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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.
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.
Or the one about the guy talking to Himself and things started existing.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
In none of them is a god. Just in none of them is an actual tooth fairy stealing lost teeth for a coin.
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.
It'd explain wave particle duality...
Rendering optimisations.
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.
I mean, I can handle the concept... so long as there's just ONE multiverse.
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.
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.
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.
If we didn't think there was a multiverse, we would be living in that universe instead.
Thirty four characters live here.
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.
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!
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.
> You imply the Big Bang is generaly accepted nowadays because Koch brothers managed to make money of it?
Indeed. I had to put my helmet on just to consider that one.
My head still might explode.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
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 Big Bang - Because the universe appears to be expanding now, it must have been expanding always, since the beginning. Before the Big Bang, there was nothing and boom, out of nothing came everything.
Not to say I have a better theory, but I would not be the least bit surprised if one of those two things I've been told about the big bang were proven wrong. You suggest we should be believers in this everything from nothing theory without the least bit of skepticism?
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.
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.
"God"=="supernatural"=="not allowed by physical (natural) law." All of the multiverses are supposedly governed by physical law.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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.
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)
Actually there is a universe with tooth fairies trading teeth for coins unless of course they can't make change, then the pliers come out. In the same part of the multiverse there are numerous gods and to stand outside and declare that you're an atheist is inviting a lightning strike so you better be made out of clay to last as an atheist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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...
"God"=="supernatural"=="not allowed by physical (natural) law."
Where did you get that definition? Millennia ago, when gods started to form in people's minds, physical (natural) law was not exactly a hot topic. Gods were defined as [nearly] omnipotent beings who did things. At no time a god (except FSM, perhaps) was claimed to be supernatural.
As matter of scientific truth, an existing god would have to be natural, such as allowed (in a certain form) by physical laws of the Universe where he is present in that form. It's simply by definition. The god may deform the physics of the area by him existing, but still that would be natural. We have plenty of places in this Universe that are ruled by different (from Earth) physics (inside a black hole, or a neutron star, etc.)
Your comment is moderated 2, on a more intelligent 0 statement. I will explain. Koch brothers energy company makes money selling fossil fuels, Global Warning activism is a threat to that, therefore large amount of money are used as reality distortion field to suppress scientifically respectable Global Warming hypotheses. So think analogously with Big Bang replacing Global Warming.
Curiously, the author of non-consensus "The Big Bang Never Happened", Eric Lerner, has his own fusion energy research company. He put his effort where his mouth is. lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com
"God"=="supernatural"=="not allowed by physical (natural) law." All of the multiverses are supposedly governed by physical law.
Nothing in natural law (i.e. physics) forbids the existence of something that does not follow natural law. It does forbid something natural (or possessing natural qualities) from not following natural law (insofar as it possesses such quantities), but that does not mean something supernatural cannot exist.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
"God"=="supernatural"=="not allowed by physical (natural) law."
Ah... argument by definition you just made up. That's not the empiricist way... more like a theologian's.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
What's this "we" shit, white man?
Your comment is moderated 2, on a more intelligent 0 statement. I will explain. Koch brothers energy company makes money selling fossil fuels, Global Warning activism is a threat to that, therefore large amount of money are used as reality distortion field to suppress scientifically respectable Global Warming hypotheses. So think analogously with Big Bang replacing Global Warming.
Curiously, the author of non-consensus "The Big Bang Never Happened", Eric Lerner, has his own fusion energy research company. He put his effort where his mouth is. lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com
My comment is actually a question asking for some clarifications. Rationale - the original comment (with my emphasis):
If the Koch brothers find out a way to make money out of SOMETHING ELSE ...
may be interpreted as suggesting that Koch brothers make money on the base of Big Bang.
An ambiguity I wanted clarified and, if no metaphor/forced analogy was involved, I was curious about how.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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"?
We have plenty of places in this Universe that are ruled by different (from Earth) physics (inside a black hole, or a neutron star, etc.)
No, they are the same physics. The effects (time dilation, etc) are simply more prominent because the inputs (mass density, etc) are at such high extremes.
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.
If something does not follow "natural law," then all that means is that we don't fully understand natural law.
No, it says that the cardinality of the sets of trials that meet those outcomes is the same. There's a difference between the two, which basically only comes up in probability at infinity.
It's the same difference as the one that states that the probability of choosing any real number at random is 0, even though obviously if you're choosing a real number at random one of them must come up.
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
Two of those are likely, but the tooth fairy one actually breaks laws of physics. There is no reason to believe that multiverses can have contradictory of inconsistent physics, though the parameters of those physics may be different.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
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
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 !
Stealing teeth does not violate the laws of physics. And calling the thief "tooth fairy" obviously doesn't, either.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Nice sig, bro. Yet, there is a Latin grammar error in it. It should be "cogito igitur comedam pizzam", "pizza" being of feminine word gender and being used in the accusative.
TFTFY.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Wrong. Observations show that the universe is expanding since the time it got transparent (we can't see what happened before). We know from our observations that the universe was much smaller back then.
Moreover when the big bang theory was first hypothesized, they just took the most successful theory of the large scale structure of the universe, General Relativity, and looked at what it said. It said that there must have been a singularity at the beginning.
However that's not exactly what we consider as the big bang theory nowadays. That's because we have observations which are not well explained with the original model, and we are fairly certain that General Relativity will break down before we reach the singularity.
The first point is that the universe is much more homogeneous than could be explained by a simple GR expansion model. The hypothesis (which is generally accepted, but is far less certain than what happened later) is that there was a phase of accelerated expansion ("inflation") close to the beginning of the universe, driven by a "inflaton field". It is this inflationatory phase which would create the many universes (well, there are several different theories predicting several universes, but the others are not connected with big bang, and still very controversal).
The second point is reflected in that big bang theory as we understand it today only explains what happened as soon as General Relativiy was valid. What happened before is a subject of Quantum Gravitation, of which we don't yet have an established theory. Some theories for example say that the big bang was actually a "big bounce", that is, a collapsing universe had its collapse halted by quantum effects, which caused the contraction to reverse into an expansion.
However, the big bang is still generally considered the beginning of time, however now in the sense that the whole concept of "time" breaks down when quantum gravity effects dominate (that is, time is hypothesised as not being a fundamental property of our world, but an emergent one).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Tea-leaf discovers East India Company
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.
Sorry, I should have been more clear and ruled out your technicality. The physics we have studied (in black holes, etc) correlate with the physics we observe on earth. I didn't mean to say that all of the laws of physics are different, only those that we have studied. I meant physics in the sense of what we have recorded in the field of physics, similar to how most people when referring to biology are in fact referring to earthly biology. For instance, most people would say that water is a requirement of life, but it's technically only a requirement of life we have observed.
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.
The belief that such interaction does not occur does not rule out the possibility that such interaction may be possible given certain circumstances.
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.
Direct interaction with a system is not the exclusive means available for testing a system. Mathematics is especially useful in such scientific pursuits. You appear to confusing science with engineering.
Write failed: Broken pipe
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
4. the coin explodes in the air
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.
That I agree with.
That depends on what those theories say about hawking radiation. Any theory that makes predictions about hawking radiation could in principle be verified. Though in practice verifying the theory could turn out to be very difficult.
We have more or less directly observed the gravity of black holes. There are observations of stars orbiting a black hole in this very galaxy. And there are sufficient observations that the mass of that black hole has been computed as well. This got me wondering though. Is the effect of gravity instantaneous, or is it limited by c? If it is instantaneous, that seems to contradict general relativity and causality. But if it is limited by c, then how can a black hole have gravity?
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Well, that's one possible metaphysical assumption.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
It'd explain wave particle duality...
Rendering optimisations.
That thought occurred to me some years ago. Whoever created the simulation must have realized continuous matter couldn't be simulated. And the duality is really just a very clever hack to emulate continuous matter.
But if the universe is simulated, would our experience be any different in case the entire state of the simulation was cloned and two parallel instances would continue to produce identical results? And would we feel anything in case one of them were turned off?
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
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.
What definition there is made up? Anybody that capitalises "God" believes that it is a supernatural being.
it might indeed be testable, the other "universes" may have left patterns in ours when they were co-mingled. Analysis of the cosmic ray background might be a possible means
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.
Physics and other other empirical sciences tell us about things within their sphere, they do not speak of things outside of those domains. They are based entirely on observation - something that is, by definition unobservable such as a deity, or other universes, for that matter, can't be proven OR disproven by science, which relies on observation.
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"?
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.
Well, what if we distinguish theories that have *no* untestable predictions from theories that have *some* untestable predictions?
Suppose some theory explains the universe better than any other we've attempted, and which over time has resisted numerous skillful attempts at disproving. So far as we can tell, all of the theory's testable predictions hold. Now suppose that theory ALSO makes predictions that can't be empirically verified. This situation, if it occurred, would blur the lines between verifiable and non-verifiable predictions. We can't *observe* the thing predicted, but other evidence confirming the theory could be construed as confirming its otherwise unverifiable implications.
That said, I think this hypothetical scenario certainly outstrips the current situation with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, although if we ever develop a theory of everything we might be confronted with a situation like that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Scientists are not so naive as to simply think "it is expanding now, therefore it has always been expanding." The main reasons why we think there was a big bang are (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#Observational_evidence):
1) The universe is not just expanding, it's expanding in such a way that the relationship between distance and speed matches up neatly along smooth curves.
2) We can see (in microwave telescopes) the cosmic background radiation just where it should be, at just the frequency that was predicted if there had been a big bang (note the prediction was made in 1948, but the microwaves were not measured until 1965).
3) We can see gas clouds in the far distance (12 billion light years), which we see as they appeared 12 billion years ago, which are made of hydrogen and helium in the proportions that we expect would have been made in the big bang, and without the heavier elements that we think would not have been made in a big bang, and there is no other theory that has been able to explain the proportions of the light elements.
4) The way galaxies and quasars are distributed and the way they appear to have developed over time matches what we think would have happened if there had been a big bang (and rules out other ideas such as a steady-state universe).
You also asked:
You suggest we should be believers in this everything from nothing theory without the least bit of skepticism?
No scientist would suggest that you believe any theory without skepticism. Certainly, be skeptical! But skepticism is not the same as refusing to accept an idea just because it sounds far-fetched. If someone does come up with a better theory (where "better" = "makes predictions that match what we actually observe more closely and more efficiently than other theories"), then by all means, out with the old theory and in with the new. And it's certainly fine to attempt to poke holes in the current theory -- indeed, there is surely a Nobel Prize waiting for the person who proves that there was no big bang! But poking holes in the theory has to be done by either finding out that the theory contains contradictions, or finding that it fails to explain something that we can see happens in reality. One doesn't get the Nobel Prize for saying "that doesn't sound right."
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 article is discussing a consequence of some of the most well-established scientific models in existence: general relativity, quantum field theory, and the Big Bang cosmological model. That knowledge is what allowed the computer you're using to be built, and what allows GPS satellites to work. Those models make predictions which have been tested over and over and found to be accurate. The article is describing another prediction of those models. Your argument from incredulity (a logical fallacy) is nothing but a reflection of your own ignorance.
Maybe in some universes coins are long cylinders and landing on the side is more likely, balancing out the possibilities.
That still doesn't make sense to me. I get that some particles actually enter an orbit around the black hole, and that the effects of those orbiting particles could be visible. But what about particles on a trajectory, that would cross the event horizon? Their time would slow down from the view of an external observer, but their movement relative to the observer and the black hole would not. The particles would be accelerated towards the event horizon. What happens as seen from the external observer? How does the distance between such a particle and the event horizon change over time?
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
nice idea and one - in contexts where it makes more sense - which has been explored. in this context it doesn't make sense, since the other parts of the multiverse discussed in the article are casually disconnected from us and couched in the language of general relativity, meaning they can't influence us. but if you take a different theory of gravity, you can end up very quickly with the idea of branes, which are 3-dimensional spatial surfaces that exist in M-theory. these branes can and do interact gravitationally, so other "universes" in this "multiverse" (where we have to be careful to remember what definition of the words are being used at this moment) do interact gravitationally with ours. the most significant impact may well be from a dilaton -- which is basically the distance between the two branes but which exhibits itself on our brane as a scalar field and quite possibly as a dark energy -- but it's not beyond the realms of belief that clusters of matter on one brane act as gravitational sources for matter on the other brane.
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.
The statement "Nothing in natural law (i.e. physics) forbids the existence of something that does not follow natural law." is entirely nonsense. The meaning that the writer is trying to twist is false. Physics does not allow for the supernatural. Forbidding (for lack of a better term) belief in things that have no scientific backing and every scientific reason not to exist is pretty much the primary purpose of the sciences. The whole damn point is that something "super"natural cannot exist so trying to claim that physics does not forbid the supernatural is a flat out lie.
Stop trying to bring credibility to your beliefs with science where none exists. Multiverse theory and deity dogma are in no way comparable. One has math and physics to complement the theory and the other has a math and physics showing it to be impossible. That science cannot disprove something cannot be used as evidence of its existence or acceptance of its possibility.
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 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.
The statement "Nothing in natural law (i.e. physics) forbids the existence of something that does not follow natural law." is entirely nonsense.
You need to make allowance for the fact that you might have misinterpreted what the poster was saying. The poster was replying to this statement: "God"=="supernatural"=="not allowed by physical (natural) law." . and his/her remarks ought to be taken as a rebuttal of that (clearly incorrect) statement, not as a generalised invalidation of the scientific method in the empirical domain.
To be clear, the scientific method only applies to questions that can be tested empirically. There are many questions that cannot be empirically tested - e.g. is Hamlet a good play? These questions have answers, but they cannot be derived scientifically. The question "Is there a deity/or deities?" is one of those.
Physics does not allow for the supernatural. Forbidding (for lack of a better term) belief in things that have no scientific backing and every scientific reason not to exist is pretty much the primary purpose of the sciences. The whole damn point is that something "super"natural cannot exist so trying to claim that physics does not forbid the supernatural is a flat out lie.
You don't understand science, or it's purpose, nor do you seem to have even a basic grasp of epistemology. Your remarks smack of blind dogma.
Stop trying to bring credibility to your beliefs with science where none exists.
The only person making statements of belief as a priori established fact is you.
Multiverse theory and deity dogma are in no way comparable. One has math and physics to complement the theory and the other has a math and physics showing it to be impossible. That science cannot disprove something cannot be used as evidence of its existence or acceptance of its possibility.
So which is it? Is there maths and physics showing that a deity is impossible, or is science unable to disprove the presence of a deity?
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
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
e.g. is Hamlet a good play? These questions have answers, but they cannot be derived scientifically. The question "Is there a deity/or deities?" is one of those.
You are making false equivalences again. Hamlet being a good play and existence of deities are not comparable in any way. One is a subjective measurement and the other is a question of "fact". A deity's existence is not a subjective judgement. It exists or it does not. Is Hamlet a good play? That does not have an answer in the same way as "Is Zeus the king of the gods?"
Your remarks smack of blind dogma.
No. Physics would be useless if supernatural events could disrupt it (also we'd be able to see that). The basic premise of physics is "the universe displays a set of rules". It leaves no acceptance of the supernatural. It basically says that all things are "natural" so to state that it does not forbid supernatural things from behaving supernaturally is simply not true.
The only person making statements of belief as a priori established fact is you.
If you try to use science in defending the supernatural you are being dishonest or wrong. Science and the supernatural are diametrically opposed. If something can be defined or described scientifically then it is, by definition, natural.
So which is it? Is there maths and physics showing that a deity is impossible, or is science unable to disprove the presence of a deity?
Newton's laws make it impossible for some omnipotent entity to exist. That is what the term "supernatural" means. It means that it cannot possibly exist in the natural world. This is why people feel the need to make statements like "but that does not mean something supernatural cannot exist. " It is a form of cognitive dissonance. A slight logical fallacy so that all of their internal beliefs can line up.
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
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!
And in fact, the MAJORITY of those universe, no life ever evolved on earth.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Why would all universes be governed by physical law?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I'm very much a theist who believes that the supernatural is just the natural that we human beings have not explained yet (whether that have not is due to just not having the time, or not having the ability since we're finite beings who know very little, is up in the air).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Or at least some of them.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Supposedly both can be eliminated by adopting a geocentric universe in which orbits cannot be explained mathematically.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Science cannot prove the validity of science. Science is faith-based. Measuring rods remain invariant. Humans can trust their senses. Etc. At the foundation of science is faith in the axioms thereof. Newtons laws? Hey now, those laws are not in sync with so-called Quantum laws (or theories). Science and Faith are inextricably inter-twined, and there is no (zero) inconsistency between the two because they both point to the same thing-- The Truth-- which is absolute. Science is a closed system. Consistent? Maybe-- but we cannot prove that-- we can only say things like "with our current set of science laws, Revsion 59.23.2.99408, we have a a more-or-less generally consistent set of rules that science uses to explain the natural world-- but stay tuned for daily updates, retractions, and additions. Closed? Yes. Axioms exist. Keep saying that. Admit it. At least be honest. Science believes in (has faith in) Axioms. See The Laws Of Thought. Etc. By their own admission, scientific "laws" come from a pre-existing nature. First nature. Then the description of nature (science). Not the other way around. No nature. No science. To say "anything we cannot explain with our current definition of natural world cannot exist" is ridiculous. Don't lean on the lay definition of "super-natural" disingenously-- call it "unexplained" and you get a whole new picture. That the state of science cannot explain something is a silly excuse to prove something does not exist. Plus, don't blame anyone but science-folk if God doesn't fit under a microscope-- get a better microscope.
Science and faith cannot be equated in the same way as dogma and faith. The "faith" that believes in science is not the same as the faith that believes in god, ghosts, jumbies etc. "Faith" in science means: reason, logic and observation points to this. Faith in religion means: I think I'm right and everybody else in the world is wrong because I'm right and they're wrong.
You cannot prove a negative in the way you demand (which is exactly why you frame the discussion in that way). Science can show why gods don't exist- why the supernatural doesn't exist but there cannot be an experiment to prove such nonexistence. It is a complete non-sequitur to claim that that means science doesn't "forbid" its existence. Science ignores it because it's useless to look for something that is not there. I could use the same reasoning to claim there is a little purple fish that floats behind your head but is only visible directly to your eyes. Prove it's not there! It is a useless statement and to try and frame it as being perfectly okay is absurd.
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...
Sort of. The God question is for children; you'd first have to define God. Good luck! However, once you stop equating the supernatural with religion, it begins to make sense that there are invisible laws that govern that natural law is incapable of evaluating.
Science is only one method of reason and measurement, math as its metric, and relies upon repeatable results. Therein is why it is limited in evaluating the supernatural. What we attribute to being of the supernatural is the occurrence of the improbable and impossible.
Science is still in its infancy and today depends upon higher schools of thought to direct its pursuits. Perhaps one day it will have a broader reach.
However, once you stop equating the supernatural with religion,
You cannot stop equating the supernatural and religion. They are one in the same no matter what you want to believe.
it begins to make sense that there are invisible laws that govern that natural law is incapable of evaluating.
There is absolutely no reasoning behind that assertion other than to make people feel better about holding beliefs that all evidence contradicts. It is complete nonsense. Spurious reasoning and pseudo-insightfulness is not an argument.
Science is only one method of reason and measurement
Another statement complete void of meaning. Name one other method- one that isn't purely begging the question.
What we attribute to being of the supernatural is the occurrence of the improbable and impossible.
Bolded for emphasis. We call it "impossible" because it can't actually happen, like the supernatural. The improbable is not supernatural. Rolling 10 sixes in a row on an unweighted die is improbable but not supernatural. Things considered supernatural are not improbable- they are impossible. That is why they are labelled supernatural.
Science is still in its infancy and today depends upon higher schools of thought to direct its pursuits. Perhaps one day it will have a broader reach.
And by this what you actually mean is: I don't fully agree with the implications so I'll assert that it doesn't apply.
However, once you stop equating the supernatural with religion,
You cannot stop equating the supernatural and religion. They are one in the same no matter what you want to believe.
You are talking in absolutes and creating a dichotomy that doesn't exist. I think you are also failing to understand both religion and science. Maybe you are a student. You are also holding a childish caricature of what is often attributed to the supernatural (e.g. "purple fish in your head")
Religion has nothing to do with the supernatural. It is a social construct. Religion has, however, created a mythos, fables of sort, to help define how one should live. Sometimes it relates to the supernatural. That certainly isn't one and the same.
Regardless, I won't be discussing religion with you nor is it relevant to this thread...
it begins to make sense that there are invisible laws that govern that natural law is incapable of evaluating.
There is absolutely no reasoning behind that assertion other than to make people feel better about holding beliefs that all evidence contradicts. It is complete nonsense. Spurious reasoning and pseudo-insightfulness is not an argument.
First, I hold no beliefs and only speak from experience, insight, and education. The same with those who came before me. So what does that say about your ability to reason? It means what you just said was nonsense (i.e. not applicable). That's a failure of reasoning and comprehension on your part. You shouldn't be so quick to dismiss thousands of years of thought; that's naively dangerous.
Neither does evidence contradict the supernatural, quite the contrary. This is a thread on the topic of cosmology, which is a subset of metaphysical philosophy which sets out to explain both the natural and supernatural.
Let's take a moment to describe what the supernatural is...
I will use the word you just used, "belief". If I believe something will happen, the likelihood of it occurring has been increased beyond measure. It's a paradox. Belief itself is power and has the ability to bend natural law. Science is beginning to recognize this in theory.
Take another example... for instance, higher thought itself is independent of a singular mind and is transcendental. I would attribute this to the supernatural. What about you? It certainly doesn't involve natural law.
Science is only one method of reason and measurement
Another statement complete void of meaning. Name one other method- one that isn't purely begging the question.
Sure... Poetry, Philosophy, Art-- all higher schools of thought and reasoning that science derives its pursuits from.
What you are doing by holding the science of natural law as some supreme form of thought is dismissing its very origin. You are divorcing it from all beauty and higher purpose.
Let's take poetic symbolism as an example of a predecessor, as it is regarded as the highest form of thought and consciousness:
"the sound of stars" or "the grinding of cosmos". Only until recently did science recognize that stars emit sound and is actually a useful way to deduce their internal composition.
Same applies to the work of Newton and Einstein.
What we attribute to being of the supernatural is the occurrence of the improbable and impossible.
Bolded for emphasis. We call it "impossible" because it can't actually happen, like the supernatural. The improbable is not supernatural. Rolling 10 sixes in a row on an unweighted die is improbable but not supernatural. Things considered supernatural are not improbable- they are impossible. That is why they are labelled supernatural.
Take your 10 sixes and roll them again a billion times. Would you say that was impossible or improbable? Can you fu
You seem to have a misunderstanding of the words you are using. To clarify...
Supernatural doesn't equal religion. However, religion relies upon moral law which is traditionally seen as being dictated by the supernatural. If you want to debate moral law, that's fine, but I think you'd might want to find a different website. Also read Nietzsche, Kant, and Schopenhauer before doing so. For the record, I am more in agreement with Nietzsche.
"Science", in modern context, refers to the scientific philosophy practiced by neo-positivists. It's fashionable these days to dismiss reality when it can't be verified by mathematical logic. But I guess it's always been trendy to be stupid, arrogant, and foolish. No one wants to think anymore.
Furthermore, there is no religion/science dichotomy. It is stupid and simpleminded to even try to frame a debate or argument with this pretense. I know it's popular, but it's tiresome. I will ignore it. It's fueled by people's petty personal insecurities and psychological disorders. It is just as stupid and childish as saying you are "atheist", "agnostic", or "religious".
Trust thyself. The universe is too beautiful and awe-inspiring to be so dismissive.
If I believe something will happen, the likelihood of it occurring has been increased beyond measure.
No, it really hasn't. The fact that you state that indicates that you are a troll or the stupidest person on Slashdot (and that is almost supernaturally stupid).
You continue droning on with the coherence of a Markov chain also indicating a troll. Unfortunately there are probably other extremely stupid people that would buy into the pseudo-authoritative nonsense that you just wasted my bandwidth on. In other words:
what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
You are the one speaking in absolutes, narrowed-mindedness, and empirical bullshit. That is the very definition of stupidity.
Congrats, kid. You've just shown yourself as an ignorant beast. Look for another website that is more suitable to your intellect.
Careful there, it's supported by over three schools of philosophical thought, quantum mechanics, and every poet.
Stay in school. It seems to be the only hope for hopelessness.
You continue droning on with the coherence of a Markov chain also indicating a troll.
You do not understand Markov's chain.
Again, your insults are in vain. I had to correct your every irrational dichotomy. Your intelligence is revealed when you make this a personal affair. Glad we got to the heart of the matter.
my IQ = 220
your IQ = 120 at best.
How's that for your dumb thick head? The disparity in our intellect alone is comparing Einstein with a monkey.
Suck it.
How many replies do you have to make? That rambling certainly supports your claim to have a higher IQ than Stephen Hawking. Are you sure you didn't get IQ confused with your SAT score?
You didn't correct any "dichotomy". You spouted nonsense that you thought made you sound smart- it didn't.
Careful there, it's supported by over three schools of philosophical thought, quantum mechanics, and every poet.
I'm really not sure what you claim is supported. I assume wanting things to happen can make them happen. If that is the case then no- it is not supported by anything. A poet is less qualified to weigh in on matters of physics than Jenny McCarthy is on matters of medicin.
Stay in school. It seems to be the only hope for hopelessness.
I would suggest you try going to school instead of making up IQ scores.
How many replies do you have to make? That rambling certainly supports your claim to have a higher IQ than Stephen Hawking. Are you sure you didn't get IQ confused with your SAT score?
You didn't correct any "dichotomy". You spouted nonsense that you thought made you sound smart- it didn't.
You have been unable to articulate and support a position. Yes, my IQ is higher than Stephen Hawking's. Surprise, not all intelligent people are physicists. Just because you were unable to understand my "ramblings", does not make it nonsense.
You created at least two dichotomies: natural and supernatural, religion and science, and insinuated natural law as being empirical -- that which has yet to be proven/verified with mathematical logic must not exist.
Careful there, it's supported by over three schools of philosophical thought, quantum mechanics, and every poet.
I'm really not sure what you claim is supported. I assume wanting things to happen can make them happen. If that is the case then no- it is not supported by anything. A poet is less qualified to weigh in on matters of physics than Jenny McCarthy is on matters of medicin.
"Wanting" things to happen is not the same as "believing" something will happen. And yes, it's all well documented. Google it or go to your local university's library. You completely ignored my other example that's well discussed in metaphysics. Stop nit-picking to suit your agenda, and stop attacking people who are being friendly.
You might want to ask Einstein where he got his general theory of relativity. A physicist is only useful when he's properly educated in poetics and philosophy.
Stay in school. It seems to be the only hope for hopelessness.
I would suggest you try going to school instead of making up IQ scores.
Again, stay in school.
It's adorable that you think you are so intelligent.
Being as we're just making stuff up I just went ahead and asked Einstein (him and I are super close by the way; I invented a time machine so we could chill). He says you're completely full of shit.
Hawking thinks you should finish high school before trying to pretend to be smart on the Internet. He didn't say it quite that nicely but I didn't want to repeat it- it was kind of mean.
James Randi wants to see you believing things into existence. He tells me he'll give you a million dollars for it! I told him you probably make more money believing in winning the lottery though.
In any case, the four of us need to get back to our spaceship. We're making a road trip to Vulcan!