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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.
That is 10 to the 10 to the 1.42, which is significantly longer.
What is the shortest sig that cannot be expressed in fewer than 20 words?
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
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
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.
Heck, I stopped subscribing to Scientific American about ten years ago. I sensed that the publisher was targeting an audience with less scientific background. When I started reading SA it was somewhere between a scientific journal and Popular Science magazine. It seems to have moved closer to Popular Science. That just too "thin and watery" for me.
I still subscribe to Science News. It delivers the goods; short summaries of new scientific discoveries, new research, and updates on important topics. It provides a good overview of what's going on in science research. I've had a subscription for going on 25 years...the quality has remained high all that time.
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.
Yeah....it's gotten worse, but not quite bad enough to be called sensationalist crap like Omni. But it's certainly awful enough to have made me switch to American Scientist. The Sigma Xi publication delivers some kick-ass articles on all facets of scientific research, focusing mainly (in my view) on physics, math, and meta-research on scientific methods with some astronomy and life sciences thrown in. Lots of CS, too. Comes highly recommended despite its US-centric name.
I believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, personal God. I believe he has always existed and will always exist. I've also been interested in Science and Science Fiction from a very young age, so I've been thinking about questions like this for a long time. I don't see any inherent contradiction between the Christian God and the theories discussed in the article.
Both faith and reason are very important in being human. Science wouldn't advance if the Scientists didn't have faith in theories that haven't been proven yet. Faith in God wouldn't be possible without being able to observe evidence and understand His relationship to us.
I think that the Mormons believe in many gods, each ruling over a different planet or world. They associate the Father with one of those gods and the Son (Jesus) with the literal offspring of the first god. I haven't studied Mormonism in depth, but it seems to be full of logical problems. As with many false, human religions (really, all religions based on human logic are false) the interpretation of all truth most come from leaders near the top. Individuals don't seem to think much for themselves.
Don't make the mistake of looking at one group of religious people that have turned their brains off and think that all belief in God is brainless. There's much about God that I don't know and there are some things I know to be true that seem contradictory. No one on Earth can claim to have it all figured out. If you've decided not to believe in God, make sure you know why you decided it. If you still have an open mind, I urge you to keep it open.
Yep, and it goes as far as your sensory input. If you look at the development of neural systems in organisms, you can see the growth from simple neural nets in hydras up to complex information processors in humans. The engineering drive is the same- process input data and control the body. Neurons fire because they're connected to other firing neurons and because they have rules about upon which inputs they send their output. Where does the first input come from? Well, from stimulation of the retinas or the ear canal or the skin or any place where there's a nerve ending. These are organs designed to send an electrical charge on their "bus" back to nerve clusters in the spinal cord and brain for processing.
One of the things that I've found most fascinating is the theory that the mind can influence things at the subatomic level. During the 60s/70s, the USSR did some experiments with people who rumour said had strong psychokinetic abilities (ESP). Now, the Ruskies were into all kinds of bizarre things, they researched things that Western science wrote off as ridiculous.
On the contrary, the US dumped millions of dollars into researching remove viewing as a means of gathering covert data. The "experiments" and "projects" were failures, just as the Soviet ones were.
Anyway, they found some pretty interesting things. Like, they didn't find anybody that could move objects with their mind, or anything like that. But, they did find a few who could apparently alter the rate of nuclear decay. As you're probably aware (you read slashdot after all), subatomic decay is essentially random according to todays science. What they found was that these "psychics" could, in controlled conditions, speed up or slow down a number of a screen that measured decay. I can't recall if they were told what the number meant or not, but they could seemingly control the process at will.
I recall hearing somewhere that anyone could achieve results similar to this test without any effort at all. Systems on the edge of chaos are funny- one butterfly beats its wings, and the resulting probabilities collapse differently. IIRC, though, these tests have very poor reliability and don't amount to much.
Interesting. Could the mind impose itself onto low level randomness? If so, that could be the missing link between mind and body.
They found that link a very long time ago. It runs down your back in a bone sheath.
If mind can affect quantum probabilities, and our brains are in a state of quantum instability .... aah. You have mind controlling body. Such a thing would answer many questions.
Again, this doesn't take quantum hoodoo to explain. Brains are built to control bodies. They communicate through a bus of several major nerves that service the major sensory organs and muscles (read: I/O devices) of the body.