Stephen Hawking's last paper: multiverses follow the laws of physics

[Onyx]

That sounds very interesting - the whole concept of Dark Matter bugs the heck out of me. It's like we're back to the Victorian concept of The Ether again.

Btw, just a general reminder that we don't discussion religion or spiritual beliefs here - too likely to invite an argument.

I think it is this gentleman:
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/case-dark-matter/


I think it is impossible to separate any Strong AP discussion from "religion", so I hope the guide can be the avoidance of scripture based argument for particular "theories". I like what Amberlen articulated by saying one can adhere to a particular "theory" without presuming that the story could be more complex or unbounded than the information offered.

 

[BAYLOR]

No one has come up with a Theory of Everything an Likely never will, at least in lifetimes.

 

[Onyx]

No one has come up with a Theory of Everything an Likely never will, at least in lifetimes.

What have you read that led you to that conclusion?

 

[Amberlen]

I think it is this gentleman:
The Man Who's Trying to Kill Dark Matter


I think it is impossible to separate any Strong AP discussion from "religion", so I hope the guide can be the avoidance of scripture based argument for particular "theories". I like what Amberlen articulated by saying one can adhere to a particular "theory" without presuming that the story could be more complex or unbounded than the information offered.

*blushes at the compliment* thanks. i mean, at the end of the day, dont we need to know where everyone is starting from to form a better understanding? i think so....

 

[BAYLOR]

What have you read that led you to that conclusion?

They haven't found way bring together strong force which is Gravitation and weak force within is Electromagnetism .

 

[Onyx]

They haven't found way bring together strong force which is Gravitation and weak force within is Electromagnetism .

They haven't. I was wondering why you believe that they never will. Is there some speculation among physicists that it is impossible?

 

[BAYLOR]

They haven't. I was wondering why you believe that they never will. Is there some speculation among physicists that it is impossible?

With all computing power we have at our command , one would have thought we would cracked it by now or we would be close to doing so.

 

[Onyx]

With all computing power we have at our command , one would have thought we would cracked it by now or we would be close to doing so.

It appears that we are still taking cosmological measurements and running particle experiments. Maybe we haven't gathered all the data, yet?

 

[BAYLOR]

It appears that we are still taking cosmological measurements and running particle experiments. Maybe we haven't gathered all the data, yet?

Our confinement to one planet and solar system limits us a bit. If we could go to a neighboring star system or two , maybe. get near a neutron star without getting torn to pieces and collect some date. ,explore a nebula . Try to test fo Dark matter in space . I think it would be helpful in our quest if we could see some of these things up close. That is, assuming our civilization lives long enough to do that. But , even if do get to explore and do all those things , we still may not find the great theory everything because we may find that the universe and its underpinnings are whole bigger then we can ever grasp.

 

[Brian G Turner]

With all computing power we have at our command , one would have thought we would cracked it by now or we would be close to doing so.

We aren't anywhere near as advanced as we might like to think we are.

Besides, there's a clear warning from the recent past - at the end of the 19th century, it was widely known that science had explained everything we could possibly need to know about the universe. There were just two pesky - but very minor - issues still unresolved, one relating to violet light, and the other to black body radiation.

Both were solved by some young patent clerk who popped along with a paper about photons as quanta. That effectively opened the new field of quantum mechanics, for which the clerk was awarded the Nobel Prize - before he went on to rewrite the laws of gravity under the name of "special relativity".

Uncertainly is a good thing - science is all about facing mystery - and it's clear we have yet to peel back a very fundamental layer of understanding about how the the universe works. Maybe Deutsch is onto something after all.

 

[RJM Corbet]

@RJM Corbet so, i read your link on fine tuning....i am not sure whether i agree on the premise or not, but i dont suppose i have to decide either way, as my end understanding was that it is all theory.unproven to date. I am possibly odd girl out here in that i DO believe that there was and is an "intelligent design" to the universe..in effect, a Creator, who i call God- but at the same time, that doesnt mean i believe in Genesis verbatim, nor do i think that automatically means i can't believe there are other lifeforms, inhabitable planets, planes, dimensions,"multiverses (nods @Onyx ) or what have you. Our creation in my mind, doesnt necessarily translate that there was nothing before, or since.*shrug* maybe that will be perceived as naive, idk, i just also like to think i dont know, what i dont know.

No, I'm on your side. Take the car apart and surmise all you like: the (philosophical) problem isn't with progression, but with origination. How did the Big Bang originate? How did life originate? We don't have plausible answers to these questions and so should not evade them by essentially saying: Don't ask?

 

[Amberlen]

Those are the big questions,no? Lol
Although it may be we never have the answer while in this conscience state. Me personally, I like to believe if there is other life somewhere besides earth, it’s better than an algae or amoeba- I hope for it to be something cool and sentient-maybe even a good looking hawty

 

[Onyx]

No, I'm on your side. Take the car apart and surmise all you like: the (philosophical) problem isn't with progression, but with origination. How did the Big Bang originate? How did life originate? We don't have plausible answers to these questions, and so should not evade them by essentially saying: Don't ask?

No one is saying "don't ask". Weak AP is saying "before you ask, are you sure you question doesn't contain a perceptual bias?"

"What force hauls the sun across the sky?" is a reasonably articulated scientific question. Unfortunately, it becomes very difficult to test because it contains an assumption about what we observe, and that assumption poisons both the question and the useful conclusions.

"Why is the universe so great for supporting life?" Several huge assumptions in this - the first is that life is a process of particular importance or interest from a universal viewpoint, and the second is that life is well supported. But in the first case life seems to be so ineffectual that everywhere we look we see neither life nor its artifacts. On a cosmological scale, the incidence of life appears to have as much effect on the mass and energy of the universe as a stray calcium ion has in your brain.

In the second case, is a universe that is largely vacuum and entropy evidence of conditions that are supportive of life? Would a truly pro-life universe resemble the Antarctic we find ourselves in, or would it be like a jungle, so dense with self organizing life that you could "walk" to the next star on the backs of other organisms?

We have a single point of reference. We know of no life outside a single lineage of DNA based life on (possibly) two planets in one solar system in one galaxy. Like the Drake equation, we don't have anything to attach real probabilities to these questions. And just as Drake's equation has its answering Fermi's Paradox, our fundamental wonder at our good fortune has the AP to bring some reason back to our perceptions.


I'm a fan of life, but I am also acutely aware of how dumb, slow, distractable and mortal I am. I don't feel like a success story as much as a privileged cockroach that found a lifetime supply of spoiled food to munch on as I ponder my existence. It is quite possible that the existence of 7 billion super-monkeys is relatively unimportant in universal terms, which I accept as unimportant to my daily happiness.

 

[Amberlen]

i feel like before this discussion ends, we may find the answer to what came first? the chicken or the egg?

 

[RJM Corbet]

Never mind assumptions, perhaps someone has answers, lol?

 

[RJM Corbet]

...

I'm a fan of life, but I am also acutely aware of how dumb, slow, distractable and mortal I am...

Compared to what?

 

[Onyx]

Compared to what?

Compared to what I can imagine. I have been rather clever at times, but don't operate that way constantly. I dream of flying, but none of my ancestors ever had wings. I desire to live for millennia, but I know getting past a century is a push. There is evidence all around the natural world that we could be better, faster, stronger, smarter, healthier, longer lived and more empathetic, so it isn't hard to scale that up to imagining what a real super being would be like.

In this thread we've discussed a variety of fundamental physics theories, and I'll bet not a single one of us is intelligent enough to follow the underlying math to its logical conclusions - the number of people capable of that are incredibly rare. But I can certainly imagine a world populated with Feinmans and Fermis.

 

[Amberlen]

No, I'm on your side. Take the car apart and surmise all you like: the (philosophical) problem isn't with progression, but with origination. How did the Big Bang originate? How did life originate? We don't have plausible answers to these questions and so should not evade them by essentially saying: Don't ask?

i dont think anyone is saying "dont ask" i think people just tend to want the question asked that "they" want asked. plus, tbh, obvious elements of the debate (from my perspective at least) are out of bounds, which effectively negates a whole aspect that i find credible. but whatever, im not sweating it. i think people should be more open and friendly too, but that doesnt work out often either.lol, at the end of the day, its just what should be a respectful debate.

 

[RJM Corbet]

i dont think anyone is saying "dont ask" i think people just tend to want the question asked that "they" want asked. plus, tbh, obvious elements of the debate (from my perspective at least) are out of bounds, which effectively negates a whole aspect that i find credible. but whatever, im not sweating it. i think people should be more open and friendly too, but that doesnt work out often either.lol, at the end of the day, its just what should be a respectful debate.

No, not don't ask, but don't ever even dare consider a 'higher power' than human intelligence, perhaps? No thought may ever swing that way (in the world of science) and every amazing contortion will be accepted to resist the possibility? Gotta leave it there, lol, and go take a walk in the bluebell woods ...

 

[Onyx]

No, not don't ask, but don't ever even dare consider a 'higher power' than human intelligence, perhaps? No discussion may ever swing that way, and every amazing contortion will be accepted to resist the possibility? Gotta leave it there, lol ...

Every discussion of Strong AP, like Elon Musk's obsession with the universe as a simulation, is the consideration of a "higher power".

The problem with such discussions is that they are intrinsically non-rational because they rely on information that is necessarily not possible to discover independently. But all of science is something that can be recreated at any time in complete isolation if the right questions are asked - no one has to import the "answers" from a source that is necessarily from outside our plane of existence. So there is a basic incompatibility between science and any explanation that cannot be derived from scratch. If it could be observed that some fundamental religious tenants arise spontaneously in isolated populations, that would make discussions of faith have some interaction with science, but as it stands none of the messages to humanity from external sources have ever occurred in such a manner. There is no New World Buddha or Mohammad that transmitted their Strong AP information sets to those portions of humanity in the egalitarian manner that underlies most evangelizing belief systems. That doesn't mean Islam is right or wrong, but it does mean that the faith behaves like a social meme rather than as a discrete bit of information fundamentally woven into the structure of the cosmos, ready to be revealed to anyone who asks the right questions, like Planck's constant.

Lot's of questions and answers are not scientific, and that's fine. No one needs to provide the science behind my love for my wife or the film's of Whit Stilman.