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Why We Think There's a Multiverse, Not Just Our Universe
An anonymous reader writes "It's generally accepted that the Universe's history is best described by the Big Bang model, with General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory as the physical laws governing the underlying framework. It's also accepted that the Universe probably started off with an early period of cosmic inflation prior to that. Well, if you accept those things — as in, the standard picture of the Universe — then a multiverse is an inevitable consequence of the physics of the early Universe, and this article explains why that's the case."
That there is a universe out there where Sarah Palin is President.
multiverse: one where there is a God. one where there's not. more to come.
But the turtles appear out of nowhere and are very far apart.
Why do cosmological theories of any merit always sound like they were written by Douglas Adams?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Note that this isn't talking about the quantum mechanical multiverse where whenever a decoherence occurs you get branching of different copies. This is talking about a more concrete notion of multiverse where the early inflation spreads out so much that there are lots of little regions of observable space time which cannot observe each other.
or something less stupid, instead?
It doesn't make any sense to say that it's one big thing, but not one big thing at the same time.
Kind of like saying it's not one big cake sliced into wedges, it's lots of little cakes that have nothing to do with each other.
AND YET THEY OCCUPY THE SAME PLATTER.
A common theory of time travel is that you can only time-travel between universes via DAG (directed, acyclic graph). This resolves the grandfather paradox, because it's impossible for you to go back in time in your original universe and kill your original grandfather. In other words, you were born in a universe where another you didn't travel back in time and kill your grandfather.
Why would I accept a hypothesis that cannot be tested?
So we're all just virtual universes inside a universe server in a rack in a universe farm in some universe hosting site?
Or the one about the guy talking to Himself and things started existing.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
I think that this is a great article, but...
It is obvious that there are parts of the universe that are not (and never have been) causally connected with our universe.Those are just the parts of our universe we can't see, which are inevitable in an infinite universe with a finite duration and a finite speed of light. You don't need either quantum mechanics or inflation for that, and it has never been called the "multiverse."
The multiverse in my experience means exclusively the idea that there are other parts of the universe with different physical laws. That idea is connected to the anthropic principle, and (IMHO) evading tough issues about the nature of physical laws. (Find the cosmological constant to be inconveniently small? That's OK! In a multiverse there are a gazillion universe with large cosmological constants and no life like ours, ours with a small one and our kind of life, and nothing left to explain!) "We" might think that there is that kind of multiverse, but "we" in this case decidedly does not include "me." (People like me tend to call such ideas "Just so stories," which in physics is an insult.)
This is really talking about eternal slow roll inflation, so let me fix this for you :
There has always been nothing, and it has always been exploding.
Who said there was nothing?
Are you a religious nutter? Your rhetoric seems to indicate that.
I know it's karma suicide to post on something like this saying "I don't get it", but, well, I don't get it.
I've been reading about inflation, multiverses, and whatnot for a very long time at this point, and I like to think that I can give a reasonable explanation comprehensible to nontechnical people. I've come across some articles that were a lot of work to get through, and I've given up on some because I don't have the necessary math.
But this article was terrible. Its grammar is good and not overly complex; it doesn't use a lot of obscure words. It's written like a nice popularization piece, with important parts called out in bold and lots of illustrations. But the illustrations are baffling -- what's that "getting closer to a sphere" four-panel diagram credited to Ned Wright, and where does the text refer to it? What the heck is going on with those diagrams from Narlikar and Padmanabhan? What's with the black space-balls rolling around on the mini-golf course at the end?
I'd wonder if this is a Sokol-type troll, but I don't see anything obviously wrong in it -- there's just a bunch of stuff there that looks like explanations, but apparently isn't. Or maybe I'm just having a bad night.
Why do you have fingers when what you type is trash?
"It's generally accepted that the Universe's history is best described by the Big Bang model"
If the Koch brothers find out a way to make money out of something else, you betcha it won't be "generally accepted". Every morning Fox and friends will howl how ridiculous the Big Bang model is. In the UK Lord High Heels and Suspenders Crazy Pants will address conservative think tanks who drum the table and cry "hear! hear!" Big Media will print stories discrediting Big Bang "to be fair."
Slashdot Trolls challenge: Plant a story that the Big Bang is proof of global warming and watch what happens.
I mean, I can handle the concept... so long as there's just ONE multiverse.
so your looking for dark matter because its effects are present - look to this mulitverse as your answer - this will fit the model and explain why we have not found dark matter
Because this probably means that somewhere there is a universe where desperation is considered sexy and Slashdotters are studs.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think the next greatest feat in physics will not be a new discovery, but just figuring out how to explain the current state of knowledge to a high school student. How can the field progress if only a handful of people actually understand the information we now possess?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying we should only pursue theories and bodies of knowledge if the average idiot can understand them? I'm sure you'll agree that if it makes sense for physics, it makes sense for all areas, including... engineering.
So say goodbye to television, GPS (oops, there's some relativity physics in that too), computers of all sorts, and possibly even non-electronic internal combustion engines.
I'm willing to continue relying on people who deal in knowledge I don't understand, as long as I'm satisfied they're constrained by peers who are incented to find flaws in their arguments to keep them honest.
Hell, most people don't understand what *I* do for a living, and I'm just a senior manager in healthcare information systems.
But in this world the link leads to nothing but a teaser blurb and an invitation to blindly execute whatever arbitrary code another server might decide to hand me. No thanks.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
If you remember a bit of calculus, you right appreciate the idea presented here. This one postulates that time varies according to Mass. We already know that black holes slows down time so...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy47OQxUBvw
Even if you think this guy's a crack pot, it damn interesting.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
within chaos and then go "Wrong again!! Oh thats just brilliant!." Or something like that.
Physicists should kind of be ashamed of themselves to care so much about things like this. It's just mental masturbation. There's not one single thing, practical or impractical that could be derived from the knowledge of multiverses.
Can you visit to them? No
Can you take their energy? no
Can you see them? no
Can you impact them? Maybe but why?
Can you reproduce them? No
.
So why waste your time? Presume it's possible and move on.
Even if humanity evolves and expands into the far reaches of our galaxy. Even if we discover communication or means of travel outside of the bounds of relativity,
even if we rule our own planets and send our only child out to be a god amongst men and give him all of our knowledge crystals.
Why would we ever care about a multiverse?
All you armchair PhD's that make slashdot famous can go on and flame me now. /I do consider a great many aspects of astronomy and research into the very large and very small important, so don't think I'm anti science.
Of course that's not what he's saying. He wants to radically improve education so that a smart high school student can understand modern physics. Like on star trek.
If there wasn't nothing, what was there and where did it come from- or how did it get there?
Are you a religious nutter? Your rhetoric seems to indicate that.
"Nothing" is not the natural state of the universe. "Nothing" can not exist. "Something" is the lowest energy state that the universe can have. There has always been "something" and never "nothing".
....you drank the koolaid.
First there was nothing. Then it exploded.
Correction: Before the beginning there was nothing. The nothing was everywhere itself, filling every possible probability. It was incredibly unlikely that nothing would explode, thus everything did so instantly as far as anyone can tell.
The multiverse theories werent intentionally thought up. A few people were contemplating some complex equations and it suddenly sprung out at them: these equations say we're living in a multiverse. Even they didnt believe it at first, but math doesnt lie.
The universe is, by definition, EVERYTHING. Therefore, there is no multiverse. There is an array of visible areas. TFTFY.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I thought there were already concise terms for it. The universe IS the multiverse / partitioned universe. The part that we are in is called observable universe.
Better known as 318230.
The cake many! It would make more sense the other way.
First there was everything. Then it changed.
Mostly random stuff.
Correction: Before the beginning there was nothing.
Actually, there wasn't any "before" the beginning . . . because the beginning created time itself . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I can haz credit for Everet-Wheeler Hypothesis?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
Rising health insurance prices were doing that anyway, with or without Obamacare. At least pre-existing conditions are covered now when people do get insurance.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I posted this comment. Not sure why this was modded -1; I was a bit snarky but I think it discusses a valid point.
High schoolers get (and some understand) F = ma, and that works (to a certain extent) in most engineering applications.
The problem is, F=ma doesn't cover all the bases. The above mentioned relativity for GPS satellites for instance. How many high schools are teaching relativity?
There is a huge disparity between what the cutting edge of our civilazation understands and what is actually being taught to the next generation. And that divide is growing, not shrinking. Relativity was posited as a theory over a century ago. How many people truly get it today, in 2014.
And to dismiss it as "the average high-schooler is an idiot" doesn't advance the civilization (yeah, I'm looking at you, DexterIsADog).
Actually, 4. Learn all about them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
Math lies like a dog.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
It's generally accepted that the Universe's history is best described by the Big Bang model, with General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory as the physical laws governing the underlying framework.
No no no. It's generally accepted that each one of these theories taken individually is the best currently known description within its particular domain. It is not generally accepted that you can just throw them together and get an accurate description of the fundamental nature of the universe! In fact, we know you can't do that because general relativity and quantum field theory are deeply incompatible with each other. People have been working for half a century to find a single consistent theory that can reproduce the predictions of both. They've made a lot of progress, but we're still a long way from having any confidence about what the true fundamental theory is.
The picture of eternal inflation described in this article is plausible based on what we know. But it's still very speculative. That's true of any discussion of cosmology. Our current knowledge is just way too limited to have any confidence about it.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
We accept the things like General and Special Relativity and the tweaks and add-on theories that came afterwards because they are the best theories we have for explaining what we see, and they haven't been dis-proven yet, at least not to the satisfaction of the scientific community.
But what if we are wrong? What if there is evidence we haven't seen that disproves the theories of the universe that we - meaning the general scientific consensus - agree are probably true?
Don't laugh, it happened to Newton's theories when it became possible to measure things that went very fast or which were very small.
In short, the "if this, then that" statement in the summary is not an "if" that we should take for granted.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
the universe where the Palin haters are intelligent enough to know that it was a comedienne impersonating Palin who said she could "see Russia from my house"
Sadly, most of the haters get their "news" from late-night comics and are generally clueless about the real world. THAT's how a governor of a state with record high approval ratings from BOTH Republicans AND Democrats in her state, who was only running for VICE PRESIDENT was made a joke while a guy WITH NO EXPERIENCE RUNNING ANYTHING and less than 2 years experience as a junior senator (a race he won, not by legitimate campaign, but by getting a friendly judge to unseal the divorce records of his opponent and publicizing those to drive him from the race) was promoted as the smartest and best-qualified person to run the nation. I bet you believe Obama was a "law professor" (hint: he was not, but his campaign encouraged a friendly press to say he was over-and-over again (he was only a lecturer on constitutional law related to community organizing))
and some people thought this was a bad idea
Conjecture and imagination heaped upon piles of conjecture and imagination .... leading to a "conclusion" that is "obvious" to the guy promoting the conjecture and imagination. Next, he will introduce us to his imaginary friend "Harvey", a tall invisible rabbit, whose existence is also "obvious"
Is there no end to the loads of perfumed manure that will be promoted around the internet under the theme of "science"? Can we PLEASE get back to studying and admiring the work of REAL scientists doing actual SCIENCE? You know, the sort that included EXPERIMENTS and DATA that validated (or invalidated) theories....
Why do we always try and segragate things like this? We seem to have some need to put everything in it's own little box. Atoms, molecules, planets, solar systems...
The definition of "Universe":
all existing matter and space considered as a whole; the cosmos.
So, if there is no need for the term "Multiverse" The universe contains it all. Our universe is just a tad more complicated than we had assumed.
You can't argue with idiots like Mashiki. He's the type of mental midget that's lied to himself so much that he no longer understands that the ACA is largely a product of the Heritage Foundation and conservative politicians back in the 1990's to counter Hillary's involvement in health care, and that the ACA has largely done what it's supposed to have done for the years it's been going in Massachusetts as whatever Romney called it there.
He hates it for one reason only, the same reason republicans have been running around for 6 years trying to burn down the entire country: Obama. Why are republicans against the PATRIOT Act and the NSA programs now, when they're the ones who wrote it and pushed for greater surveillance: Obama. Why are they against the Afghanistan war now, when they pushed for it instead of simply extraditing Bin Laden (which the Taliban said they would do as soon as the US handed them evidence he was behind 9/11): Obama.
The GOP and their teabagger fascist cult have only hatred of Obama, nothing else, for everything they do, and they don't give a damn how much damage they do to this country because of it.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
All you need to know about it is here. After listening to this, your understanding of cosmology won't be that much better, but you'll be happier.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Actually, the time we understand only existed after the beginning, before that, we do not know if time existed or not. But according to our definition of time, it had to of existed to some form or another, we just do not comprehend it well because time is relative ans constructed to our understanding of it.
In short, time is like a circle, no real beginning and no real end, only reference points placed on it by people trying to understand a concept of or with it.
Why are republicans against the PATRIOT Act and the NSA programs now, when they're the ones who wrote it and pushed for greater surveillance: Obama.
I agree that there are many partisan idiots, but both republicans and democrats, by and large, push for greater surveillance and the erosion of our liberties. Very, very, very few people on either side opposed the Patriot Act the first time around. Why? They knew the country (i.e. the idiots who make up the majority) was in a state of panic, and that they could get away with it. Now that people are less panicked about 9/11, we see more people voting it down whenever it comes up, but their hearts are almost never in the right place.
Math lies like a dog.
History lies prefer a burger.
Economics? All custard.
Anything else doesn't cut the mustard
That's the way I feel.
Maybe it's all surreal.
Entropy of all that's real.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If you took the time to read the article; Google: "dark matter" "vacuum energy"
and see where it takes you, it's an interesting ride.
FTA: "The ideas that you hear—multiple false vacua, the landscape, connections to quantum gravity, etc.—are ones that people have speculated upon in recent years. These are mostly driven by including connections to string theory, and they present a whole host of difficulties as well as a great many interesting avenues to investigate. I will not touch upon them here, but when you hear those words, this is the basic story that they all take for granted.""
They aren't taken for granted, One question of importance is if gravity is 'shared' between his "Multiverse's"; each verse weakening the force of gravity through it's sharing to the weak force we see in our verse?
By definition "nothing" cannot explode. If its doing anything, then it isnt "nothing".
Time is, AFAIK, the presence / state of change. How can time be created by the thing to which time will apply? If time doesnt exist, then "the beginning" wont randomly explode.
... that this is the best possible universe.
If Science and Religion turn out to be talking about the same thing in different ways c.f. "In my Father's House, there are many mansions..."
There's no mystery about that. The party that's in power always wants more power and the opposition always opposes it. In that the Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same. The teabaggers you're so unfond of are the only ones in the nation who want the government to have less power even when their guys win.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
How can you spot a liberal? When unable to relate to facts on an issue, they break down into insults and run off into wild directions while using ad-hom's.
Om, nomnomnom...
You can name something 'university' and have another university next to it. Why not the same with universes. Both words come from a Latin expression that meant something like 'turned into one' or maybe 'rolled into one'. A 'university' was a sort of guild as in a guild of students, or students and teachers. Universe was probably meant to imply 'the whole deal' all of existence when it was first applied, just as 'the world' suggested there was only one world. Now 'the world' is 'our world' as opposed to say Mars. 'The Universe' is 'our universe'. I think most people know what is meant by the word 'multiverse', or 'other universe' don't they? (Or do they? Hmmm.) Maybe the word 'cosmos' should be reserved for the whole deal, all of existence.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Rising health insurance prices were doing that anyway, with or without Obamacare.
Really? How odd that the number of uninsured was at a pretty much constant level. Now with the ACA, you have people who can't get insurance at all, have people who's policies have been fully cancelled and can't get insurance at all, and even more people who's rates have climbed to a point where they could afford insurance, they now no longer can.
I'm sure that you also believe that you can keep your insurance, and your doctor too...well...if you can find a doctor.
Om, nomnomnom...
What's this "we" shit, white man?
How can you spot a liberal? When unable to relate to facts on an issue, they break down into insults and run off into wild directions while using ad-hom's.
I'm not sure that particular Modus operandi is monopolised strictly by Liberals. I do agree with you though; ad hominen generally concedes the argument.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
If there were one thing that could be different about the US Constitution that would make it better - it would be a 4th branch of government that had limited and enumerated powers over the other 3 branches. This fourth branch of government would be drafted, at random from among taxpayers. They would only meet once a year and all they could do is have absolute veto power, with 2/3 majority over ANYTHING that has been decided by the other branches of government in the last 2 years.
Kind of a final sanity check, with teeth.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Was I the only one who mistook the headline for multiverse and universe apt-get sources?
For that, you'll have to make unintelligent people (the grand majority) intelligent. People can memorize facts, but actually understandings the 'why' is quite another matter.
I think the next greatest feat in physics will not be a new discovery, but just figuring out how to explain the current state of knowledge to a high school student. How can the field progress if only a handful of people actually understand the information we now possess?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying we should only pursue theories and bodies of knowledge if the average idiot can understand them?
I don't think so.
One interpretation of the OP's comment is essentially related to Feynman's famous quote: "I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it.". In other words, if the practitioners don't take the time to be able to explain their work to laymen, they are moving too fast even for their own good.
Another interpretation is this: we are all constantly asked to take action (e.g., vote) on questions that depend more or less on information that many, even the majority, not only don't understand, but have utterly no clue or even intuition about. Even in a representative democracy (to stick with the voting example), we need enough understanding to vet our representatives. The minimum requirements for education need to be not just a little higher, but a lot higher than they are. And a lot of what's missing could be addressed by the OP's proposal.
Does one of the articles in the link vomit summary explain? I am not going to bother clicking on half a dozen links to figure out what the hell the summary is talking about.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
How can the field progress if only a handful of people actually understand the information we now possess?
It's much more than a handful of people. It'd be thousands. Every 4th year or postgraduate theoretical physics student has absorbed quite a bit of it, all of General Relativity and QM - those theories are quite worked through, plus Quantum Field Theory, string theory and particle physics.
Because university means "a group of people acting as one body", while universe means "everything". The root word meaning "by one" was used in the later case to mean an entire revolution of time.
Better terminology for this theory would be "islands of causality". But scientists tend to be shit at naming things so instead they will overload a sadly overused term instead.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
i'm so stoned this is the perfect article for me
Think I followed TFA correctly though my physics is weak.
It suggests there are seperated observable regions in one 4 space universe.
That's not my understanding of the multiverse proposal.
My understanding is that a multiverse consists of seperate universes not simply seperate regions within the same one.
Though I know next to nothing about such things.
Mixing terminology confuses and the subject is confusing enough without doing that :)
My 2c.
If you accept those things, then its just as logical that the universe is a huge cat hairball coughed up by the Great Pussycat, but we just cant see whats behind the lil teeny fur hair of it we inhabit.
Dont forget the 'Tiny Purring Cat' theory (TPC) that also replaces 'String Theory' and fits much much better with whats been observed.
I have a 'theory' about the origin system of all these so called 'theories' - I call it TSIOTA - "They squirt it out their ass" 'theory'.
It is funny, but that theory is the only valid one amongst them.
And in some universe they would resent that because the politicians there do their jobs
In all the universe(s) in the multiverse scenario they do share something similar -
1. Empty space
2. Stars
3. Gravity
4. Black holes
5. Dark matters ...
..
..
..
... scumbag politicians
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
does it seem a bit insane to give universal postulates too much credence when we have such a limited view of the place?
Yes, but even more to the point, theories that are untestable are not science, they are science fiction.
If there's an alternate universe that doesn't interact with ours in any manner, by definition, it is out of the realm of science. If there is interaction of sorts, the parallel universes are suddenly part of our universe, again, by definition.
By the same token, speculating about the goings-on inside the event horizon of a black hole is not science as such theories cannot possibly be tested. In fact, we can never even detect the formation of a black hole because of time dilation, so in a very real sense, black holes cannot possibly exist from the point of view of science.
Such speculation has often proved useful—remember antimatter—but it remains speculation until there are observable consequences. I view dark matter and dark energy theories with great suspicion, but they at least are firmly grounded to observed phenomena.
... you just have to enable it in /etc/apt/sources.list
otherwise there must be a universe where someone has discovered a way to communicate with all the other universes, and I'm still waiting to hear from them.
cut the muster, not mustard.
Tea-leaf discovers East India Company
Just think! If we have an infinite multiverse then you exist an infinite number of times in every conceivable state of existance. For example there may be thousands of universes that are identical to ours in which your wisdom tooth is killing you.
-- Douglas Adams
Correction: It was incredibly unlikely that nothing would turn into something, thus it did so instantly as far as anyone can tell.
The ancient Greeks had this system - it's called Sortition, or drawing of lots - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
The idea was that they didn't even vote, they just picked citizens at random for various committees, similar to how a jury is chosen.
Better terminology for this theory would be "islands of causality". But scientists tend to be shit at naming things so instead they will overload a sadly overused term instead.
While it would certainly be a better technical description, many people might have difficulty understanding the expression "islands of causality." The term "universe" is more widely understood by the general populace, and hence the expression "multiple universes," or "multiverse" if you will, may be more easily understood by a broader audience.
Write failed: Broken pipe
the most exciting consequence of this is that mankind could possibly live forever under this scenario.
That means I personally could possibly live forever.
But of course the article does not mention that.
And of course I will be the only person on this thread mentioning this.
In fact I will be the only person in the world who will put that conclusion to words.
Why is that? Why are you animals all so pattern-bound, so stuck in your rut that you cannot speak ideas for which you have not been prepped?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
At first it was too hot to bother to become something, then it cooled off, got an education and made something out of itself.
If we accept that Einsteinian universe, we accept that it's limited, finite, and had a beginning. Thus, we accept that it HAS A BEGINNER. Never mind these other places. What do we do about the (obvious) God who began THIS universe? Or do we use this wholly unproven notion as yet another excuse to ignore our Creator?
Cranky educator.
I've often thought about the possibilities in what existed pre the big bang. Is it entirely possible that our universe is, in itself, the result of the output from a black hole from another universe? This also implies that there are other universes out there that are born from our universe.
If the "tired light hypothesis" was true, and the "observable" universe was actually much older than 14 billion years, if could be possible for a system at the edge of what we observe to take information it has observed from further way and repeat it in our direction. Thus, even if photons from further way could not make it to us, in theory information could -- potentially from a distributed internet spanning endless quadrillions of light years of space and time. Thus the idea of a cosmological horizon is incomplete:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_horizon
By the way, Hugh Everett's life is another example of how poorly academia often rewards thinking outside the box: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett
Too bad he did not know how to escape "The Pleasure Trap" (which can be hard under stress):
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Sci-fi author James P. Hogan used the Many Worlds Interpretation is some of his sci-fi novels from around the 1980s and 1990s (not sure exactly when the first was). Hogan often championed the academic underdog, arguing they should get a fairer hearing, whether they were right or not..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Universe_(physics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_Arp
http://www.thesunisiron.com/
Semmelweis is another example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis
One can see more extreme examples in times now despised enough to admit of them like Deutsche Physik or Lysenkoism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Something to think about for the modern day (a book recommend by JP Hogan):
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
A different-but-related take on that by Freeman Dyson:
http://edge.org/conversation/heretical-thoughts-about-science-and-society
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What that web page describes is simply regions of space that can't communicate due to FTL inflation, and that might or might not have somewhat different fundamental constants. The claim the web page adds is that inflation may be stopping at different times in different regions.
The multiverse in quantum mechanics means something entirely different.
Actually, physicists just have a propensity for ignoring techniques and terminology in other fields and rolling their own. There is little scientific content in that article that an engineer wouldn't understand if it were translated into more familiar terms. Of course, an engineer would likely call the whole thing a collection of wild, unproven speculations anyway and would simply ignore it.
Yep, that's right, all health insurance problems began with the ACA, nothing preceding it could possibly have any influence because that would contradict your partial narrative.
There is an interesting theory what the big bang actually is or is not by Sir Roger Penrose. As with my little brain it is difficult to comprehand all that and even more difficult to elaborate on the subject in any meaningful way but it seems to me that Sir Roger found a mathematical way to explain away a singularity of bing bang by doing few tansformations which are simple and basic so I do not bother explaiing them here. this would contradict the parent's post somewhat or maybe not. In any case this is not the reason to makr it as a troll.
No. You're thinking of Obamabots, who by this point are as far from being liberals as their drone bombing, benefit cutting Dear Leader.
ad hominims *WIN* every argument.
you dick.
what good is being able to be covered for a pre existing condition if I cant afford to buy the damn insurance anyway??
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
"Relativity was posited as a theory over a century ago. How many people truly get it today, in 2014."
As a fraction of the population, I suspect it's about the same as it was then. It's just too counter-intuitive to us slow pokes at less than 1% of c, and the math needed to get past that is beyond most people. I've had math up through diffy-Q, and I can barely manage it. I can get the right answers to textbook questions, but as to really understanding at a deep level what is going on, no.
If you really think that the tea party are the fascists, I dont think you know what the word means. Being anti big government is the exact opposite. And if you honestly believe it is only our "hatred for obama" that is pushing you, you need to take the blinders off. There were many many people myself included who hated everything bush was doing and see no change in what obama is doing from that standpoint.
it really is sad meglon that you believe the stuff you are saying.
He hates it for one reason only, the same reason republicans have been running around for 6 years trying to burn down the entire country: Obama.
This is simply not true. Did we say that the only reason democrats were against it in 2003 was because they hate bush?
Why are republicans against the PATRIOT Act and the NSA programs now, when they're the ones who wrote it and pushed for greater surveillance: Obama.
The mainstream republicans are NOT against the NSA and patriot act, the tea party and the new class are the ones who are against it, It is us who were in high school when it was written who now are old enough to have a voice speaking out
Why are they against the Afghanistan war now, when they pushed for it instead of simply extraditing Bin Laden (which the Taliban said they would do as soon as the US handed them evidence he was behind 9/11): Obama.
That is completely retarded, once again it is the younger generation who now has a voice. The ones who were in high school were mostly against the wars from the start, now that they are being heard you lump them all together. If you ask mccain or romney or the rest of the older republicans they still want the war. But I dont expect you to figure that out in your hate filled, misplaced rant
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
On related news: the earth is round,
round like a pancake.
PS, the acticle starts nice, and simple, and then it introduces something called vacuum energy, which is a catastrophe in current observervations of the real world.
Yup. I think you were being sarcastic but you actually hit that one out of the park. You see, the old system had problems but it was opt-in. Now that it is mandated, all the problems fall on the mandate because we cannot opt-out. Insurance is a gamble no matter what. Do not force us to play with stacked rules or you will have a lonely game.
It's been a theorised consequence of inflation and later string theory. This article would be news if it offered any inclination on how to REACH those parralell worlds as the theories that postulate them also deem them forever inaccessible from each other.
Sure, the Obamabots stopped protesting Bush's abuses of power when they became Obama's. But on what planet have the Republicans or teabaggers, aside from the Paul's, complained about NSA spying, murder-by-drone, or the NDAA? They'd rather go on (and on and on) about the nonscandales of the IRS or Bengahzi.
Republicans and the tea party are not remotely the same thing. They simply overlap at the moment as both oppose increase governmental power under Obama. Will they all remain true to their stated goals when a power-hungry Republican is in office? Not a chance but I expect a significant portion of those who actually understood and believed in the impetus behind the tea party will.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Actually, many people had fake health insurance. A careful read would show that for all practical purposes the 'coverage' was pre-cancelled should they have had any expensive medical issue (and these days, most medical issues are expensive). When ACA passed, the insurance companies cancelled those policies since they might have actually had to pay for something otherwise.
No, they just want the government to do less for the general welfare except for theirs. They want the government to keep it's grimy hands off of their medicaid.
I am more interested in extra dimensional universes. I was hoping this article was about that.
weed for those in need
Really?. Oh well, at least you didn't fall for the sig.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Paul, referring to Disciplined Minds on Slashdot is like admitting that you are a predator alien. We're going to have to be much more clever than that if we want to convince people to question their ideologies. The subconscious will not cede its control unless you offer it something in return. The best way to deconstruct the subconscious is to study branding and market research. Learn about what happens when people buy stuff, and compare that to what people do when they try to evaluate claims about scientific models with limited information.
See my thread: http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14667
Then it wasnt nothing. Only something that exists can undergo change or take action; action requires an actor.
... sort of like intellectual masturbation.
To serve only self is the ultimate slavery.
Heh, if you think politics is about issues, you really haven't been paying attention. It's first, last, always, and only about power. If you ever manage to understand that, you'll be flying the tea party flag too. Until it inevitably becomes as corrupt as every other political group anyway.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
I vote for the observable universe to be named the falsifiable universe, the notion of the universe that experimental physicists inhabit in mind and body.
I've long regarded the unobservable universe as akin to an analytic continuation.
Analytic continuation
Far from being useless, these are tremendously useful in suggesting new ways to approach the mathematics of the original function.
So we have two things here: the falsifiable universe, and its intellectually stimulating analytic continuation.
If you're burning through chalk and pencils on an exponent growth curve, you'll soon give the analytic continuation some terse symbols, such as i and by the human psychology of oft-masterbated terse symbols, you'll come to regard it as being as real as any other symbol dripping down from the Matrix.
If you're lucky, at some point the unobservables all cancel out, and you're left with an insight into the falsifiable universe, arrived at through a mathematical worm hole. Mathematics folds in on itself in mysterious ways, no quantum particles required, so far as I've been able to tell.
The first requirement of a falsifiable universe is the state of being casually connected. If the falsification process is embedded in the falsifiable universe, there are additional requirements: you're dealing at least with a self-falsifiable universe. Falsification, it turns out, itself sits pretty far up the food chain.
Here's a good gig. Posit some primitive element amenable to nearly limitless analytic continuation, such that it can never be shown that there does not exist a continuation capable of collapsing back through some miracle of symbolic reduction to a testable statement about the falsifiable universe.
Congratulations. You have now made it permanently impossible to tell whether you're doing physics or not. It's important that the math is in some way highly constrained and very difficult, or it becomes immediately obvious that the playground exceeds the project.
If the constraints are difficult enough that you can tell the difference between the really smart people and the really, really smart people, and an Ed Witten or two comes along from time to time to humiliate the really, really smart people you've at least got the foundations in place for a credible intellectual discipline. If not physics, at least it's a sport.
It's just too bad that most of the people doing quantum-cosmic analytic continuation pass themselves off as physicists. Different rules, different discipline, whether or not they share the first twenty years of the same education. You can tell there's a lot of strain over this because the string people mutter the word "testable" as often as Microsoft mutters the word "innovation"—and to equal effect.
If we had a nice standard of elegance E and a proven theorem stating that all theories of physics more elegant than e are necessarily true, we could mend the house.
But we haven't yet written down the most surpassingly elegant equation that's actually false as witnessed in the falsifiable universe. Without an objective decision point, it's just a bunch of exceedingly smart guys refusing to kill their darlings.
I'll give you the epitome, the highest possible scientific wisdom there is : I don't know.
>Are you a religious nutter?
No.
I'm the opposite of a religious nutter. The asinine counter question by asking me the exact same I suspected he is, just show shallow rhetoric or better the lack of it.
It's extremely poor discussion style. The fact that you get up modded for such an empty post makes me beyond being sad.
He stated a religious straw man argument, I called him out by asking (the virtue of scientific conduct) and I get asked if I am a religious nutter. On slashdot???
If that is the sad state of slashdot I give up hope for mankind.
Forgive me, I am off weeping.
There's no standard definition for the term "multiverse", because it's not a term that corresponds to any established physical theory. The theory described in the article has a good claim to the term multiverse, because it's much more than just separate regions.
The region of the universe we're in almost certainly extends beyond the limits that we observe, so there are already "separated observable regions" in the universe we know. The article is talking about a scenario in which multiple Big Bangs occur, so each region is not just separated by distance but also by the nature of the space in that region - how much it has inflated, how fast it is inflating. Each such inflating region is possibly also distinguished by different laws of physics in that region. There would also be non-inflating regions which would have properties different from anything we're familiar with.
Back when other galaxies were first discovered, they were originally referred to as "island universes". This eventually changed to "galaxy" as our understanding of the extent of the universe shifted. If the theory in the article were somehow confirmed (difficult!) then in future, we might indeed refer to that larger space as just "the Universe", and refer to the inflating bubble we're in as something less all-encompassing than "the Universe". For now, though, it would be very confusing if we started referring to speculative constructs way beyond our ability to observe as "the Universe". Multiverse is as good as a term as any.
It's already there. At the very beginning it seemed like it just might have been grass roots, but if it ever really was it got co-opted some time ago. It's just another faction of the old party. Further, it seems to actually represent the same people as the old party but does so even more blatantly and makes less concessions to everyone else than ever before.
The teabaggers you're so unfond of are the only ones in the nation who want the government to have less power even when their guys win.
Seriously?!? Do you really actually believe this? Really? Your naivety apparently knows no bounds. All I can say is...Wow!
Republicans and the tea party are not remotely the same thing. They simply overlap at the moment as both oppose increase governmental power under Obama. Will they all remain true to their stated goals when a power-hungry Republican is in office? Not a chance but I expect a significant portion of those who actually understood and believed in the impetus behind the tea party will.
I will believe this when I actually see it. I will not be holding my breath waiting for it to happen, though, because I don't think I could wait that long.
what good is being able to be covered for a pre existing condition if I cant afford to buy the damn insurance anyway??
If I recall correctly, those who are in lower income brackets will have the insurance premiums subsidized by the government. Or are you one of those people who insist on your medical services being completely free (i.e., someone else pays for them)? Look, you live in this country too. What are you willing to pay in order to have things like doctors, nurses, hospitals, level I trauma centers, state-of-the-art medical research labs, etc.? You do realize that these things cost money, right? So, what are you willing to pay for them?
And in the parallel Universe with President Sarah Palin the U.S. unemployment rate is now 4%, the U.S. economy is going gangbusters, the poor became richer instead of poorer as they have under Obama, income inequality became less as it did under Reagan, NSA collecting data on millions of U.S. citizens was ended by President Palin as being obviously unconstitutional, and the U.S. debt grew at a much smaller rate.
Uh, yeah. 'Cause I've never seen a conservative do that, no sir, not once.
What?
While we're throwing around reading lists, I recommend "Richard Feynman: A Life In Science" by John and Mary Gribbin. It goes into Feynman's refusal to directly challenge "big bang" (because it wasn't his specialty), and the lectures on edge data and flat earth that he would launch into when asked that question. It also goes into some technical issues involving his "reverse wave hypothesis" where it could actually be the limit of the reverse wave to propagate (in the future) that stops the photon being emitted unless it can find a target within ~14B years.
People think that skepticism is flamebait, wow, they're exceptional anti-scientific for people who probably think they're defending science.
There is really no reason to attach strong claims to the meaning of photons being shifted, without sending a precise, well-understood photon source into space, launching some uniform photons some great distance, and then receiving them at the other end. Then we would have some experimental data. As it is, we have photons that don't match the conditions in the lab, and a hypothesis that claims a reason; but it would require the Universe to be bounded in time right at the edge of the data we can collect, and even for the laws of physics to have been different in the past. They couldn't even fit the data, so they change the laws of physics over time to massage it into place. Maybe their answer is correct; but shouldn't they at least have an experiment that shows some more parts of this are true?
It is not like the radiation belts were right where they predicted, and the edge of the solar system is as predicted. The largest scales we're doing measurements of, the local neighborhood is not as predicted. If we can predict inside the atom to a bazillion decimal places, but we can't even get the cosmic neighborhood correct, how accurate are we likely to be 14B years with no experiment?
If the "tired light hypothesis" was true, and the "observable" universe was actually much older than 14 billion years, if could be possible for a system at the edge of what we observe to take information it has observed from further way and repeat it in our direction. Thus, even if photons from further way could not make it to us, in theory information could -- potentially from a distributed internet spanning endless quadrillions of light years of space and time.
Sure, that's a great idea for an experiment: In a reflection, not all of the light actually bounces off the surface; some small percent of it the old photon is absorbed, and a new photon emitted to replace it. Reflection isn't entirely passive.
If we find a distant galaxy via a gravity lens, what percent of those photons are reflected photons that were re-emitted? How long would the telescope be running before we could find one? And, do we have any useful measurements to do if we did find one, or do we just know too little about how light looks over a long distance to make use of it?
Perhaps quantum computing will increase our knowledge of data storage in photons enough so that we can do some sort of useful measurement even if we did isolate a 25B year old reflection.
:-)
AC wrote: "Paul, referring to Disciplined Minds on Slashdot is like admitting that you are a predator alien. We're going to have to be much more clever than that if we want to convince people to question their ideologies. The subconscious will not cede its control unless you offer it something in return. The best way to deconstruct the subconscious is to study branding and market research. Learn about what happens when people buy stuff, and compare that to what people do when they try to evaluate claims about scientific models with limited information.
See my thread: http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14667 "
First, I probably can't in general disagree with your points on branding, advertising, purchasing, etc. Even if specific cases for specific individuals may differ, as in some people are more analytical than others (sadly sometimes meaning perhaps they are more easily bamboozled by "facts"?), some people may be in a stage of life looking for a new idea to try or an explanation for a past difficulty, etc.. I can wonder if that person to be so good at selling such ideas would be me though? But yes, in general, you are probably right. I liked the personal development diagrams in that thread (having only looked through the first page of 11 in the thread, need to read more later). Reminds me of one I've seen elsewhere with eight stages or so but generally overlapping.And I liked the line in Megamind where he says the difference between a villain and a supervilian (or by extension amateur and professional) is ... "presentation". "-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy2zB8bLSpk
The first ten episodes of the popular "Downton Abbey" provides examples of workers identifying with the system around them and not seeing much hope for change (although a war shows up and some things do start to change, and some do see potential for change). James P. Hogan echoes similar themes in Voyage from Yesteryear, as people cling to the old scarcity-based social hierarchies even when confronted with abundance. Historian Howard Zinn's take on that: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
BTW, you might also like some other quotes I've collected here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
Also related (there are better links I've posted before, these are just top Google matches):
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/26/peer-review-as-censorship/
http://landshape.org/enm/peer-censorship-and-scientific-fraud/
One thing Einstein got very right was the need to improve our ways of thinking given our new technological powers:
http://anwot.org/
I'd also agree we could use better communications systems to discuss science and reason together about it. My wife and I have taken some steps towards such things in terms of making free and open source software, but no big successes so far. This web page has a video related to a Kickstarter campaign I thought about doing to further those efforts a couple years ago, but I did not proceed with it (taking work doing more conventional stuff instead for sadly short-term reasons): http://twirlip.com/
At least I still have some time now and then to advocate for a Basic Income as at least one way someday to give people more intellectual freedom (among other things). But even that is a tough sell, although I am glad
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Wow, that's a cliché I haven't seen expressed in a while. "Of course, engineers could understand it, if only those eggheads would stop their babblin' and talk like folks who work for a living."
That's ridiculous. Physics is largely advanced mathematics that takes more than the practical knowledge of the average engineer.
Your claim makes you sound pretty ignorant. So, no wonder you would "ignore" it.
I keep telling people the Bengahzi issue is the CIA's fault, out of control once again and not paying attention. Sucks for Obama was in office when it blew, the CIA has a long history of screw-up completely independent of whomever is in office.
The only universe that concerns us is this one. The one God created 6,000 years ago. Watch Kent Hovinds videos for information on how evolution is scientifically impossible.
CHRISTIAN, n.
One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
- The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce
Obama
The math used by many engineers is basically the same math used by physicists: linear algebra, ODEs, PDEs, FFTs, transform methods, moments, expansions, perturbation methods, tensors, etc.
Well, you certainly are ignorant.
If they didn't understand "islands of causality", why do you think they "understand" the expression multiverse? Or, rather, what do you think they understand from the expression ?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Did anyone see this and immediately think of the Alcubierre drive warp bubble graphic?
Except it seems the majority of tea-partiers still want the government to have more power in your private life in line with their religious choices.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
You may enlighten yourself with a lecture on the worlds most ancient description of creation.
Dr Richard Thompson: Big Bang or the Vedic conception of the universe
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ueQ-gBYkbis&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DueQ-gBYkbis
Which is exactly what you'd expect to see when your only view of them is coming filtered through a heavily left-leaning press.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
actually im the opposite in thought. I dont want the government subsidizing the costs. I think the ACA is a joke, the worst piece of legislation pushed through since the patriot act
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Then you have the new breeds
(of Republicans)
, you have the rand pauls and ted cruzs, the small government anti establishment types.
The entire Republican party was like that before Reagan became president. Reagan turned them into a bunch of religious lunatics hell bent on overspending to keep the military budget inflated.
Learn something new.
Did we say that the only reason democrats were against it in 2003 was because they hate bush?
Bush, however, wasn't black.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
"Why when I talk about belief, why do you always assume I'm talking about God?"
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Reminds me of the infinite improbability drive.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning in this way: If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!
He did this and was rather startled when he managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator. He was even more startled when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he was lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had realized that one thing they couldn't stand was a smart-ass.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4658365&cid=45929307
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Is it just me, or did this guy magically appear with multiverse pictures in the middle of the article? I was following him, talking about the universe, and then BAM! just like that, multiverse is real! all hail our matrix terminator simulation overlords!
What's "heat me" supposed to mean?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
You're just trolling... again.
Well, rock on. Don't let it bother you that I don't reply.
But ask yourself... why do you run into assholes all day long? It's probably because *you're* the asshole.
High schoolers get (and some understand) F = ma... ...and to dismiss it as "the average high-schooler is an idiot" doesn't advance the civilization (yeah, I'm looking at you, DexterIsADog).
Wow, did you really write that, AC? You think only "some" high school students in physics class understand that force equals mass times acceleration?
You must think they're stupider than I do!
Big bang is an explosion of space so however the matter is distributed it's one big bang with one emergent 4 space with all the stuff in it.
There may or may not be other 4 spaces or indeed n-spaces emergent from other big bangs - they would be other universes - present in a hypothesised multiverse.
TFA describes multiple regions. That inflation may not be constant across our entire universe does not make these regions seperate universes. They're present within the same 4 space.
I don't think the term multiverse should be used in the context of the scenario described in the article. Find another term.
My 2c.
Wow. Freeman Dyson. Released books right between when Science Fiction, as written book literature, became nearly extinct, and when TV jumped onto the "Sci-Fi" bandwagon. A dry period indeed. When libraries were throwing into the recycle bins books like first editions of Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" ('Scuse me while i hold back the tears!). Then, suddenly, we got a whole new cadre of "Sci-Fi" fans.. (Isaac who?") from deeply reflective series like "Duck Rogers in the 25th century", and OMFG "Battlestore Galactica". and suddenly all these young folks were combing the recycle bins for those Isaac Asimov first editions. Er.. not. That was us older folks. ;-(.. "Isaac who?" "what you want books for anyways? The tubes got 'neat' stuff on it now... Man you should watch "V"
That's what I am reminded of when I think of Freeman Dyson...
Trouble understanding the math I mentiond?
Don't worry, nothing idiots like you do "bothers" me.
There's a universe out there where Obama is president
Actually, it's pretty much also the exact view you get of them if you can choke your way through their own poorly written propaganda releases.