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There Is No "You" In a Parallel Universe
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "Ever since quantum mechanics first came along, we've recognized how tenuous our perception of reality is, and how — in many ways — what we perceive is just a very small subset of what's going on at the quantum level in our Universe. Then, along came cosmic inflation, teaching us that our observable Universe is just a tiny, tiny fraction of the matter-and-radiation filled space out there, with possibilities including Universes with different fundamental laws and constants, differing quantum outcomes existing in disconnected regions of space, and even the fantastic one of parallel Universes and alternate versions of you and me. But is that last one really admissible? The best modern evidence teaches us that even with all the Universes that inflation creates, it's still a finite number, and an insufficiently large number to contain all the possibilities that a 13.8 billion year old Universe with 10^90 particles admits."
nt.
What's the point, without you?
has nothing to do with "parallel" universes...
There's no you, sure. But me, I'm in all of them.
like the universe does, doesn't it?
Those universes aren't what people usually mean by 'parallel'. Usually they're thinking of a universe which at some point in the past was identical to this one.
These orthogonal universes obviously aren't going to have duplicates of anything here.
And the support for Big Bang style cosmic inflation (universe ballooning up from nothing in a trillionth of second) is sparse. (As opposed to the normal expanding universe we see that even old Steady State theory said existed.)
If cosmic inflation happened, everything real far away should be in its infancy, but we see sprial galaxies 13 billion years away.
Quasars are supposed to only be in the beginning of the universe in early times according to the Big Bang, and there are 2 of them within 800 million miles of us which should not even be possible. http://www.sdss.org/news/relea...
So we have old structures very far away well-developed with plenty of metal, which shouldn't happen.
We have "newer" structures nearby, which shouldn't happen.
Add to the fact there are no metal-free stars (Pop III) ever seen, it is difficult to see what aspect of Big Bang Theory holds true. Astronomy might be better off if it were discarded because a number of the popular conclusions double-down on bad science and result in wild goose chases (dark energy only need exist to support the Big Bang because only the Big Bang says expansion must be accelerating.)
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Obesity. News at 11...
This universe is parallel to itself. You do not exist.
Show me one other alternate universe. Is that so much to ask?
As usual for this crap, the poster gets it completely wrong. The idea of eternal inflation, that the conditions for inflation could "loop" due to tunneling back up a potential, is not that a finite number of "universes" are created, but an infinite number, so there absolutely ARE an infinite number of "you"s in such models. Of course there are tons of things than can go wrong with such models, but the description given goes against just about all the descriptions of inflation with quantum backreaction given by leading field figures (Linde/Guth et al.)
"Universes" here are shorthand for region of space that have become causally disconnected. The philosophy of identity in all this is up for grabs, and there's loads of problems making predictable models out of this stuff, even simple counting problems go wrong due to ordering ambiguities etc. Nevertheless the models that the pop-sci author is using do the opposite of what's being claimed here.
There goes my alternates chance with Kate Upton.
no u
Picture a flock of seagulls, flying east to west flying so far, so far away.
I wonder what Mr. Fluffy, the cat most famously illustrated in Schroedinger's Cat theory, has to say about this "discovery".
The idea is that people are just lumps of matter end energy, and hence if you have enough randomly created ones, you will get a duplicate of a given person in there. That is of course obvious nonsense. People are a bit more complicated than can be explained by physics, in particular as physics offers zero explanations for intelligence and consciousness. In fact, after half a century of intense AI research, it looks pretty likely that intelligence cannot be created by matter+energy alone, as there is not even any theory that would allow that given the restrictions of this universe.
Side note: Physicalism is not atheism. I am an atheist, but also a dualist. Physicalists have this dogma that there is only physics. They have no proof for that and they are ignoring some rather obvious indications to the contrary.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So now we are making predictions about speculations and guesses to say, there is no you in a parallel universe. Call me a skeptic but I would like a molecule of proof that such universes even exist before you start on speculations about what exists in them.
Not saying that the parallel universe concept is correct but his argument just dismisses a particular type then states there aren't any.
If there are an infinite number of parallel universes it stands to reason that in some of those universes it would be determined that there are no parallel universes.Maybe we live in one of those.
Some people don't believe the universe be like it is, but it do.
From "Our quantum problem", Adrian Kent
http://aeon.co/magazine/scienc...
"...Its great rival was first set out in a 1957 paper and Princeton PhD thesis written by one of the stranger figures in the history of 20th-century physics, Hugh Everett III. Rather unromantically, and very unusually for a highly original thinker and talented physicist, Everett abandoned theoretical physics after he had published his big idea. A good deal of his subsequent career was spent in military consultancy, advising the US on strategies for fighting and ‘winning’ a nuclear war against the USSR, and the bleakness of this chosen path presumably contributed to his chain-smoking, alcoholism and depression. Everett died of a heart attack at the age of 51; possibly we can infer something of his own ultimate assessment of his life’s worth from the fact that he instructed his wife to throw his ashes in the trash. And yet, despite his detachment from academic life (some might say from all of life), Everett’s PhD work eventually became enormously influential.
One way of thinking about his ideas on quantum theory is that our difficulties in getting a description of quantum reality arise from a tension between the mathematics – which, as we have seen, tells us to make calculations involving many different possible stories about what might have really happened – and the apparently incontrovertible fact that, at the end of an experiment, we see that only one thing actually did happen. This led Everett to ask a question that seems at first sight stupid, but which turns out to be very deep: how do we know that we only get one outcome to a quantum experiment? What if we take the hint from the mathematics and consider a picture of reality in which many different things actually do happen – everything, in fact, that quantum theory allows? And what if we take this to its logical conclusion and accept the same view of cosmology, so that all the different possible histories of the evolution of the universe are realised? We end up, Everett argued, with what became known as a ‘many worlds’ picture of reality, one in which it is constantly forming new branches describing alternative – but equally real – future continuations of the same present state..."
Well, it kind of does, depending on exactly how you define the term. One of the implications of inflation theory is that the original superluminal inflation is still going on, and will always be going on, and what we consider to be "the universe" is but one tiny bubble of "stabilized" space that decayed from the inflationary energy, and is presumably surrounded by a nigh-infinite number of other bubbles with different physical laws that will never interact with each other because the space between them is still full of self-replicating inflationary energy expanding faster than light, and which is perpetually spawning still more bubbles as the false-vacuum spontaneously decays into lower-energy states to trigger a chain reaction. You could easily consider every one of those other "bubbleverses" to be a parallel universe, with it's own physical laws and causality that will never intersect our own.
Of course that has absolutely nothing to do with the sort of parallel universes posited by the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which absolutely would spawn a potential infinitude of "other yous" with every quantum "decision". And neither has anything to do with the third major posited type of parallel universe which stipulates that our universe is a 4-dimensional membrane existing in within the 11+ dimensional metaverse posited by many QM theories, and that other membranes likely also exist, and may occasionally collide with our own, causing "big bangs" from the release of energy on impact.
Any one of those, or even all three, might exist, but so far as I know only the first is a necessary implication of currently accepted cosmological theory, and thus it has sort of inherited the "parallel universe" crown.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Remember, if you meet anti-You, just bow, not shake hands.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
a failed frosty pisser!
What an absurdly muddled summary.
**skips article in favour of researching medium.com **
Ah, gibberish to be expected.
fuck off troll
There is no relationship between the multiverse theory and inflation. First of all I would like to say that both inflation and parallel worlds are on shaky ground so the fact that one disproves the other is rather silly. We have found no definitive proof of gravity waves in the cosmic microwave background. If inflation did occur we should have found them by now. This does not rule out inflation but makes it less likely for it to be proven. For a widely accepted theory like inflation this is a significant development.
Parallel wolds in my opinion with a copy of you do not exist. But, playing devil's advocate here. The author's complete lack of knowledge of parallel worlds in this article and it's placement on slashdot is truly amazing. The multiverse theory postulates that the parallel you is outside of our universe so they would not include particles in our universe. The particles are not beyond our ability to detect due to inflation. They have moved off in a different direction than our universe and are no longer contained within it. So, the argument that the particles did not have time to form beyond our ability to detect shows a true lack of knowledge of what multiverse theory is speaking about, and in fact what the definition of the word universe is. Multiverse = more than one universe. It does not = too far away in our universe to detect.
Look, the equations of time work forwards and backwards equally well.
If we go forwards in time, I sip my coffee into my mouth, then swallow the coffee from my mouth to my stomach. If the coffee wasn't in my mouth already then the second step would be broken.
Going backwards in time, the coffee rises up into my mouth, and then transfers from my mouth to the coffee cup. Again if it hadn't risen up from my stomach in step 1, then step 2 would be broken.
So time works both ways, AND SO DOES CAUSALITY. If you head back in time, the grandfather paradox becomes a grandchild paradox or similar, and we are both traveling backwards and forwards in time. It's only that we perceive forwards time, because that's how our neurons work.
Since causality works in both ways, there is no point at which the universe can split into multiple parallel universes.
Hence there is no parallel universes.
If there was, then that means that free will means nothing and everything is determined by fate.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The whole concept of "duplicate you" just smacks of new age bullshit "spirituality" which suckers in the weak-minded and ill-educated with baffle gab and fancy words. Of course that's not all that far removed from religion, except that the new agers like to make their bullshit sound scientific when it is based 100% on faith in completely unprovable conclusions drawn from unproven theories in the first place.
I wish people as a whole were more rational, but they're not. They'll believe whatever they choose to believe. But at least I can respect the religious groups for admitting their beliefs are based entirely on faith, whereas they new agers try to claim there is "logic" behind their fantasies and bullshit.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
No really ... cosmic feckin-A inflation? Grant pimping see-Jane-blo-Dick fairy tales treated as certified physics sure make HARD SCIENCES like ... economics or anthro appear desirable. A less generous observant would giggle pointing to Diracs **turds** and move on to oyster farming.
The author comes up with arbitrary ridiculously large numbers than tries to amaze up how ridiculously large they are.
This idea that every possible choice I make spawns a whole other universe where I made a different choice has always seemed ludicrous. This sort of thing implies that my choice of every word in this sentence causes a universe -a whole universe with planets and black holes and telemarketers and tofu- to pop into existence, just because I decided to use 'tofu' earlier instead of using "marmalade" or some other word.
This means either the theory is wrong, or that causing a universe to exist is completely trivial and of no particular meaning. Which in turn implies that THIS universe that we live in is just a casual happenstance of some being's choice. Which means the big bang and everything else that we know and that every human being has ever known about anything is just absolute pap.
That may be the case but it's easier to accept the theory is just wrong.
Sig for hire.
Too bad about "you" though, who knew?
Different matter distributions == a universe in which said parallel universe which is inherently different than what we see around us.
I think there is some confusion over what "parallel" universe means. This is generally taken to be a universe which has been an exact parallel of our own universe up to some point after which it diverges i.e. everything is the same up to some point in time. In the quantum multiverse interpretation of QM this happens for each possible result of collapsing the wave function.
I've never heard of this ever being associated with multiple 'universes' from inflation because QM requires that the universes interact before they separate (this is how it explains the self interference of a single particle) whereas inflation requires that the universes be causally disconnected after their creation i.e. inflationary universes are just different universes, not parallel ones. So I think the author of the article got himself rather confused.
One person with a penis as small as mine is quite enough, I was feeling pretty guilty that there's an infinity of 40 year old virgins in other universes...
Just like any of the other interpretation of the measurement collapse (Copenhagen), it has no evidence speaking for it. It just an interpretation of what we see in the mathematical equations. There is some way one *might* go to test it but at the moment we have nothing but the math (and I have my doubt about the proposed experience but it is for another thread). It is fun to speculate on what the consequence of MWI, especially if you might stumble on a way to make it testable, but I wish people would stop calling it a theory. At best it is a testable claim.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
:)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
if it delivers us from this clickbait spam of unreadable websites.
It's turtles all the way down, except that very last one... only one needs to be first.
There is a u, it's the big letter right behing parallel!
TFA is basically a response to a talk on parallel universes given by Max Tegmark at the recent AAS conference. But it seems Ethan didn't read Max Tegmark's book (Our Mathematical Universe), because he only tries to address one of Tegmarks 4 levels of the Multiverse. The TLDR is that according to Tegmark the Multiverse is infinite, so there are other yous.
The multiverse of bubble universes spawned out of inflation is _not_ the same thing as the Many Worlds interpretation of QM! The multiverse idea has never claimed that *absolutely anything and everything* is realizable in other bubble universes born in inflation because these other universes still have to follow a set of _feasible_ laws of physics in order to exist, let alone spawn an exact replica of you, even though these laws might be different in some way to those of our universe. Otoh, parallel quantum realities, if these actually exist, would indeed contain a "twin" of you.
In other words, TFA is not news.
That said, we don’t know quite a few things about this inflationary state, and what this does is bring up a huge number of both uncertainties and also possibilities:
Comes across as a disclaimer, can't prove him right or wrong, while allowing a lot of leeway.
The "measurement made by a conscious being" is not the deciding point. It just makes it more interesting. The quantum implications of the uncertainty principle doesn't require a consciousness to 'make a measurement' that would cause a wave function to collapse to a single solution. It happens all the time with normal interactions. The only unique thing about a consciousness being involved is we can decide to set up the conditions where it will happen and then we notice it. No one spends a lot of time on what we don't notice...
I think almost all of this discussion comes under the second heading of: http://www.suck.com/daily/1997...
lammelarity. yup. all it takes is one and the right kind of math.
when I roll a "fair" die then the likelihood of any single value is the same as any other single value - almost. This means that if a parallel universe exists, and it has a random configuration, then in the limit of an infinite number of universes there is some subset that are twin or clones or effective clones of the current one.
the process that made the universe is not a "fair" die. It is physics. In particular it is thought to be a type of decay of a supermassive black hole. at a single point the singularity "broke down" and a jet of infinite density, finite mass matter was emitted. there is a chance that early in the process substantial matter was created from the surrounding spacetime. More to the point, as the jet diverged, is where the "parallel" comes from. Though the mass is large but finite, and it makes finite universes, they all start out in nearly the same state, going the same direction, with the same properties. The parallels start out close.
Further, gravity between adjacent lamella interacts. There is a chance that the mass of dark matter is in parallel lamellar universes. This means that there is correction over time maintaining similarity. Reducing very large scale convergence.
EngrStudent
Considering the universe expanding in all of the directions it can whiz,
And we're not talking only west/east/south/north, also smaller, bigger, and where's up anyway?
The particle number, while finite, is growing rapidly, really, really, rapidly.
The question is, how many multiverses exist inside a single unified verse?
We are just trying to describe and define it based on our consciousness and from what our senses can feel about it.
And given our consciousness and our senses are themselves artifacts of the universe. I think we will never be able to understand and describe outside of the thin domain of our own being.
Léa Gris
"even the fantastic one of parallel Universes and alternate versions of you and me. But is that last one really admissible? The best modern evidence teaches us that even with all the Universes that inflation creates, it's still a finite number"
Why is a person that doesn't understand the difference between the terms "parallel" and "multiple" even writing an article on something they so clearly don't have the first clue about?
One might see this article as an argument in favor of an infinite universe, as that is no less probable than that zillions of universes exist but not *all* possible universes exist. I suggest something entirely different, an idea I cannot entirely explain at this time: Inferred computation applying to the power set of the natural numbers. Without discussing that prematurely, I can say that it leads one to consider that the phenomenon by which our universe appears to be "computed" (Wheeler's "It From Bit") would also make *all* possible computation appear to be computed. Essentially that would mean all possible universes exist. The idea also embraces the concept of a block universe - a universe that is eternal and only seems to us (within it) to have a certain finite age. It is utterly reasonable that an infinitely old universe that appears to have expanded far beyond the confines of our event horizon would also seem to have already expanded for an infinitely long time.
Seriously.
a) We have no evidence that even one "parallel universe" exists.
b) If "parallel universes" do exist, we don't really know what that means or what the overarching physical laws are that govern them, their distribution, their number because -- wait for it -- we have no evidence that even one parallel universe exists.
c) So somebody makes up a theory that takes an interpretation of quantum mechanics (which does exist, or at least for which there is actual evidence), extends it by fiat to describe one particular possible way that -- subject to a mountain of unprovable assumptions -- parallel universes might exist, and assumes that we know enough to be able to do the quantum statistical mechanics of the multiverse and determine whether or not they are infinite in number and whether the infinity is aleph null or aleph prime or whatever, and then makes a pronouncement that they cannot possibly justify because (oh my gosh) we have no evidence that even one parallel universe exists and hence we have no observational basis for determining their statistical distribution or the statistical distribution of some meta-universal dynamics .
Once upon a time science actually was based on observations. Well, actually, once upon a time it was all Platonic Forms, bullshit philosophy, but then the human race supposedly grew up just a little bit during the Enlightenment. Apparently we are now taking a giant step for mankind -- backwards.
Next stop, the Star Wars universe and the Tolkein universe. I'm not in them, but they sure are fun to read about as fiction, pending a glitch in the matrix...
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Unless they exist in a loop. Then there is no first. Then one can scale the loop up to infinity.
There are many rooms in Hilbert's Grand Hotel, and even though nobody ever brings cigars in through the front door, there is always a fresh cigar waiting in your room every morning.
Unless and until there is a glitch in the matrix, there isn't any really good reason to think we are a simulation in some sort of meta-universe, and some excellent information-theoretic reasons to think that we aren't. The estimates of "probability" here are completely meaningless because the Bayesian priors are utterly disconnected from any possibility of proof. If this, that, and the other thing are all true, then we are probably a simulation. If there are multiple universes at all (whatever that even means) and if we make a small mountain of assumptions about the rules that govern them (all unprovable) then there is no you in any of them, unless of course the distribution of universes isn't uniform or defies the odds and there is. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If pigs had wings, they could fly.
The only sad thing is that people are even pretending that this is science. You have it pegged -- it is science fantasy written by a cynical but very funny philosopher to mock human frailty when it comes to making absurd arguments without evidence.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
no its just telling us - regurgitation of speculation and theory (much of it conflicting)
its not actually teaching us anything real - anything that is true (as in provable)
oh alot of it is clever ideas, bit then zen masters also are very clever at saying absolutely nothing (and like many of these 'scientists' making a good living at it)
Interesting but incredibly naive perception of reality.
I get a kick out of the name "Startswithabang"..
Clearly a proponent of thought that there is only one game in town.
This is a rehash of the Boltzman's Brain paradox, which doesn't require quantum mechanics, just infinity and statistical mechanics. It's a line of thinking in physics that goes back at least 80 years and probably back to the late 1800s. This doesn't mean it's wrong or bad, just that generations of physicists have thought about this (usually with a beer or two) and there's not a hard physical answer to the question: do I exist somewhere else in the universe?
It comes down to one little bit in that article: the universe could be infinite, and may have been infinite since before the big bang. The rest is the same line of reasoning about the improbability of growing toward infinity (gravitation at first, limits on inflation now) that we've been looking at for many generations. We're pretty sure we're not growing into an infinite universe. We still have no idea if the universe started off infinite. Addressing that is a bit outside of what we can currently do.
I'm not even sure there's a me in THIS universe.
J
Particles combine in a finite number of patterns that must repeat given a sufficiently large single universe. Your other you's must re-appear every few Hubble volumes, as well as uncountable slight variations. Entire identical universes aren't required. Entire identical galaxies are possible and sufficient. Entire identical solar systems are possible and sufficient.
By the way, quantities that are mind-bogglingly huge are not at all unlikely. They merely boggle the human mind that operates on a human scale. Additionally, probability itself is an absurd and completely undefined metaphor, hence useless for predictive purposes, on infinite or enormously finite scales.
it would be a parallel niverse, then?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I'm a pessimist, it is all probably not happening at all.