causality problem (defining something as 'acausal' doesn't solve it, it just dodges it).
Now, linked to this 'where did the universe come from?' problem is, 'Where did the incredible laws, which make our universe a coherent place come from?', which is what I think underlies it all. Once the universe began, it is easy to say 'the laws guided the evolution of everything from there'....but how did the laws come to be? Why are they so perfect? (weak anthropic principle could be an acceptable argument here).
When you think of an omniverse that has no beginning, then we are talking about something that is temporally at least infinite in duration, something ultimately beyond time itself, where concepts of a beginning and an end have no meaning. I think what this also means is that any one set of properties/laws we experience are also ultimately entirely arbitrary. If they are not then we must ask ourselves what meta-laws are behind it governing what types of laws are allowed and which are not? And then we have to ask ourselves where did these metalaws come from? And then meta-meta-laws and so on to infinity. And, not surprisingly, it doesn't go anywhere. No matter how you try to explain the origin of any laws, none of the theories can account for the cause of those laws. From this, I concluded there can be no fundamental laws.
So if there are no fundamental laws, no limts, then everything is possible. If not, why not? And we are right back to an arbitray set of laws with no explanation. And since we are used to applying the metaphor of technology to such things, we could (at least for fun) call such tech based on a lack of laws nada-technology or onto-technology. The technology of reality itself. I like to call it nadatech becuase ulitimatly it's based on nothing... no laws, no limits, nothing at all.
So what do we do with nada- or onto-technology?
Anything. Everything.
Either way, the ultimate lack of any fundamental laws implies that everything is possible and probably already exists exists in a timeless standing quantum probability wave in eternity.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
Man I hate you.
We used to call it "Mr. Magoo syndrome", now it's "The world is my TV". In any case there should be lesser criminal charges for running folks like you down: "He wasn't in my worth-occupying-volume cone of vision, Officer!"
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
multiple universes are the ultimate gravy ticket for cosmologists. bah!
neither cosmologists, physicists nor mathemeticians ever come to the most simple conclusion, and that is that the fabric of the universe is SIMPLE.... i.e. the ultimate building block is indeed, the simplest of building blocks. not sheets, not donuts, not rippling membranes of goo, but a singular particle which exists on the threshold of reality. i.e. a mass of 1 / infinity... travelling at a velocity of infinity - 1/infinity, making blobs of goo in the void like an electron beam on a phosphor screen makes pictures or barney the dinosaur.
what's that? speed of light you say? it has no existance, so it can go as fast as it wants.
there are two numbers the mind cannot visualise.. zero and infinity, and for all intents and purposes they are the same number with the same properties... not only that, but they are interchangeable.
the universe is actually a sphere, where the surface is also its centre... an infinite dimensional klein bottle. and every particle is the same particle, everywhere at once.
matter, energy and anything else you care to dream up are summations in the oscillation, regions of probable existance. god went dot!
any theoretical reduction of observation or extrapolation of the simplest of ideas is an excersise in self perpetuation and justification.
proving this of course is as futile as the determinacy argument, because as douglas adams hinted, the question and the answer are always mutually exlusive. this is the nature of things.
but i digress.
"Parallel Universes Are Real...The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here"
So which in which paralell universe does predictions = fact?
Ha! I was put in this psych ward by my family because I said I could communicate telepathically with my double from another universe. They think I'm crazy but now I can show them this article and prove them all wrong!
Thank you Slashdot! You may help get me out of this unjust imprisonment once and for all.
Anything that tries to trivialize natural phenomena with common sense immediately sets of alarms in my head, ie. like:
How could space not be infinite? Is there a sign somewhere saying "Space Ends Here--Mind the Gap"?
And what about Olber's paradox which asks the question that why is the sky dark? If universe is infinite and reasonably uniformly distributed with matter, we should see a star at every point in the sky. The article seems to cover this by making up some mind-boggling distances between the universes so that our light cones do not overlap. However, having "universes" distributed uniformly in same infinite space would mean that there are infinite amount of universes, too. And this would mean that the probability of not having another universe (in fact, infinite other universes) close enough to see approaches zero.
In other words, glancing upwards and noting the, well, space between stars is enough to undermine the foundations of the article, thus reducing it to a load of crap.
This may be interesting for some people. ...
A reproduction of an ancient conception of multiverse
The innumerable universes emanate
If there are parallel universes, are there also parallel dimensions? And if that is true, what about differing matter phases?
So, based upon all these theorems, in all actuality, there is the possibility of 4 completely different sets of atoms for a given universe and dimension, each vibrating at exactly 90 degrees to each other. Then, there is the possibility of an infinite number of both universes and dimensions....so you would have a total possibility of (I*I)*4 for the total physical mass of all possible atoms in any given space-time. So now we have an infinite number of universes, each with an infinite number of dimensions, and each dimension having 4 different "phases" for the infinite diversity contained within?
I wish the scientific community would hurry up and decide what is actually possible, or even probable, and what's only good fiction.
Maybe then the Vorgons will be able to build their interstellar bypass, and Ford Prefect will know the question that the answer is 42.
--CypherDragon
It's nice to think that there are an infinite (countably or uncountably) number of parallel worlds playing out every possible outcome. The idea is this: every particle acts out every possible point in its wave function at every given time. Don't go having fantasies about the multiverse where you get laid without paying a professional for it, though. The theory also states that what we observe in our daily lives is the most likely possibility; the expected value or quantum superposition of all those states.
To put it simply, you're living out every possible life _right_now_ but can only see the one with the highest likelihood.
The middle mind speaks!
"The estimate is derived from elementary probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate. In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere. There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices."
Didn't they read the Hitch Hikers guide to the Gallaxy?
10^10^28 is the distance they've calculated. 10^42 is 10 to the answer to everything.
Nothing is different.
Ok, here is my problem with the parallel universes theory.
Assuming there are an ifinite amount of worlds, with every possible reality, its would therefore follow that there are worlds, just like earth, except entirely populated with super-genius Evil KlownZ.
And of these infinite Evil Klown worlds, there are ones that have discovered trans dimensional travel. And of those worlds, there must be one where they have just opened a portal into our world, which has just opened behind my chair.
So all I have to prove this theory false is turn around and chJF()*#)(++++++
why does scientific american use the netscape logo for its favicon???
And those bastards at DC renamed it Hypertime & Elseworlds. Those bastards. Maybe now they'll listen to Science. It's all Krona's fault anyway.
Sorry, they're all busy washing their hair or getting eaten by hamburgers...
I'm sitting here, finishing up my thesis which is due next week, happily talking about the argument from design and generally relying on the fact that the multiple-universes model is unverifiable and thus irrelevant to my argument. Then I take a break to glance at Slashdot and what do I see?
Isn't that rather like saying that if we pick a number (to represent our universe), and we keep picking other numbers (to represent the other universes), that we'll eventually pick a number equal to our own?
This seems like it's slightly less than certain. It assumes the nonexistence of some rule that would prevent us from drawing our "number" again, doesn't it?
__________
[Big Brick Wall]
INFINITE: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that, in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big" time. Infinity is so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.
Douglas Adams
When you have some spare time, try dividing infinity by infinity, or something to that effect, and you'll find that the probability actually does arrive at 1 at some point... And just for fun, the probability that an event HAS happened (in the past) is ONLY 1 or 0, but never something in between.
This assumes that space time is quantified. Recent discoveries that light over long distances does not show up this property might imply that there are many more (if not infinite) possible positions. Thus blowing the whole argument to pieces.
So the discworld must exist then! Fantastic!
Somewhere out there... GNU/Linux has the biggest share in the desktop market... and Micro$oft enthusiasts.... are hacking away at it's code to make it better?
--roflmao-- TAKE ME THERE NOW!
Great ideas happen at 4am. Bad career moves happen at 4pm...
Seems like they keep changing their minds.....
On March 11 the Universe looked like a doughnut.
Parallel universes have twins of YOU...
Without falsifiability, what you're talking about not a scientific theory, it's metaphysical speculation. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it ain't science.
If this were true, why is it the case that science developed greatly in the Christian world (that has now been become secular) and not in the Buddhistic world? IMHO, the reasons is that Buddhism has a cyclic world view, e.g. no real progress is possible, whereas Christianity believes that there is progress. There is this believe in a better world to come.
How do they manage to include both of these in the same theory? So the Universe started from nothing 14 billion years ago, and has expanded to fill an infinite non-curved space?
about 26.3 meters! :-(
But i guess if my twin is parallel, they'll always be 26 meters away from me
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
Space-time may not be quantized per se, but it is certainly not continuous in the sense of being infinitely differentiable. See here:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0105097
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I'm not trolling here, but I swear that I thought of this 3 1/2 years ago. Here's a link to the discussion I started on alt.philosophy and alt.pilosophy.debate about this exact same theory that I had. I am going to research to see if anyone involved in this theory was involved in our discussion.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
I will travell between them and kill my other `me' and I will be The One!
:-)
There can only be one! Me
Damn, how did you do that? You been watching my surfing activities!? LOL. :-)
www.enthea.org
I can't say I'm as unhappy with Scientific American these days as you folks. I've read it for 15 years and am still pleased with it. Sheesh, it's not like they're running stories on Alien Autoposy investigators who smoke PCPs to understand perpetual motion machines, like Omni.
However, it does give one pause.. a de-evolved future has often been pictured as one in which people were blatantly more sensationalistic and less wise. What if, instead, the flashiness and beautiful presentation of information in the future made everyone imagine they were smarter and wiser than people of the past even as the population slips gradually into ignorance? Sadly, this seems all too plausible.
Of course, it all depends on who you consider in your evaluation. Victorian intellectuals were very, very sharp, but also a very, very small part of the world's population. Today the overall percentage of the population that are well educated and thoughtful is much higher. Perhaps because there are more people in this category, it appears that intellectual standards have slipped.
However you count it up, a fact that seems to be generally ignored is that the vast majority of humans, perhaps also a sizable chunk of people in developed nations, are pretty much unaware of pretty much everything. So maybe the rising tide of sensationalism is a symptom more of the movement of more and more people into intellectualism, rather than a sign of the decline of intellectualism.. or perhaps in the short run this is all the same thing.. man.. reality.. it's so damn complicated!
To echo another poster, James Burke's Connections series in the magazine was very cool, if short lived. Here is a link to a directory of them..
There really is a universe where Homer is real, obscenely wealthy, AND it rains donuts!?!
Olber's paradox causes no problems when considered against conventional cosmology, or the cosmology discussed in the article - have a look here.
This explanation is not affected by an actually infinite number of stars, as postulated in the article. Even in a universe only as big as the part we can observe, there are a near-enough to infinite number of stars for the purposes of the paradox anyway.
Great! Now I have to find a way to travel to the other universes so I can kill myself until I become The One.
...one of the other me's will build a means to cross this space and enter mine. I could assume that I am in one of the universes where my double did not go. But why hasn't any other doubles been visiting us and telling us this?
Well, there would exist the possibility that we exist in a universe that wasn't visited by any such doubles. There would be an infinite amount of universes that received no such visitors at all (Although it would seem logical that there would be less such universes than ones that did receive a visitor... I guess some infinities are larger than others).
There's also the more likely scenario that any visitor of this sort would be considered a raving lunatic, and be entirely dismissed. Anyone seen K-Pax?
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
If this were true, why is it the case that science developed greatly in the Christian world (that has now been become secular) and not in the Buddhistic world?
That's an excellent point. I think you may have answered your own question though. Science has only become revered and far reaching in secular societies.
The other reason is that while Buddhism accepts science and, in some cases, follows it, it is ultimately a faith whose believers are trying to break away from the 'human realm'.
Why do we spend so much time on science and discovery? Even if we made contact with aliens, managed to grow crops on the moon, and all had cellphones, what good is that? When you're dealing with faith, issues of science and technology are almost irrelevant. Buddhists are trying to reach Nirvana, not NYC on their cellphones.
So while Buddhism may comfortably live alongside science, compared with other religions, it does not actively participate in developing it.
If I were to take a guess at something having a probability of zero, I'd say it would be something like a statement that was both 100% true and 100% false.
The two of you are talking apples and oranges. wackybrit is talking about the probability of an event occuring, while you are talking about statements.
Saying something like "I always lie" creates an interesting logical paradox, but it's much different than the possibility of the existence of another mark-t who owns a Lambourghini.
--Zero
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
So if there are an infinate number of universes then why does our universe have to be a probable one.... we could be one of those rare improbable ones that just got lucky.
Let us not forget that while Europe was plunged into ignorance because of the Christian Church's suppression, the Islamic world was making amazing advances in math, science, and medicine.
Al-Khwarizmi invented algebra around 780 (both "algebra" and "algorithm" are arabic words).The Bagdad physician, al-Razi, (865-925) produced a medical textbook that was the standard throughout the Islamic world. And Avicenna (Ibn Sina) was like the Isaac Newton of the Islamic world, who in 980 was making advances in medicine, physics and philosophy.
Many agree that many of the advances made in the Western World during the renaissance owe their beginnings to the science, math, and rational thought of the Islamic World.
In one of my favorite scenes from Lawrence of Arabia, Lawrence is talking with Prince Feisal of (Saudi) Arabia, the point is made:
Feisal: Do you know, Lieutenant, in the Arab city of Cordoba were two miles of public lighting in the streets when London was a village?
Lawrence: Yes, you were great.
Feisal: Nine centuries ago.
Charmed, I'm sure.
Spumco still has it in them to do more - Just look at the Tenacious D video
I would so have my cats use Gritty Kitty, cause if it is not it gritty kitty, it stinks!
47 Million Dollars!
Pardon Me Mr., Would you like to buy some rubber nipples?
Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence!
It seems as though the poster of this article on slashdot jumped the gun. To claim that "Parallel Universes Are Real" as if it were a proven fact seems like wishful thinking right now.
That said I have a question. If someone were 10^(10^28) meters away, would that not imply that they are within the same dimensions of space that we are? If so, then they are not in another universe, just another location within ours.
Does that mean there's another two of me out there?
Summation 2
The frog itself is merely a thick bundle of pasta, whose highly complex intertwining corresponds to a cluster of particles that store and process information.
Thanks Scientific American!, now i understand it all.
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
Buddhism is fairly varied in its various forms, more so than the major western religions. Some forms of Buddhism believe in some form of afterlife, others say nothing about it. I personally think Buddhism is more apt to be called a philosophy, but even that's problematic, since there's a more dogmatic form of buddhism that feels more like a religion than a philosphy. The more cynical version of myself in some other parallel universe would say that Buddihism is at it's best a philosophy, and at its worst a religion ;).
I suppose the reason so many people find Buddhism and science compatible is that Buddhism tries to avoid any distinct beliefs about the outside world. Most other religions have tended not to do this, and offer up explanations of things (and later conflict with what we learn through science).
AccountKiller
standing at edge of universe, waving at twins in the next universe over
Fry: So there are an infinite number of parallel universes?
Farnsworth: No, just the two.
Bender: Can we go? I'm sick of parallel universe Bender lording his sombrero over me.
10 * 10^(1.42) meters is as far as we can see into space? I'm sorry, but if we've only penetrated 263 meters into space, we're a lot less advanced than I thought we were. Not to mention, now I'm a lot more worried about black holes.
No comment.
Maybe it's a process of natural selection if certain unbreakable laws don't exist then maybe neither does the universe, or us. Not so weak.
posting a duplicate universe
Well I bet Microsoft is just seething over this discovery. Think of all the people they could SUE for using their software without a proper license from this universe!
OK, I'm not an astronomer nor am I a theoretical mathematician, and I know I get flamed by this by a lot of astronomers and theoretical methematicians, but I can't resist:
It seems to me that a lot of people tend to infer *anything* from the existance of infinities now that we know they exist. While is holds true that on a theoretical basis *anything* is contained in an infinitely large space, it is also possible to have an infinitely large space filled with absolute nothing. So there is actually no proof at all that parallel "universes" - if they exist - do so in the extends of our own spacetime.
Mind you, the "distance" from you to your twin which they have calculated is based solely on whimsical probability assumptions. In the real world, we simply do not know the probability of our universe - exactly our universe - coming into existence out of nothing. So even if we think that big bang-like events (which to our knowledge today created matter and probably space as well) can co-exist in an infinite space volume, we really know nothing about how probable it is that an almost identical configuration comes into existence. We do not even know if it is possible.
For all we know, the infinite reaches out there could in reality all be filled with purple goo, a very big version of G.W. Bush's ass, or even nothing much at all - whichever you like best. And for these things, too, we can give random probabilities and calculate their distance from us based on that.
Dark Matter problem solved?
Maybe SCIFI will bring back sliders with this article. Preferably just the first few seasons.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I am sure such a universe will exist if the theory is true. Also, another universe will exist where I break your jaw for making such a smart ass comment and you will be lying in a hospital.
Oh wait.... that universe seems to be merging with ours.
What's under yellowstone?
(how do the child prodigies know stuff they shouldn't know?
Here's an idea. They're born with brains more apt to performing those skills?
etc.. how comes some people remember fragments of what happened in the past and then verify it to be true? and so on)
What about the vastly greater amount of people who "remember fragments of what happened in the past" and are outright wrong? There are bound to be a few who coincidentally nail something. Selective memory is amusing.
"Sufferin' succotash."
These sorts of everything-could-exist proposals for an infinite universe spring from a fundamental
misunderstanding of infinity. Just because something is infinite DOES NOT mean that all
possibilities will exist in it. For example, there are an infinite number of fractions between
the numbers 0 and 1 but nowhere in that infinite list will you find the number 1.1. Similarly if this universe is infinite it does
not mean that everything (eg you , me , your aunt etc) occurs in infinite amounts simply because there are an INFINITE number of possible
alternatives that are not like us. Infinity confuses most people and in this case obviously even some scientists.
or ignorance is bliss... not knowing about 'science' is a good thing, just look how screwed people are when the logging companies and schools come along.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
So, basically, the machine from sliders would basically just be a machine that lets you travel faster than light.
Wherever you maybe, if you're reading this somehow... interesting article, isn't it? (Of course, you might be reading an alternative version stating that there no parallel universes... *sigh*).
;-)
Anyway, if you chose to buy this magazine, send it to me and I'll pay half of the cover value.
Gee, I could do a pyramid scam just among my parallel versions!
Not to mention the spam possibilities!
the whole premise is based on the supposition that "In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere." ok whatever. if this were true the following scenario would be unavoidable: somewhere out there a parallel-scientist exists testing the same quantum entanglement apparatus you the this-earth-scientists is testing - and parallel scientist's particles are entangeled with yours (entanglement can occur regardless of distance right???) so you could send your parallel-scientist-self a message. and vice-versa. this happens then i'll believe all this bunk about every possibility having expression somewhere by virtue of space being, like, really big.
-Captain Chaos
4e2778bd21a578d384b5e6d9d7166f2d
Do you not see the irony of your own statement?
... and then verification.
You are claiming knowledge you do not have.
Don't flame me, I am not a believer.
It's amusing how so many shoot down what they can not perceive in the name of science. When science is firstly about discovery
Fightening how much the arabs degenerated when they got religion again, eh?
There should be a lesson there.
What!? There is another Saddam!? Prepare troops, arm weapons, invent interstellar drive! We'll get him!!!
...a 1000-monkies-on-1000-typewriters comment be considered particularly witty in this context? If yes I actually understood the article.
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
If you were a little atom looking at a sea of cells around you, it would probably seem plausible that somewhere in that huge sea there was someone a bit like you fighting the same battles you fight every day, but in a slightly different way, or with different hormones.
Of course this wouldn't matter since you would never meet your counterpart.
You'd have a vague idea that maybe the universe was not infinite because perhaps it was one day going to end. But something would tell you that it was somehow cyclic, and it would come back.
So in a sense it would be infinite.
And if you could travel really far, maybe you'd come to the end of the sea of cells. But you'd have to travel so far that you can safely say that your sea of cells is infinite as far as you're concerned.
Ale
Damn't I knew I should have listened to that Jerry O'Connell character when I had the chance.
I don't about you guys but I'm not so sure about this I mean that would make a man called Maximillian Arturo right.
What kind of a name is that anyway?
You mean there are *two* Bill Gates !?!?
If they meet in battle and destroy each other, does Linux win?
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
By this analogy, there is a universe with one hydrogen atom, on with two... and one totally filled with only hydrogen, one with a hydrogen and helium atom... one filled with hydrogen and one helium atom... you see where I'm going with this... so we're just lucky to represent the space-time equivalent of something that makes us think we're sentient but we're actually a number representing a large conglomeration of atoms. The think I don't like - it means there is fate and we can't change our destiny. On the other hand Einstein was right. God doesn't play dice. God is just counting using atoms.
So does that mean there really is a 10,000 mile long turtle swimming through space with four elephants on its back holding up a flat disc shaped world?
You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.
-- Ken Thompson
If this is true, then it probably provides final proof that faster-than-light travel is impossible, or someone/something in the infinite universe would have used it to come here by now (and actually talk to us, not just fly around and cause UFO-watchers to get excited).
Either that, or it is possible but is limited to a certain maximum speed not great enough for the nearest lucky inventors who decided to come our way to have reached us yet. Phew, infinities are confusing.
Where is Sailor Moon? (And can I get her phone number?)
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Lesson? Like the recent rise of the US religious right and gradual breakdown in the separation of the church and the state?
BOO! TERRO
There are hamburgers that will eat you? I'm set for life...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Buddhism is the only 'old' religion (although some argue it's a philosophy as it has no god) which correlates and whose beliefs correspond with science all the way across the board.
Only if you discard reincarnation, Nirvana, various supernatural beings like the "Monkey God" (as seen in the famous classical Chinese book "Voyage to the West" - basically the whole religion. You might as well say Christianity fits with science because there was that flood thing in Genesis and floods have been known to happen. Just like a broken clock which is right twice a day, religions can sometimes be congruent by chance with science.
While scientists would not particularly go for the whole reincarnation game, there is a lot of logic in it
No. At the root of it is the assumption that there is a "soul" responsible for our thoughts that is somehow separate from the brain, just like in Christianity, Islam, etc. According to science, we think because neurons fire in our brains. When the brain dies, no more thoughts.
This is not saying there are multiple universes, but rather that the universe 'loops around' like in old arcade games.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yeah don't let fundamentalist power hungry maniacs turn your nation into a theocratic dictatorship. It's bad for business.
This plays into my deepest existential fear. That everything that anybody can imagine will, sooner or later, happen. So in some universe at some time, I'm going to be tortured to death by a serial killer, in another time and place I'm going to be a holocaust victim, in another time and place I'm going to BE Hitler and so on.
Of course that also means that I'm also going to be Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner too, so it doesn't mean unremitting horror.
Insert witty sig here.
i like satire.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Science searches for the simplest explanation first because more often than not it is the correct explanation. The simplest and most probable state of the universe would be 'nothingness.' The next would be one created universe. A bunch of parallel universes appears way down on the list. Which is easier to believe? One created universe, or an infinite number of invisible universes?
Despite my exceedingly limited scientific knowledge (A-level physics... nothing out of the ordinary), I've come to completely disbelieve in the idea of parralel universes where any possible outcome is played out.
Why? Mostly bccause the arguments provided for them, at least on a layperson's level, are arrogant sci-fi that tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they just "assume" that another path is possible, e.g. life never formed and Earth is barren now, or they assume that universes differ through human choice, e.g. you choose not to go to the cinema, or whatever.
The first suffers as it completely ignores why anything happens. This would mean that there are universes created at every moment of time as gravity switches, or elements gain different properties. Why limit what can or can't happen?
The second suffers as it suddenly places the human freedom of choice at the center of its reasoning. This would mean that the human mind/soul/id was somehow *above* physical properties. Would new universes be created if an animal decided to do something differently? How about plants? As the lifefor, gets less complex, this rapidly decends into a form of the first argument - that some things can change, but others can't.
Maybe there's another way to work infinite multiverses into life, but I'm not convinced by anything I've seen so far, even if blinded by science and big numbers.
My 2-layman-pence, anyway.
RIAA lawyers in the parallel universe are currently building a space craft to come here and sue you for copying the same songs that exist in the parallel universe.
I suppose this is killed because although the universe is infinite, space-time is bounded. Still it seems to me this is more a mind game than serious scientific postulation. What is the point of a theory one cannot test?
... in that Parallel Universe. And all their programmers are doing the duplicated job to fix them. How can we combine our efforts?
Less is more !
That show KICKED ASS (well, the first two seasons, anyway).
Please refer to those terms as 'freedomgebra' and 'freedomgorithm', as we must boycott the enemy's culture.
Thank you
~The House of Representatives.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I've also read that the basis for a lot of the hatred of Islamic fundamentalists toward Christian Europe is because they believe that God granted them their scientific advancements in harmony with their faith, and when the Crusades happened, the Christians stole their gifts of insight from God and perverted it by seperating it from its Islamic faith.
:)
Of course, I guess that doesn't explain how the Greeks knew so much without any divine Islamic revelations, but don't look at me, I'm just paraphrasing crap I read weeks ago online.
Not 10^1.42, but 10^(10^1.42), or about 10^26.
Anyway, here's what you do: You go to the parallel Earths (the ones that deviated from ours no more than 30 years ago or so) and find all the Sandra Bullocks and JLo's who never got rich and famous in Hollywood. Then you give 'em 6 figures to come here and make pr0n.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
If there are "alternate JuggleGeeks" in parallel universes, I suspect they are also very sceptical of this idea.
> Science has only become revered and far ...until the Buddhist has a heart attack and flies to the west for open heart surgery (Japan will do), or cancer treatment, or Computerized Axial Tomography, or Positron Emission Tomography, or Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or Lasik.
> reaching in secular societies.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
In the matter of religion versus science I'm issuing a restraining order: religion must remain 500 yards from science at all times.
-5F05 "Lisa the Skeptic"
There is a parallel universe in which your comment above was modded as "Moronic".... not "Funny".
cheers
front
It also doesn't explain why they kinda gave up on science and math, either.
It's the religion. The middle east is in a dark ages much like Europe was, and for much the same reason.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Are others in parallel Universes doubles of me..
or am I a double of some other true self?
Nikkos
On the other hand, James Randi has well over a million dollars waiting for anyone who can prove anything like that.
It still sits gathering dust.
Care to offer anything that science cannot prove that actually exists? Anything at all?
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
The subject pretty much sums up my question.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
the recent rise of the US religious right and gradual breakdown in the separation of the church and the state?
As a student of history, I can tell you that your perspective is all wrong. Religious fundamentalists have always been a threat towards freedom and a factor in US politics, but your perception of them is colored by the fact that a large percentage of the American voting public is more liberal and secular now than in previous eras. The fact that we're now positively shocked by attempts to instill prayer in schools, or teach creationism, or prevent gay marriage, is a good measure of how far we've really come. What you see now is a conservative backlash against increasingly dominant liberal, secular ideals. I'm not saying we don't need to fight it, but you're not looking at long-term trends.
A side note: Bush's religiosity seems absurd to many people, but it wouldn't have a century ago. I agree with the sentiment that the Founding Fathers believed in a secular government, but they certainly didn't have any problem with declaring their belief in God. Separation of church and state should prevent Bush's stupid faith-based initiative, or this anti-family-planning bullcrap, but it doesn't mean he's not allowed to be religious or to let his policies be framed by Christian ideals.
Is CowboyNeal an incarnation of the Eternal Champion?
So, what you're really saying is that somewhere out there my double is having sex with a gorgeous supermodel right now?
*sigh* My evil twin gets to have all the fun.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
"I know there are parallel universes, because sometimes I lose things"
They say that if spaces if infinite with an infinite amount of matter and energy then somewhere in another bubble universe there is someone doing exactly what I'm doing thinking exactly what I'm thinking and oh wait exactly like me. In fact not only is there someone doing all this but there are an infinite amount of me's doing this. Even though the chances of it occuring being 1 in a freaking huge ass inconcievable number due to all the events leading up to me being here writing what I'm writing right now having to be coincidentally EXACTLY the same. But they can be, an infinite amount of times. So in effect I am aware of someone just like me who is aware of me and aware that I am aware of him. Isn't that freaking cool? Not only that but if I pooled my efforts with an infinite amount of me's to do something chances are it would happen given the right resources, which there are an infinite amount of. Unfortunatly we really have no clue if there is an infinite amount of anything. If there is like some believe and we knew about it then one day contact could be made between people exactly the same, thus rending them DIFFERENT. You can't be the same doing exacdtly the same things due to coincidence after you have met that person. If I met another chris (Chris1) and I was Chris2 and we were exactly the same in all our thoughts and actions until that point, once we met that would all change. First off someone would say hi first thus breaking the chain. Anyway I'm getting off on a tangent. Basically if we were aware of eachother we could take steps to find eachother. Say I thought "hey I want another Chris to pick up a cup of coffee". Somewhere in an infinite amount of space and matter another Chris would think "Hey another Chris want's me to pick up that cup of coffee". This gets real crazy but it's actually not only possible but 100% probable. SHIT EH! I wonder if there's a Chris president of Afganistan the most powerful nation in the world. WOOT!
I wrote this in my blog last month and no I didn't really give a hoot about spelling or grammar lol.
And let us not forget, while the largely christian population of europe went through the Age of Enlightenment and reformation periods, ultimately making people more secular, allowing for post world war 2 borders to solidify, people in the middle east continue their battles for religious locations...
My bet is 2 or 3.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
So while Buddhism may comfortably live alongside science, compared with other religions, it does not actively participate in developing it.
I may be ignorant here, but isn't Japan a primarily Buddhist country? They seem pretty scientifically aware. Of course, saying Japan is a Buddhist country is like saying the US is a Christian country: both societies are redominantly secular (or at least secular enough for science to advance).
"Slashdot is about legos and staplers." -Cmdr. Taco
Lawrence of Arabia was one of the biggest assholes of all time. He peddled the lies of the british to the arab tribes to turn them against the Othman (ottoman) empire and thus lead to the creation of the artificial arab nations we see today that bicker with one another and are ruled over by western forces.
It was simple divide and conquer. The hashemite kings were put in power and since then the arabs have been suffering under one dictator or puppet regime after another. The intellectual society of science and literature is gone. This downfall thanks to one asshole running around the desert on a horse.
Okay, theory: There is an infinite number or parallel universes.
:)
This implies that there is at least one universe wehre any given situation can happen.
This implies there is at least one universe where there are no parallel universes.
Which would prove the theory wrong.
I love bad logic.
Althoug I fully agree with you you are confussing hindu and vedic myths (Monkey God) and mixing it with Budhist stuff.
In countries like Thailand all these influences mixed and thus the Budhism practiced there is different to Budhism in other places with less hindu influence.
Reincarnation and Nirvana are of course all as faux as any religion dogmas.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This just makes the episodes of seinfeld and Sea Lab: 2021 even funnier. Damn dopplegangers.
Except everyone wears cowboy hats...
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Parallel is so 90's. Everyone knows the future is in SERIAL universes.
Science has progressed despite Christianity, not because of it.
their server is /.'d ;-)
How wonderful.
Maybe in an alternate universe they can handle all the page requests
What about the parallel universes that exist in the exact same time/space as our universe - but are separated only by the differing sub-atomic vibrations in the matter of each???
[Obligatory Star Trek joke] Also, the article forgot to mention that the duplicate of you would be the same - save for a suspicous-looking goatee.
Your ideas are interesting, but strange... and different. Therefore, we must reject them.
I love the idea the someone in the multiverse CP/M, GEM, MacOS and Unix happily coexist on the inexpensive, powerful Intel pc hardware platform along with sparc, 680x0, mips, ppc and a whole plethora of intercompatible hw and sw system choices, where vendors make great efforts to work with other systems, and Bill Gates had to take a tech support job to pay the rent.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I don't really see how the article can make a jump from infinate space = infinate matter = infinate posibilities. Even if we do have infinate space and infinate matter how does it follow that we suddenly have the ability to do anything and everything? If that's true why aren't we exploring the stars because surely someone would have created the warp drive and come to tell us about it by now.
The Anti-Blog
Let us not forget that while Europe was plunged into ignorance because of the Christian Church's suppression, the Islamic world was making amazing advances in math, science, and medicine.
Agreed. Now I guess it's their turn to be plunged into ignorance because of religion. Though it looks like they may be coming out of it, which is good. Too bad the "Christian Right" is trying to pull the western world back down again, though.
While I agree that it's wishful thinking to try to match up the beliefs of any religion too directly with contemporary science, I must point out here that there are different kinds of Buddhism. Radically different kinds.
Your parent poster probably had something like Theravada in mind.
Disclaimer: IANABE (I Am Not A Buddhist Either)
This Like That - fun with words!
The one where I won powerball and supermodels are chasing after me?
The middle east is in a dark ages because the Mongols smashed its cities and centers of learning, and just when it was starting to get back on its feet, the Crusades finished the job. Yeah, that was a long time ago -- but it's hard to overestimate the effect of such massive destruction. Unfortunately, when civilization is wiped out, it's generally the really fanatical types who survive. Islam codified this change, but it didn't create it; Islam in the golden age and Islam now are essentially two completely different belief systems, and the Mongols and the Crusaders are why.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Great, now we know where Grim's Fairy Tales come from!
Of course some of us already knew this from watching the 10th Kingdom.
Just wait. When the troll armies march in and take over New York, you'll remember this theory.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
then why do you slags get obliterated by westerners, and have a combined GDP of Spain? Get off your high horse, the western world wants you all dead. It's a shame, but this planet isn't perfect.
sandals and easter.
I didn't fight the Romans so you can wear sandals.
I don't think the Britons (&Europeans) were doing to bad before the Romans arrived.
checks, checks again... nope the Romans, Vikings and Christians caused a lot of problems.
Anyhow,
medicine: I don't do that.
education:I didn't like that(ignorance is bliss).
wine: beer and cider.
public order: umm.. I'm perfectly in order.
irrigation: well maybe, just live somewhere sensible, that was the Iraqis anyhow.
roads: ahh, I hate traffic, CO2, global warming...
a fresh water system: live somewhere sensible.
public health:I don't do that.
Romans go home.
..is by far the best scientific rag out there. Yeah, it's pricey ($120/yr, includes AAAS membership and lots of other goodies), and all the articles are either papers (it's the biggest place to get published, sort of like having a solo show at the Met or something) or written by scientists for scientists...but it's all solid, real, peer-reviewed bleeding-edge research and theory, all in all VERY worth the price.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Then doesn't that mean that, if the chance for a universe with laws allowing communication between universes is non-zero, there is a definite subdivision of universes with which we can interact, and from which we can interact with other universes?
Hah - the heck with Linear physics!
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
> Okay, theory: There is an infinite number or parallel universes. :)
> This implies that there is at least one universe wehre any given situation can happen.
> This implies there is at least one universe where there are no parallel universes.
> Which would prove the theory wrong.
> I love bad logic.
I know you're just funnin', but I still wanted to point out one counterexample to your hypothesis:
There could be an infinite number of universes that happen to be exactly, precisely the same.
-JC
If there is an infinite number of me...then there can also be only one of me. If there is an infinite number of universes, how can you say that there is an infinite number of those universes, when its just as likely (in infinite) that there can be only one.
How can the Big Bang being finite produce so many infinite things? The Big Bang cannot exist.
Why is "The Big Bang" singular?
Can anything be proven true?
-=-=-
I exist in an infinite number.
However, I am the only me.
And anyway, twin or not, anyone outside my light-cone is dead to me.
That's what your twin says about YOU!
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
The month before they made the switch to "popular science" I had just renewed for 3 years. So I wrote them a letter complaining about it and they offered to refund my subscription---so I took them up on it and haven't looked back.
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
Your timeline is a little off. The first crusade started in 1095. The third crusade (1189-1192) was put down by Saladin. The fourth crusade didn't even make it to the Holy Land since it was diverted to Constantinople.
The Monguls sacked Baghdad in 1258. And the Turks took Constantinople in 1261.
In an expanding universe, our cosmological horizon is finite, even if the universe itself is infinite -- no problem with Olbers paradox.
..so I think I'm qualified to say you're half-right. Heisenberg's principle states "It is impossible to specify simultaneously, with arbitrary precision, both the momentum and position of a particle." (P.W. Atkins, Physical Chemistry 6th Ed., Oxford Press 1998, p. 306).
But...the Principle doesn't just apply to particles, it applies to any set of complimentary obseravbles. Those are any pair of observable values, which are defined in terms of mathematical operrators (e.g. momentum and position, but could be anything) that do *not* commute, i.e. the order in which they are calculated matters: Op1(psi) * Op2(psi) != Op2(psi) * Op1(psi). (Ibid., p. 308) This applies for a single particle; it's a fairly trivial excercise, which I'm leaving to the reader, to set up a system of equations for more than one particle where the non-commuting operators "cancel out" and you can violate the Principle.
A general case of this (eliminating non-commutative operators) is actually a fairly common question on PhysChem tests - you need a basic mastery of the math involved, and that sort of setup is a very good way to check that. just my educated $0.02.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
the other 6 dimensions of our universes shrank down to 1/100,000,000,000ths the size of a proton, or was it an electron, I forget.
Anyway all that big TOE stuff proved once and for all that time travel and folding space was possible when we developed the electromagnetic technology to rip open a wormhole into those really small dimensions.
Didn't they try that with the Philadelphia experiment?
somewhere...
:-)
I like the concept that the multiverse is a big catalogue of all possible mathematical structures.
Someone has mentioned hitchhikers already, but I can really see those white mice sitting in their cages controlling it all!
Well, must go to another universe right now to get my dinner, see (or rather not see :P) all you fols from different universes later!
Actually there are three main religions in Japan - Shinto, Christianity and Buddism. There is also a very high level of tolleration between different religions - something many other societies in this sorry world could learn from.
Many Japanese count themselves as being in two or more of the above religions -(ie. a poll on religions while I was there in 1995 had a total much higher than 100%). There is a saying I heard once, "Japanese are born Shinto, Marry Christian and die Buddist."
See Survey - Religion in Japan for more info.
In all dimensions Arnold Judas Rimmer is better looking than you.
The most profound idea in the article was near the end: "which of the multi-verse ideas is the simplist?" Simplicity of an explanation, called Occam's Razor, is a means of choosing among theories. On the surface, the plain-vanilla single universe sounds the simplest. However a single universe presumes built-in initial and boundary conditons with no objective explanation of why (yet). The most elaborate Level-IV multi-verses have no boundary conditions and may be the SIMPLIST EXPLANATION!
But then, how would you know? If they're exactly, precisely the same, there's no way to tell which one you're in... in which case, it's functionally equivlant to there only being one universe.
Like science, Buddhism is the quest for enlightenment - that means nothing is known until enlightenment is achieved. Even then, nothing is known. Reincarnation can mean many things. The "soul" could be a reference to the fact that genetic continuity is transmitted into the future from the past through procreation. It could refer to the mystery of life as an object different from all other natural objects in the universe as a pattern striving always to overcome entropy. When the simplest theory doesn't fit, a more complex one must be posited, or we risk jumping to hasty and forgetful conclusions. The history of humankind's search for knowledge cannot be reducible to a stopped clock that happens to be right twice a day, or we do a disservice to all of the aggregations of hard work that has been done to answer the questions of what is reality and existence and what are the mechanics of these things and all of the things they are made up of? You must keep in mind that Buddhism is much older than Scientific method. They are not incompatible. Buddhists don't claim to believe the Universe is projective or annimistic, they aren't even convinced that it is objective. Are they wrong for being skeptical? Of course not. Everything we think we know about reality sooner or later turns out to be partially false. Take quantum mechanics, where particles can transmit their properties and can spontaneously slip into and out of existence...or experiments in amplifying the speed of light with cesium charged tubes. Suddenly the value C only appears to be an average, not an absolute. We cannot see the universe as it is, only as it appears to be. The challenge is truth, for truth is knowledge, is power - yet power is corruption, is deception is decay. Therefor truth and power are false paths. The problem with science is that it is like a computer: dumb. It serves us well, but we created it. It is made anti-objective by the flaws of the species: greed, anger, vanity, lust, etc. Where science is the compass, ethics (religion//Buddhism etc) is the right choice of a direction. If the phillosphy of science chooses not to make ethical decisions, it still has made a choice.
Can't we take a lesson from television and build a cellphon slider control that creates some sort of wormhole. We can Slide to parallel dimensions.
The late Joseph Needham spent a great portion of his life trying to answer that very same question, and in the end still could not give a satisfactory reply to it. Read his 'Science and Civilization in Ancient China' (a massive and comprehensive set of volumes).
Maybe you meant 10^14.2 -- a 15-digit length in meters seems more likely, since I can see things 26 meters away quite plainly, without a telescope even.
The Arab culture was great. Then two bands of fundamentalists began fighting for control, each one trying to be "holier than thou". And their science hasn't recovered since. And the two groups are still fighting, and still trying to prove that they are "more fundamentalist than thou".
I just hope that we don't go the same way. But every week I see signs that say that we could.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Traveling to a place which is experientially identical to the past, but which has no effect on the present a person left is not time travel. If I don't know the difference between China, China Town, and China Grove, taking a stroll in San Francisco is not the same as flying 8000 miles.
Your flaw here is that you assume God is a created being.
No, you're both just making sophisticated variations on the spavinned old Argument From Design again. Why does the universe have to have a cause? (Maybe because we observe things in that paradigm, but perhaps the paradigm doesn't work on the macrocosmic scale?)
I'm not even going to address the part about gods, save to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Very true, and those were dark times for the Christian church.
However, just as the western world owes the basis of their renaissance to the Islamic world, the Islamic world owes the basis of their great mathematical advances to the Greeks of the 3rd century (Diophantus' Arithmatica) and Indian work of the 6th and 7th Centuries (there was quite a bit of foundational work on quadratics done in India at that time. You can look up Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta if you'd like)
Everyone deserves their due, and all the great mathematicians and philosophers of the past have helped us get where we are today.
Cheers
s
The Greeks had wine long before the Romans.
The Egyptians had irrigations long before the Romans.
Sanitation? The Romans? Well, public baths, but that's not the same thing.
public order? Others had it earlier, and the Romans weren't that good at it.
roads. OK. Basic engineering in stone they were good at. Their roads were better than ours, by and large, and for the traffic they were designed for.
Fresh water: Yes, but remember that the aristocrats used lead pipes. Which may have been why there were so many crazy Roman aristocrats.
Public health? They did some work there, but I don't recall that they were anything outstanding. As I recall, they didn't even quite get the idea of contagion.
And I'm not quite clear on how this would tie into the thread even if it were true.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
>> Al-Khwarizmi invented algebra around 780
actually, i was under the impression that al-khwarizmi's work was largely indebted to hindu (ever wonder where the decimal system came from?) and greek sources. 'algebra' itself has certainly existed since the babylonians, and perhaps longer.
That's an excellent point. I think you may have answered your own question though. Science has only become revered and far reaching in some secular societies.
Not in all, or even most, secular societies. And why is an very good question. Particularly if you can decompose it into:
What factors about a society cause it to consider science both worthy and significant?
That allows one to start examining potential factors for relevance. It's a pity that we don't have a few more data points.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Its a line from the Monty Python movie "The Life of Brian".
The people saying the line are a group of Judeans (Jews) who are complaining about being conquered by the Romans.
The People's Front of Judea are discussing why they hate the Romans. Unfortunately, their discussion goes awry as the Romans are trying to build a solid empire and have been building some pretty decent things for them.
So, being fair minded people, the People's Front of Judea acknowledges that the Romans are doing a pretty good job of providing people wine, setting up irrigation, sanitizing the cities, enforcing public order, building roads, providing fresh water, and in general providing for the public health.
But other than that... they're scum that must be thrown off!
Its comedy...
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
So much for the egocentric philosophical belief that you are the centre of the universe...
...unless of course you enjoy an ego of Beeblebroxian proportions, in which case it's, "More universes? More mes? Now I'm the centre of everything! Freeeow!"
(I can't help but think: Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.)
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
don't forget slavery, easter, child abuse, prostitutes, the idea of dumb blondes (prostitutes died their hair blonde), and sparticus.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Am I the only one that, on reading this first paragraph, decided to put the article down without finishing it?
--Somebody infect me with a
The romans are comming always used to be a joke at school.
'Well if Hitler had have won we'd all be speeking german, thank fuck we beat the Romans'
Sites down now...
There would be signs. Like at the City Limits.
"Now Leaving the Universe."
And shit like "Welcome to the Universe. Visitor Info Center Next Left."
Many agree that many of the advances made in the Western World during the renaissance owe their beginnings to the science, math, and rational thought of the Islamic World.
;^)
Many agree? Who doesn't agree???? All one has to do is read books from Europe in the 16th century and it is clear that over half of their sources are Arabic..... I guess some people just forget
What actually happened was actually quite direct. In the thirteenth century, a movement began in some corners of the Catholic church which held that the Muslims must have some great knowledge which was preventing Europe from lasting victory in the Crusades. These monks translated the works of Avecenna and many others. Works on alchemy, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, philosophy, and physics among other works were translated. And in the process of obtaining this knowledge, Europe was transformed from a sort of glorified barbarity (typified by the Crusades) to a highly advanced civilization.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I think a distinction needs to be made between the "Christian Church's suppression" in the Dark Ages, and the amazing Reformation that occurred in the Northern Europe. The former was brought about by a strict control from the leadership (the Catholic church) that discouraged an individual from reading the Bible for themselves by keeping the language primarily Latin which very few people could read and understand. With the Reformation and the freedom for people to read and learn on their own (the original idea of Christianity, by the way... people were commended by questioning the apostles' presentation by "searching the scriptures"), Northern Europe changed dramatically with an explosion of art, music, and science.
This transformation is largely ignored by modern historians, perhaps because of its religious overtones, but it was just as transforming as the Renaissance and took place nearly a century before. Certainly, the amazing feats of the Arabs influenced the Renaissance, but you must not forget the profound impact of the Reformation as well.
Also, this notion of the Christianity being anti-science is completely wrong. The Bible is filled with many accurate references to the animals and environment of the Middle East including interesting references to creatures that are now extinct. It also encourages proper use of the land by commanding that the land be left fallow every seven years to preserve it. It actually should encourage Christians to research and discover more about the universe as it is a reflection on the power and person of God. In Genesis, it records that God gave man dominion over the earth and its inhabitants. I know many intelligent Christians who pursue science just for this very reason. Just because a few people took over the religion for their own purposes and powerbase does not mean that the religion itself is to blame. Those who propose that Islam is a good religion understand this well with some of the current (and recently deposed) regimes in the Middle East.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
So what you're trying to say is that in one part of the metaverse, Superman never died, and in another he's still dead.
-You need a license to have a dog, but any fool can have a child.
Its basically saying that the universe is so inconceivably big that there is a very high probability that an infinite number of equivalent "earths" exist which, initially only considering my life, means that there is an equally high probability that my life is being led out in an identical way, with each one of us making different decisions at different stages.
:)
I would say that this is equivalent to the problem of making every bitmap file possible... I think it went, if you set some criteria, such as an image of size 1024*768, 32b colours, and set out to create every possible combination, while you would end up with a lot of junk, you would theoretically create every image possible, you would have a snapshot of every moment in history, a picture of every possible human face etc... The theory discussed sounds the same therefore saying that there is so much space out there that there is a high probability that every possible configuration of not only my life but everyones life also exists. So it is not really saying that these exist on another plane of existence, along the lines of a 5th (and beyond) dimension but exist in the same dimension as we do, just a long way away.
At least thats how I read it
SA
Taking that position obliterates the stance that the universe is so great/complicated/whatever it necessarily needs a creator. Because if so, the creator needs one. And can't have one. So by contradiction, the universe didn't necessarily need one.
In a nutshell, one many-universe theory that does deal with a Probablity Axis as it were (ty DA): Everything in the universe is described by a mathematical wavefunction. Until directly observed, the waveform is in an indeterminate state, i.e. the object is existing in all possible states and outcomes. Once you make a decision to observe the object, the waveform collapses down to a precise function that tells you the state of the object. (Look up Schrodinger's Cat for an example) The collapse of a waveform is a chaotic process, but there are theories floating around that when the waveform does collapse, it spawns a number of universes exactly equal to the possible outcomes, with exactly one outcome in each universe. Basically, every obersvation/manipulation/decision/event spawns Universes with every possible outcome. There was an old TNG episode about that...
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
You are claiming knowledge you do not have.
... and then verification.
Of course I'm not. The opposite is true, and I'm merely pointing out the obvious.
It's amusing how so many shoot down what they can not perceive in the name of science. When science is firstly about discovery
Get back to me when something is "discovered" in the first place.
"Sufferin' succotash."
...is ruled by Microsoft.
I don't have a sig.
Wow bizzaro world. Linus Torvalds (did i spell it right) is worth 40 billion and Bill gates creates the first user friendly open source software with an unfamiliar square logo. Modders everywhere scrable to port Windows onto the proprietary L-BOX console.
The possibility exists that somewhere, sometime that Duke Nukem Forever has gone gold.
I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal.
Of course, you can't blame the arabs for their own part in all of this.
Especially not their religious beliefs.
That would just be wrong.
I spent my late teens exploring various religions and philosophies, looking for something that made sense.
Buddhism was the most seriously pursued philosophic framework, and this was because it did not directly conflict with things I already knew to be true - such as the energy/matter/energy pattern. In fact, I once wrote:
"Energy can neither be created, nor destroyed. It is eternal, unchanging. Thus, you were never born and you will never die. You are a wave of energy, a temporary yet eternal pattern. Everyone is you, and you are no one."
The first half, as mentioned, is one of the reasons I enjoyed Buddhist thought so much. The second half is why I eventually moved on (and found something much more appealing and applicable).
The problem with Buddhism is that it is almost entirely focused on the *negation* of self. The rejection of identity. The philosophy I discovered after a year or two of Buddhism is one I have held firmly for most of a decade - and it is entirely focused on self and reality.
Buddhism advocates two things, albeit in different ways than other religions/philosophies: faith and not-self. Objectivism is the direct opposite: existence and identity.
Buddhism is inherently flawed. Almost all other philosophies are, too, and in the same way. It's a little difficult to explain in a short slashdot post, but here goes:
Buddhism attempts to reject the existence of the self, and the mind, and speaks against the validity of desires. But in doing so, it uses those very things. A Buddhist says "I want to seek Nirvana" - and destroys the fundamental tenets of his own faith in the process.
First, he says "I" - a declaration of self. Second, he says "want to seek" - indicating a desire, and what's more, a mind capable of desire. In two strokes, he has destroyed 3 of his ideas.
It's like a man saying "I have no mouth". There is an excellent and concise statement of this:
"Existence exists. And the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one is aware of; and that consciousness exists, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness." (Ayn Rand, _Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology_)
I will give Buddhism credit, however, for being very original, creative, and intellectually challenging. I also appreciate the fact that so many Buddhists are so very open to reason, to fact, to proven science. I would much prefer to deal with a Buddhist than with most(all?) other religions.... except for the ridiculous rejection of self.
If you do not have your self, what do you have? A mass of carbon and water and heavy elements acting like a computer, accepting input and spitting out whatever society and environment has programmed? I don't like this view - I prefer to own my self, and to write my own internal software.
It can be assumed that? Or he's merely espaculating?
Rethinking email
Good posting, but weren't the Mongols and the Crusades basically contemporaneous? I remember that Saladin (who recovered Jerusalem from the Crusaders) was involved in some fighting in Syria against the Mongols.
Anyway, Islamic science was heavily influenced by the Greeks, as was the science of the European Renaissance. What people have to keep in mind is that Islam is fundamentally a WESTERN cultural phenomenon, deriving a lot of its background from Judaism and Hellenism. The bizarre idea that Islam is "oriental" (i.e., non-Western), aside from the stupidities of ideas of the oriental themselves, makes it easy to alienate Islamic thought from your own. The reality is that the Islamic world has more in common with the European world that it has that differs.
The fabric of the universe is not the empty space on which everything is placed. The fabric of space is 100% solid matter. All objects in space, down to every single particle or whatever makes up matter, is a "hole" in space. When objects move around in space, they are actually billions of holes moving through space. Say you put your hand against a wall. Why does your hand stop at the wall and not go through it? Because you cannot travel through the void that is the nothingness that is the zillions of tiny holes that make up the wall. You can travel through space but not through nothingness. You can't put a hole in a hole. Therefore, your hand stops at the boundary of space that makes up that object.
We are only able to physically access the first 9 dimensions of M-theory. In other words, although the common experience denotes that we have only 3 spacial dimensions, using technologies that we have not yet invented will allow us to access the other 6. Time travel is impossible.
But the universe stretches on for zillions upon zillions of light years. In reality, the universe is like a vast sheet of paper that is folded many times. The paper, however, is 10 dimensions rather than two (or three, if you take into consideration that papers have thickness but this is irrelevant for the discussion). Each fold "shifts" the dimensions over some number of times, kind of like a vast shift register. Only when the universe is folded, it's not like a paper where separate points within the "fabric" of the paper don't come in contact with each other. When the universe folds, it actually "layers" different points in the same place, kind of like in a CAD software where you can show and hide layers that are in the same "place" but in a different "layer."
The reality of the situation is that you have 9 such "twins" except that they don't exist in some other galaxy. Those twins are actually just reflections of you, existing on different "layers" of the universe.
You know all those galaxies that exist in space? There is only one galaxy and that is our own. All the others are reflections of our own galaxy at different times of existance, and when we look at them, they look different but in actuality they're not. Your "twin" is the same way... Think of it as the accumulation of all your past lives. You continue to carry those lives within you. They are encoded in your physical body right now... all those lines on your hand or the placement of freckles where they might be. All of these things encode your past and your future in a way that humankind will probably never understand.
All of the above represents proven facts. None of this is a joke.
Could someone please provide an intuitive derivation of how they got that distance between parallel universes? I'm curious.
It sounds like you are living in a very small universe. From the numbers in your post it sounds like the farthest observable object in your universe is ~26.3 meters away from you (that is 10^1.42 meters if I'm not mistaken). Time to leave the house I think.
In the parallel universe, nearly all the people reading slashdot are women.
In one of the universe, there must be a Bill Gates that authored Linux and supports open source. There will also be a large slashdot community that likes what he has done....
Back in our reality, Bill is scratching his head trying to come up with more GUI-chewey-userfriendly bloatware to defeat Linux.
If we can bring the two universes together, let's have Bill meet Bill and watch them strangle each other.
If I met one of my parallel universe selves and we had sex, does that mean I'm gay? BTW I'm gonna be the "male" of the relationship.
I saw that sentence too, and being the one who went to the prom, I wondered: how can both halves of that sentence be true? If the parallel universe Me, who is identical to me in every respect, chooses to make different choices than I do, we aren't identical. Later in the article, it says our memories are identical, but that seems impossible, if making different choices. If infinite space and time means everything plays out somewhere eventually, then there isn't likely to be an identical Me anywhere, not for long anyway.
Is this the Emperor's New Clothes? Or am I missing something?
It could just be that these parallel universes are like an infinite series (those patterns that are in a series, get infinitely smaller but never end...what're they called?). In which case, you /.ians would be getting laid even less in some instances. And this post and every parallel permutation of it (different languages?) would be posted. Beowulf clusters beware...
If I have sex with my girlfriend from a parallel universe, is it really cheating?
I theorized this over fifteen years ago as a pre-teen. I said precisely what the article is saying. If infinity is all-encompassing, then there must be an infinite number of planets out there with one carbon copy of every one of us, doing precisely what we're doing right now.
Yay me!
- IP
hey dunce it's from Monty Python
For all this and more, check out Surreal Numbers by our good friend Donald Knuth.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
in a parallel universe you're not a virgin playing with a plastic m16
There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices.
So that is how ScoobyDoo and Gilligan can screw up royally each week, but *still* catch the bad guys. There is one instance universe where all that serendipity actually happens every week.
On the flip side, somewhere I accidently let out a huuuuuge fart during every job interview I ever attempt.
Table-ized A.I.
...I'm evil and have a goatee in a parallel universe? I must in at least an infinite number! Ow, my brain hurts!
in Soviet Russia, the universe parallels YOU.
actually the parallel universe sounds a lot like Soviet Russia. Wouldn't that be crazy?
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Makes for a damn good movie, though.
May we never see th
Bush's religosity is a front to gain campaign $$$. There's really no element to his behavior that suggests to me that he's in any way affected by (or even aware of) the teachings of Christ.
On the other hand, many well-known American Christian leaders don't seem to have it right. Personified in the following anecdote:
Last Sunday, one pastor in my church (nondenominational) remarked about the politicization of religion, and how there's a growing movement in the world today that if we'd just join this party, or vote for that candidate, that it would set things right and there would be peace and joy on earth.
Then he talked about how when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a Colt, his disciples were thinking "oh boy, I'm going to be secretary of state!" not knowing that they're leader would be executed within a week. Jesus wasn't riding into Jerusalem to take political control. He wants control of us as individuals. Those who choose to give Him control.
I really liked that point, and frankly, there's a TON of scripture that backs that up.
Then the other pastor gave a sermon, and hemmed and hawed about how the world is in such turmoil because we're chasing God out of our schools, and rejecting him in public life. He apparently hadn't even listened to his partner who ran the first part of the service.
This is the fundamental thing that's wrong with the Christian Church today. Is these little napoleonic pastors who aren't happy giving humble service as teachers to the faithful who will listen. They want to be "religious leaders".
So did the Taliban.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
And if God has infinite knowledge, he knows what will happen in ten minutes. Do you really think you can change that?
Food for thought...
Al-Khwarizmi invented algebra around 780 (both "algebra" and "algorithm" are arabic words).The Bagdad physician, al-Razi, (865-925) produced a medical textbook that was the standard throughout the Islamic world. And Avicenna (Ibn Sina) was like the Isaac Newton of the Islamic world, who in 980 was making advances in medicine, physics and philosophy.
Many agree that many of the advances made in the Western World during the renaissance owe their beginnings to the science, math, and rational thought of the Islamic World.
I don't think so. I hear this a lot from those who seek to counter the obvious fact that Islam is as barbaric a religion as you can get.
What little rational thought has existed in this history of Islam is only because certain military thug lords decided to allow some of their intellectuals the freedom to read classical thought and science. All Islamic "rational" philosophy is nothing more than transposed Aristotle. Most of the medicine you desribed as coming from the arabs was described by Hippocrates. It was the Greeks who bred the unusually powerful Turkish poppy, from which analgesic strength opium can be obtained.
What little advancements existed in the muslim world were simply the result of pillaging the remnants of the Roman Empire. Muslims come, they suck a land dry until its people live in poverty and their culture stagnates. Every muslim area of the world was once vibrant and live, and now its degenerate, stagnant.
In particular what infuriates me about this modern ignorance of Islam is how much they destroyed from the classical world. They burned the great library at Alexandria. They destroyed countless temples, arenas, and theaters from antiquity. They stripped the great pyramid of its protective limestone encasing to build some hideous mosque.
Of course, we won't even get into the discussion of Constantinople.
The Christian world had its problems, but this was mainly due to the vast numbers of people immigrating west. There is a reason the western empire fell before the east. No one did (or still does) want to live in the traditionally Muslim lands. They are a desert wasteland. One of the things which caused the collapse of the Roman empire was changing climate. North africa was the primary source of food for much of the empire. It is no coincidence Islam began to show its ugly head at the exact same time as the desert expanded and the people starved. North Africa has been a hell hole every since.
Also, Lawrence of Arabia was a little misinformed about London. London (and Paris) both achieved their stature because they were the capitals of Britannia and Gaul respectively, their Roman provincial titles. London was hardly a village but a fortified city rather large for the frontier. They had aquaducts, public baths (still unknown in Arabia), plumbing, industry, and heavy fortifications. It was common practice to keep some public illumination, but probably no more than torches. London never WAS a village. It was created from the very beginning to be a fortress, around which grew a city. Since Roman imperial rule was brought to the region for fertile land and raw materials, it ultimately became a trading center.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Occam's Razor is pretty standard in science (yes, not logic, philosophy, etc, but the fields aim for different goals).
If conventional physics don't explain something properly, theories have to be formed about them. So we get a lot of ideas floating around, most of which *aren't* very mundane because they're trying to explain something that doesn't fit well with our view of the universe. However, the effort is still to strive for a simple-as-possible explanation.
The people claiming UFOs exist see a light in the sky and choose a *not* particularly simple explanation involving Venusians anally probing people. 's why they don't get taken that seriaously.
May we never see th
Wonderful propoganda. Unfortunate for your theory, the Renaissance was largely a Catholic phenomena. The art, music, science, and philosophy you celebrate were primarily produced in Catholic countries, and funded by the Catholic church.
p.s. The bible was translated into Latin to be accessible to the common man, not to exclude them (hence the apalletion Vulgate - people's). As a result of the Roman empire, Latin was international language of Europe.
It might be more accurate to describe Japan as part Buddhist and part Shintoist.
Finding God in a Dog
MAX TEGMARK wrote a four-dimensional version of the computer game Tetris while in college. In another universe, he went on to become a highly paid software developer. In our universe, however, he wound up as professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania.
And in every other universe we know of he is the master sandwich maker.
Who the hell can play 4 dimensional tetris? What the hell IS it?
WWJD? JWRTFA!
This is pretty much a killer argument.
The problem is that everyone has their own issues.
Physicists like modeling things, and aren't that concerned about pure logic issues. If they can make an easy-to-use, helpful model, being wrong or inconsistent doesn't matter that much. Hence you get stuff based on things like "probability functions". It's great for making potentially simple, useful, probably wrong models, and comple crap for making philosophical arguments.
Metaphysicists are so stuck on rigor and abstract issues that they can't come up with stuff that appeals to your average Joe. So they tend to get ignored, and definitely aren't making sweeping, grandiose claims like "there's probably an alternate universe forking off of this one that we can travel to!"
Mathematicians like building models, and aren't even constrained, as are physicists, by any sort of relationship to the real world.
May we never see th
Gay Deceiver, bounce!
Barsoom, here I come!
With my luck, though, I'd wind up in the Library of Babel...
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
... am I me anywhere else?
In all seriousness, just because something is remotely possible doesn't mean that it can happen or is happening or did happen. It's quite possible it never happened anywhere in universes 1-4.
That's where universe #5 comes in.
This space for rent.
---large percentage of the American voting public is more liberal and secular now than in previous eras.---
I'm not sure this is true: sounds like a "Good Ole Days" myth. Just because the American public has a better head on its shoulders about separation doesn't mean that it's less religious and more secular. In fact, we've been more religious over the last couple of decades than in many other times in our history: we're on a peak, not a trough.
---Bush's religiosity seems absurd to many people, but it wouldn't have a century ago.---
Not really so either. Again, it isn't religiosity, but the WAY it is expressed and put into the public square. Even Lincoln, who was one of the first Presidents to use religion as a serious talking point (even though he considered his own talk "for the fools") didn't speak of it in the same WAY that Bush does. I mean, last year Bush litterally made a statement that purported to separate "good/true" Islam from "bad/false" Islam. Where does he think he gets that sort of authority? At least none of the other Presidents who were religious thought that the office of President had some special religious power and authority from which to speak. It doesn't: the whole point of separation is not to make religion bad, but to reserve it for the people. We have our own religious leaders which we can freely choose. The government, even as a democracy, has no authority to choose for us, or lecture us on what to believe. The founders understood that.
In the light universe, this shit don't happen. Linux is everywhere and M$ was blown up by its own creation, the IE, the most powerful destructive force in the two universes. Now it only eats Holland.
Our universe is four deminsional according to Einstien's Theory of Relativity... All matter exists in these FOUR deminsions. Not the three that were repeatedly spouted in this acticle. Almost a hundred years of this theory and the average scientist doesn't even grasp this basic leap that Einstien first undertook. The scientist how wrote this article doesn't understand our universe, and he expects to understand the multiverse.... Tis the sad state of the world.... That we call these men leaders.
Ok, this seems a bit "off" to me. The total entropy of the Universe (or Multiverse or what ever you call the whole system) should be DECREASING thanks to thermo-dynamics. If it's increasing we have more energy then we put it. SO if entropy is decreasing, how can we have all the "universes" growing further and further apart,that's INCREASING entropy! I skimmed the article and didn't see an answer. Until they answer that i'm not convinced!
really... so which Greek did they steal algebra and arithmatic from? btw, where did they steal the number we stole from them from?
the "obvious" fact is no culture has a monopoly on brutality or enlightenment.
-pyrrho
WE'RE RIDING!
STIMPY: Stop it! You're talking crazy!
REN: (suddenly paranoid) Oh no, I know what YOU want. You coveteth my ICECREAM BAR!
Or my favorite part, the SHINEY RED BUTTON!
REN: DON'T TOUCH IT! It's the HISTORY ERASER button, you FOOL!
STIMPY: So what'll happen?
REN: That's just IT! We don't KNOW! Maayyybeee something bad?...Mayyybeee something good! I guess we'll never know! 'Cause you're going to guard it! You won't TOUCH it, will you?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And how do I find the $%#$%#$%?
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Now I'm no astrophysicist, but...
I used to think about this stuff a lot as a kid, including the good ol "In an infinite universe, everything must exist" theory. Yes! Somewhere there really IS a Natalie Portman who wants to-.. eh, never mind...
Not only that, but by logical extension, there's an infinite number of every possible thing/object/whatever in the universe.
So far, so good.. but.. this causes problems
For example, that means there's an infinite number of infinitely large fish. (yes, silly example, but my point is serious)
Basically, this means that amongst all the other stuff, there's an infinite amount of infinite permutations of infinitely large objects. Surely an infinitely large object would.. uh.. "fill" an infinitely large universe? even though it can't, because the universe is inifinite and-... AARRRGH!
Sorry. My brain just went bang, and oozed out of my ears.
But seriously, how does that work out?
An infinite number of finite size objects take up an infinite area...
a single infinite size object takes up an infinite area..
as does an infinite number of infinite sized objects...
But none of these will fill an infinite space?
heh. it does my head in. I can handle infinity on one side of the equation, but not both. Will an infinite amount of water fill an infinitely big bucket?
If you answer yes, you're putting a finite size on your bucket, and if you answer no, you're putting a finite size on your water. Therefore.. is it unanswerable?
I probably just need more coffee..
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
It's a short parable about an infinite library. Every possible book is in this library, but most of them would be giberish to you. Somewhere is a book that lists everything you need to know to be happy. It is infinitely unlikely you will find it.
If everything that is possible exists, does what you do here matter? An infinite number of you will make good choices, and an infinite number will make bad choices. In some Universes, you succede, in others you fail. Why then should you care what happens? Because you are here, not there.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This one does not agree. You're parroting years of pure humanistic rubbish. The "dark ages" had many other causes, many of them caused by non-religious warfare and plague. Please also note that western knowledge was preserved by Christian scholars and monks during this time, despite the decidedly non-christian acts of supposedly Christian rulers who were merely lip-serving pagans. The West didn't come out of the dark ages empty handed. What you're saying is pure pluraistic, revisionist history.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I'm sorry, you get an F for today. It was in a letter that Jefferson wrote. What the Constitution says is that the Federal government shall "respect no establishment of religion". This means it may not create a sect like the Anglican church, may not pass laws against or for a religion, and may not presecute a citizen for having religious beliefs of any kind.
What people like you demand is exactly the opposite. By requiring that all government buildings and schools, and even private businesses be scrubbed of all religious beliefs and symbols, you are violating the exact same rights you're supposed to be defending. It's freedom of religion, not freedom FROM religion. If you can pierce 15 parts of your body or post humanistic fliers, I think a teenager should be allowed to wear a cross to school or post invitations to a prayer group.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Mr Bugnuts... Your agonizer please.
me: Nooo.. !
Actually, Bush used that good/bad Islam thing just to keep you left-wingers from accusing him of waging a holy war. Damned if you do, damned if you don't I guess.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
You're right that Christian scholars and monks preserved a lot. But they also gained a lot from their translations of Arabic works of science and literature. And yes, some of that had been translated into Arabic from Greek and Latin.
And just as there were "supposedly" Christian rulers committing non-christian acts, there were also "supposedly" Muslim rulers committing non-Islamic acts. People in power often like to use things like religion as justification for their own acts of ego-gratification.
But it is true that many Muslim scholars were making wonderful advances in medicine, math, science, and philosopy when Europe was "dark".
I don't think it was because they were Muslim - they merely happened to be born to Muslim parents...
The original post implied that the mere fact that the West is dominantly Christian is the reason for scientific advances, and that simply is not an exclusive case. The Islamic world had advances that were just as great.
Another poster implied that Islam was the cause for poverty in the middle east, while not considering really considering problems of geographic determinism. Climate, water, and land are definitely working against the people in the region. It also didn't help that much of the region was falling under empire after empire (mongol, persian, turk) while Europe "got lucky" and managed to set up fairly stable states that weren't dominated by foreign empires.
To quote:
"One way to do the calculation is to ask how many protons could be packed into a Hubble volume at that temperature. The answer is 10^118 protons. Each of those particles may or may not, in fact, be present, which makes for 2 to the 10^118 possible arrangements of protons. A box containing that many Hubble volumes exhausts all the possibilities."
That's great. Except that THE UNIVERSE IS NOT BINARY. Each proton that exists has an infinite number of possible quantum states. Taken individually, the spin of a proton is practically irrelevant. But large numbers of quantum interactions cascade upward in scale to affect the larger universe in subtle but important ways.
Secular (to be precise, must value observed knowledge of how the universe works over 'revealed', such as what Bob (PhD, Physics) has to say about his physics theories, or what the preacher says.)
Must be willing to spend money on research (i.e. values progress)
Must have ways for many researchers to test observerations (ah-ha!)
Ok, that last one is a big one. I think it's valid (3 people testing a theory gives us the whole cold fusion scam. 50 gives us a fair amount of proof in the theory). And that requires one major component: Mass production. I bet that a secular society and access to mass production are the two biggest factors in rapid scientific progress.
I'm not shy, I'm stalking my prey
Islam's most important mathmatical creation however, was zero. Until the Islamic world created it, there was no concept of zero. The Christian world even spurned the idea becuase it was contradictory to their religious beliefs. If it was possible that there was a concept of zero - of nothingness - than it was possible that there was a time with no God. There was a great book about it entitled: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. I find it interesting, though that Islam eventually decended into the same ideological trap that Christianity has always been in.
This is, as you know, exactly the correct reason and response to the parent's question. He's assuming that the events he described has a nonzero possibility, which isn't necessarily true. However, since this is /. (and i don't have mod points right now) his incorrect assumption and question sits at the top of the chat modded up the wazzoo, while your response remains at 1 and will likely not be read. ;\
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I'm sorry, YOU get the F for today. Ever look at that letter you're waving about? I doubt it. The reason it is quoted is twofold: First, Jefferson says, in that letter, to assure a Christian community no less, that what they meant when they wrote "respect no establishment of religion" IS the 'wall of seperation'. And second, the Supreme Court has said the same thing: A rough quote, because I'm not wasting google's server time on you, is 'And while it is not found in the constitution, the 'Wall of Seperation' is an excelent metaphor for the protections granted by the first amendment'.
Net time you troll, could you at least, please, say something different, something that might actually require more than a response that has been given by thousands of people tens of thousands of times?
I'm not shy, I'm stalking my prey
Buddhism attempts to reject the existence of the self, and the mind, and speaks against the validity of desires. But in doing so, it uses those very things. A Buddhist says "I want to seek Nirvana" - and destroys the fundamental tenets of his own faith in the process.
A Buddhist says nothing, not even that they are a Buddhist.
If you do not have your self, what do you have? A mass of carbon and water and heavy elements acting like a computer, accepting input and spitting out whatever society and environment has programmed?
What you have is total emptiness. The only way of seeing truth is ridding yourself of all biases, i.e. emptiness. Buddhists wouldn't see themselves as a mass of carbon, I assume they would see nothing. They're goal I assume would not be to write their own software but to get rid of all their software.
These are some poorly thought out arguments that remind me of undergraduate philosophy class, which is where they belong.
Algebra, using the arabic numeral system inherited from India, is certainly arabic in origin. I would strongly argue however that Greek geometry (pythagorous) was very algebric in its nature. In fact, I bet the vast majority of people only know one algebreic formula, A^2 + b^2 = C^2. Perhaps Pythagorous did not know that was "algebra", but for practical purposes 2800 year old Greek geometry can solve many problems in the real world, as much so as algebra.
Arabs combined Greek writings on number theory with Indian script.
Arithmatic was around centuries before Mohammed was even born. Do you think the Roman census was based on observation alone?
Islam arose during a turbulent time in history, and took advantage of collapsing government around them. At least the Romans conquered other strong nations. Islam simply spread where there was the least resistance. Its brutality isn't to be despised because it was brutal, but because it was cowardly.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I'm from the no brutality is good brutality.
As for Roman's and other strong nations... you mean like all the indigenous tribal peoples of europe?
Sorry, cowardice, brutality, intelligence and enlightenment are not terms to apply to any culture, but only to individuals and/or movements within that culturel.
For a christian to say, "look how brutal their religion is!" is a joke to me. Outside the whole mess, not as a christian, jew, muslim, budhist nor zoroastrian, organized religion, IN GENERAL looks to be a large source of brutality.
-pyrrho
If every possible "particle position combination" is exhausted, then everything that can possibly exist does exist. So, somewhere in the infinite universe, there must be a giant bomb capable of destroying the entire universe. In fact, there are many of them. In fact, there are an infinite number of them, in all different shapes and sizes. More importantly, they all have different trigger mechanisms. Some have buttons... Some have timers... and since there are an infinite number of them, some of these timers should have already expired. But the universe still exists. ?
I think the flaw in the logic here is that just because there is an infinite amount of space, there must be an infinite amount of "stuff" in that space. Maybe it's just empty, or nearly empty, or whatever. In terms of your "boolean" analogy, maybe everything past a certain point is a "zero" (nothing there).
Actually you can, it's called proof by contradiction. You assume something is true, then reach a contradiction therefore it must not be true.
:p Well, there might have been, I can't disprove that negative.
Well, something else here. I could be accused of eating somebody's pie and prove that I could not have eaten it by showing that someone else did. "See? The security camera shows that Bob ate that pie."
Unfortunatey, there were no security cameras at the beginning of time.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Could we bump into ourselves at parties? And would we be wearing the same thing? Think how embarrassing it could be.
Historically, Japan has been very UN-scientific - it's exposure to Western science and ways of thinking is very recent. In fact, generally speaking, Japan has innovated very little over it's entire history, generally assimilating it's technology from other, more dynamic cultures. It is, however, very, very, very good at doing that.
To simple.
You made a good start, but the legal environment must be supportive. Consider, e.g., the likely consequences of the DMCA + Palladium in the realm of computer software.
Also, are you sure that the society, as opposed to individuals within the society, must be willing to spend money on research? Perhaps this choice would shift what research gets done, but would it shift the amount?
I also believe that there needs to be a balance between respect for theory and respect for practice. (cf. Greece and Rome.)
But there are probably more factors... this is just picking the low-hanging fruit.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I didn't consider the distinction important. Rich individuals within the society giving large sums of money for fundimental research is equivilent, for these purposes, to everyone giving a little.
Legal environment: I think that was covered by 'must value observed knowledge...', actually. Lack of valueing the knowledge results in laws against acquiring it.
I don't understand your meaning on the differance between respect for theory and practice.
I'm not shy, I'm stalking my prey
Nope. They're not jealous of science or technology. Thats stupid. Ask a muslim.
" I hear this a lot from those who seek to counter the obvious fact that Islam is as barbaric a religion as you can get."
My GOD, what stupidity. Do you hate islam because it's not Christianity or Judaism?
Islam has a core value of peace. The Qur'an commands you to give equality to women and help orphans.
I don't care if you don't want to follow Islam (it's not a religion for idiots), but don't start talking uninformed garbage. What do you know about Islam? You watched "True Lies?"
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate"
or
"plurality should not be posited without necessity."
English philosopher and Franciscan monk William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349)
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
The existence of a multiverse conflicts with CURRENT big bang theory. (I've never been a proponent of big bang simply because of the weak evidence for it: theories built on theories.) However, a universe cannot bang if it is part of a larger structure (the multiverse). Just for all of you big bang lovers (Ever heard of Ptolemy?): The big bang's key proof comes from the "red shift" of objects in the EARTH'S SKIES. Technically then, everything in the universe is moving AWAY from Earth.(An Earth centered Universe.) Our observations over a period of little more than a century all told. Dark Matter theory exists to not only explain that the laws of galaxial gravitation but also the "missing mass" that the universe needed to bang. Einstein should be read more often and mayhap understood more often. We are not the center of the universe. We simply could be in an orbit that takes us away from most of the objects within our sight much like Pluto for the past 9 years. We are infants in trying to understand the universe. Thorstein
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has, in what we laughingly call the past, had a great deal to say on the subject of parallel universes. Very little of this is, however, comprehensible to anyone below the level of Advanced God, and since it is now well established that all known gods came into existance a good three millionths of a second after the universe began rather than, as they usually claimed, the previous week, they already have a great deal of explaining to do as it is, and are therefore not available for comment on matters of deep physics at this time.
One encoraging thing the Guide does have to say on the subject of parallel universes is that you don't stand the remotest chance of understanding it. You can therefore say "What?" and "Eh?" and even go cross-eyed and start to blither without any fear of making a fool of yourself.
...end up with a religious argument...
Until somebody makes some practical use out of the parallel universe theory, it's just that - theory... Developed mostly to justify somebody's grant or university chair or whatever...anything except truly providing some explanation of what is...
Morons...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Who said it does?
Sure, that's fine -- who said it wasn't? Church-state problems occur when the school starts sponsoring religious events, or courtrooms start posting the 10 Commandments, and such. The difference is when a government institution itself is taking a religious position, as opposed to when someone who happens to be inside a government building takes such a position.
This complaint is totally clueless, sort of like the guy that slaps a girl on the left cheek, and then, when she cries out, slaps her on the right cheek. And the bitch still complains! Geez, damned if you do, damned if you don't!
Seriously, I know I'm preaching to your jerking knees here, but the problem is not separating good Islam from bad Islam, it's separating beliefs from actions. See, here in America, the idea is that no one has authority over anyone's ideas, no matter how silly or ridiculous others might find them. What we don't tolerate is violence and coercion. THAT is what Bush should have stuck to criticizing, instead of trying to play national theologian and interpret what God thinks and wants for the rest of us.
And geez: left-wingers? I'm a left-winger because I don't agree that America is uniquely and radically secular today, or think that Bush's God rhetoric is different from God rhetoric of the past? Guess I should give up jockeying for the repeal of anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, and the progressive tax system. You know, now that I'm a "left-winger."
10 to the 10 to the 1.42
or
10 to the 26 meters.
or
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters.
Even if assume the Universe is infinite, It doesn't have to repeat. pi, 2^(1/2), and other irrational numbers are examples of this.
If you value theory, but not practice, then you build fine castles in the air, but have trouble translating them into sound architecture.
If you value practice, but not theory, then you have no guide for doing something different from what was done before.
(That's oversimplified, and slightly misleading, but it points in the right direction. And nobody is ever totally without either theory or practice, so the extreme cases won't exist.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Doesn't do medicine". "Hates roads, C02 and all that"
Until he has a heart attack, then it's modern ambulance on road to the hospital to get a clotbuster and angioplasty.
Heaven help you should you have a kid and let the kid die rather than take them to the hospital. Into the jail with you!
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
bullshit. jesus christ didnt mention anything about parallel universes so it mustnt be true. everyone has a set path and the future is already written so there are no alternatives and existence is moomoo something something ladidah!
ROFL thanks for the laugh, that reminded me of this god freak loser I used to go to school with (actually that reminds me of a couple of god freak losers I used to go to school with.)
Man I always wanted to punch those fuckers the fuck out. I was too much of a pussy tho and by the time I learned to stand up for myself I was too busy with the fucks who actually deserved it. The only thing these losers deserved was a bitch slap for being to closed-minded to reality.
I saw through organized religion for the sham it was by the time I was six, and I've devoted some of the time of my life to helping others realize this. I just do my part, as was ordained by...well thats the mystery ain't it?
Put the crack pipe down...this is the third time today I've had to trash the argument you make:
Listen up son, no universe is within the causal bounds of any other universe. What that means is no event that occurs in universe A will ever have any effect on universe B, or any other universe for that matter. Any universe with that law (which is nonsense but hey anythings possible) could exist gleefully and it would not have any effect on the rest of the multiverse.
"Physical laws change the farther you get away from one point in the universe, very much like gravity decreases with distance from an object." (Rudolf Steiner, paraphrased)
Nobody can actually really tell how many particles are within a given space around Antares, since the physical laws there would be fundamentally different.
That's why scientists observe stuff happening out there that can only be if there's stuff traveling faster than light.
If universes are different one's as soon as there are different phyisical laws, then the next "universe" would be kinda just outside the trajectory of pluto or so.
And: To my impression evidence that physical laws change over the course of time is also gathering. And these theorys aren't that new either. Some of them are almost a hundred years old. The dark-matter theory for instance is somewhat consitent with large portions of the ether theory at the beging of the 20th century.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca