I had no idea of the connection between inflation theory and multiverse theory.
Fascinating link. When "Starts with a Bang" refers to the multiverse, is that the same multiverse I was describing, i.e. the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics? It would be really cool cosmological things like the flatness of the universe, the uniform temperature of the universe, etc. actually lead to evidence of how quantum mechanics ought to be interpreted. Maybe Carroll will pull these details together? I'll post updates on what the book says.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
Then it hit me. Einstein may not be observing the moon at some particular moment—but God is. His observation makes it real!
We live in a world with substance and reality because God is presently observing everything on earth as well as all in the universe surrounding us.
This is a good example of the sort of thing that I just don't get about all this god talk. How do we know god is observing anything? Maybe god isn't looking at the moon and everything else that is—maybe he's very busy right now having hipster sex with a Lena Dunham impersonator on one of the rings of Saturn (see Hebrews 15:34 and Leviticus 43:1). If we're just gonna tack some scriptures onto imaginative statements about the guy/gal/contemplative and ontological core, then how is that activity useful for making a claim about the real world? How is it different from writing a fantasy novel? I honestly don't understand it why people find it believable except that it conforms to their mythic assumptions—except when we're talking about quantum physics, we're not talking about mythic assumptions, are we?
Are you suggesting God is really Jack Antonoff? I knew it! One of the advantages of this God theory is that it presents a conception of God that is well defined and testable. True religion indeed.
I haven't read 10 books about Quantum Mechanics and I couldn't claim to really understand it at all. But I have figured out enough to know at least one thing: Roger Barrier is wrong. He is definitely not starting to understand it just a little bit. Reading popular books about Quantum Mechanics with the objective of figuring out how to deliberately and creatively misinterpret theories to "explain the existence of God" with scientific words is.... Well, what is it? I can't think of the right word. Sad? Ironic? Violent? Delusional? Tragic? It is definitely something.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
Max Born and Albert Einstein were both believers in deity.
Max was a Jew who converted to Christianity before the Holocaust. His son would later identify his dad as a Deist who wasn't particularly religious, but who did believe in God. (Today is Max's birthday.) Einstein was a Jew always, who was a secular Jew who didn't denounce his religion. He was invited to become Israel's first president, but turned it down - he spent his final years in America instead. Einstein has been described as more of a Pantheist. He saw God in all of creation.
Einstein and him would get into arguments over the nature of God. Einstein believed God is fully in control of what happens to us on planet Earth. Born believed though God created us, he rolled a dice and let the pieces fall where they may (as in a hands off kind of God.)
Neither were atheists. Yet they were/are two of the world's renowned physicists for all time. Born went on to win a Nobel in Quantum Physics.
What makes them different from you? The spark of genius! They were more inspired than you are, and had no need to denounce God or place themselves above God.
That didn't deter them from study and discipline because they were both accomplished and gifted.
Neither tried to "prove" the existence of God. For either man, that was a moot point. They shared in common a belief that God exists, albeit their different perceptions of that existence.
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote: If I'm wrong feel free to correct me, but space itself moves FTL. - Doc
Doc,
Space isn't actually moving as much as it is expanding. As described on another thread, the rate of expansion is 68 km/s per megaparsec.
That means if one were to put a point on a star map one megaparsec from Earth, that point would be receding from Earth at a speed of 68 km/s, or very roughly 152,000 mph. The speed of light is 3.0 x 10^8 m/s.
A parsec is about 3.6 light years or about 31 trillion km. A magaparsec would be a million times that or about 3.6 million light years.
By my calculations, a galaxy would need to be roughly 4,400 megaparsecs (or roughly 15 billion light years) away from Earth before it would be receding at the speed of light.
The visible universe is approximately 46 billion light years across, so galaxies receding at the speed of light are a long way out there. By comparison, our local group of galaxies is about 10 million light years across.
Also remember that FTL refers to the local speed of light. While a galaxy 15 billion light years from us may be receding at more than 3.0 x 10^8 meters per second, its speed in a local inertial frame is nothing close to that. ________________________
*Just read a more recent estimate that increased the rate of expansion from 68 to 71 km/s per megaparsec. So, let's round off to 4000 megaparsecs, or about 13.5 light years out before a galaxy is receding at the speed of light.
Last edited by Guest on Tue Dec 12, 2017 11:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
David Hume: "---Mistakes in philosophy are merely ridiculous, those in religion are dangerous."
DrW: "Mistakes in science are learning opportunities and are eventually corrected."
DrW wrote:Space isn't actually moving as much as it is expanding. As described on another thread, the rate of expansion is 68 km/s per megaparsec.
That means if one were to put a point on a star map one megaparsec from Earth, that point would be receding from Earth at a speed of 68 km/s, or very roughly 152,000 mph. The speed of light is 3.0 x 10^8 m/s.
A parsec is about 3.6 light years or about 31 trillion km. A magaparsec would be a million times that or about 3.6 million light years.
By my calculations, a galaxy would need to be roughly 4,400 megaparsecs (or roughly 15 billion light years) away from Earth before it would be receding at the speed of light.
The visible universe is approximately 46 billion light years across, so galaxies receding at the speed of light are a long way out there. By comparison, our local group of galaxies is about 10 million light years across.
Also remember that FTL refers to the local speed of light. While a galaxy 15 billion light years from us may be receding at more than 3.0 x 10^8 meters per second, its speed in a local inertial frame is nothing close to that.
I'm about as good an expert on quantum measurement as you're likely to find. My name is on some significant papers about environment-induced decoherence, and I once held a US visa for the stated purpose of "investigating the effects of quantum mechanics on the universe." That was just a bureaucrat's garbled phrasing but I actually was doing a post-doc for related stuff.
I don't know what's going on with quantum measurement, and I don't believe anyone else really does, either. In the 1990s multiverse interpretations—"Many Worlds"—were a fad among hungry young post-docs who were embracing a startling idea in order to show off how brilliant they were, and I think the current wave of endorsement of this in popular science is just the afterglow of that old fad. I was unimpressed even then, for two basic reasons.
Firstly, there's a ton of evidence for something like wave function collapse apparently happening, but it's all about microscopic events with just a few photons or electrons really involved. So explaining this weird data by postulating uncountably many alternative copies of the entire universe, which we can by definition never experience, is like explaining the spontaneous shattering of a bunch of walnuts by postulating an invisible sledgehammer. Only a lot more so. The purported explanation is way out of scale with the problem explained. It's extremely un-Ockhamic.
Secondly, no sophisticated theories about quantum measurement that I've ever heard have ever really been anything more than rhetoric. If you boil it down to logical calculus, then the problem is that everything in quantum mechanics, except the measurement postulate, keeps giving you plus symbols. Schrödinger's Cat is alive plus dead. If an experimentalist asks you, "So what does that look like?" then you have to either (a) be observably wrong, or (b) say, "For observation, replace 'plus' with 'or'."
For observations, 'plus' means 'or' is an axiom that no-one has ever been able to eliminate, no matter how long they may yack on about multiverses or correlations or whatever. All they're really doing with all their sophisticated paragraphs is trying to smuggle in that axiom without having to count it as an additional assumption. Many Worlds might be true, but it simply does not allow us to infer the results of quantum measurement from the other quantum axioms, because the other axioms have no way of ever replacing 'plus' with 'or'. So Many Worlds cannot claim it as a point in its favor, that it logically simplifies quantum mechanics by discarding an axiom. It's an exactly equivalent logical structure to Bohr's naïve old Copenhagen Interpretation, just with New Agey packaging.
Moreover there is good practical reason to think that wave function collapse may be a real thing, and not an illusion, because quantum measurement isn't something that happens as easily as a shift in viewpoint. On the contrary, sensitive measurements of ultramicroscopic phenomena are extremely difficult. They use elaborate devices which really do perform irreversible amplification: every quantum measurement device that I know relies at some crucial point on a process which is thermodynamically irreversible. The detectors themselves are far more complicated than the events they detect, and Bohr's naïve picture of juxtaposed quantum and classical worlds is still perfectly accurate as a description of how physicists think about measurement. The measurement devices that record quantum events are themselves described in classical terms, not out of philosophical prejudice, but because they are too complicated to think about quantum mechanically. There is a lot that we don't understand about quantum measurement—technologically, not philosophically.
If quantum measurement were a murder mystery, then solutions like the Many Worlds interpretation, or the view that consciousness is somehow essential for measurement, are like proposing that the murder was committed by a ghost. If the murder were a perfect locked room scenario, then such a radical solution might be the best we could expect. But in fact quantum measurement is full of poorly understood technical details about exactly how the irreversible amplification works. Far from having a perfect locked room mystery, we have a trail of bloody footprints leading into the swamp. Tracking down the perpetrator may be extremely difficult, but postulating a ghost is completely premature.
Natural theology has its high points and low points. Big Bang cosmology looks awfully nice for theology; Darwinian evolution of nasty parasites, not so much. Quantum measurement is just neutral, I'd say, because our current understanding of quantum measurement is about like the understanding of gravity held by Plato and Aristotle. They could have debated long and hard about whether higher or lower regions were the proper spheres of earth or fire, but all their philosophizing was really pointless, because there were too many essential facts that they just didn't know. We're like that now, with quantum measurement.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
i've filed this along with a few other things under "will never get to know" so enjoy the mystery.
i even have an argument to justify why there is no point in trying to know; maybe will post later.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.
LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
