Parallel Universes Are Real 1066
It's in Scientific American, it must be true. This month's cover story:
Parallel Universes.
"The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here." That number's a lot bigger than 10 to the 101.42 meters, which are the farthest observable objects in what we call our universe. And anyway, twin or not, anyone outside my light-cone is dead to me. That's just a rule I have. If you're skeptical of the multiverse, go read our discussion of a similar article from
two days ago.
Re:I don't know about your eyes (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Er, our light cone ought to be bigger than that (Score:2, Informative)
Key insight (Score:4, Informative)
IMO the most important part of the article, though less headline-catching, is the claim that recent results indicate that our universe may be infinite in both size and mass.
I like that result, though I find it very surprising.
At any rate, it is this fact (or claim) that allows the author to conclude that a "level I" parallel universe exists somewhere. Indeed, an infinite number must exist, if the universe is in fact infinite.
He also offers levels II, III, and IV, which arise from more exotic causes. In Sunday's
A "Simple" Explanation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But Mohammed Al Sahaf says.. (Score:4, Informative)
Everyone should check out Welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com. [64.39.15.171]
I hope when we find him we give him a talk show on FOX.
MODUP (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Scientific Omnirican (Score:3, Informative)
Heck, I stopped subscribing to Scientific American about ten years ago. I sensed that the publisher was targeting an audience with less scientific background. When I started reading SA it was somewhere between a scientific journal and Popular Science magazine. It seems to have moved closer to Popular Science. That just too "thin and watery" for me.
I still subscribe to Science News. It delivers the goods; short summaries of new scientific discoveries, new research, and updates on important topics. It provides a good overview of what's going on in science research. I've had a subscription for going on 25 years...the quality has remained high all that time.
Re:SciAm, the most credible source of scientific d (Score:3, Informative)
This explanation is not affected by an actually infinite number of stars, as postulated in the article. Even in a universe only as big as the part we can observe, there are a near-enough to infinite number of stars for the purposes of the paradox anyway.
Re:Scientific Omnirican (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah....it's gotten worse, but not quite bad enough to be called sensationalist crap like Omni. But it's certainly awful enough to have made me switch to American Scientist [americanscientist.org]. The Sigma Xi publication delivers some kick-ass articles on all facets of scientific research, focusing mainly (in my view) on physics, math, and meta-research on scientific methods with some astronomy and life sciences thrown in. Lots of CS, too. Comes highly recommended despite its US-centric name.
Re:Multiverse to Nadaverse to Omniverse (Score:3, Informative)
Both faith and reason are very important in being human. Science wouldn't advance if the Scientists didn't have faith in theories that haven't been proven yet. Faith in God wouldn't be possible without being able to observe evidence and understand His relationship to us.
I think that the Mormons believe in many gods, each ruling over a different planet or world. They associate the Father with one of those gods and the Son (Jesus) with the literal offspring of the first god. I haven't studied Mormonism in depth, but it seems to be full of logical problems. As with many false, human religions (really, all religions based on human logic are false) the interpretation of all truth most come from leaders near the top. Individuals don't seem to think much for themselves.
Don't make the mistake of looking at one group of religious people that have turned their brains off and think that all belief in God is brainless. There's much about God that I don't know and there are some things I know to be true that seem contradictory. No one on Earth can claim to have it all figured out. If you've decided not to believe in God, make sure you know why you decided it. If you still have an open mind, I urge you to keep it open.
Re:Religion (Score:5, Informative)
I would agree with the ranting AC that some organized religions have caused great harm in the world, but I think that many organized religions are not inherently different from governments or corporations or other large human organizations. Any of those can be a force for good or bad, but "absolute power corrupts absolutely," so the tendency for a powerful organization is to increase its power and abuse it.
There's always a tendency for people and human organizations to become corrupt over time. An example is the Christian church. It started with the coming together of people that had personally experienced Jesus Christ and believed he was the savior of the world. Gradually, the church became larger and more powerful, until it was more a political organization than anything else, splitting along the way into the Eastern and Western churches.
Many people saw the corruption in the church and saw how far it had gotten from true faith in Christ and there was a movement called the Reformation about 500 years ago. Today, many of the denominations formed as a result of the Reformation are as far from the truth as the Catholic church was back then. Only through the blood of Jesus Christ can someone be saved, not through a human institution.
Re:Multiverse to Nadaverse to Omniverse (Score:3, Informative)
But, beyond that, the question "where did these universes come from" is a very good one, and IIRC, the current hypothesis is that, at the "base level", there's nothing but probability. The universe exploded into being because it was probable it would on some mathematical level, assuming mathematics (and probability, as a subset of mathematics) is a self-generating phenomena... both chicken =and= egg. So, before the universe, there was a probability that the universe would exist. Even in this context, "before" is a tricky word, and doesn't really relate to linear time, or even time at all, as there is none outside the (Type IV) universe. It's just a useful metaphor for the woefully underpowered meat-calculators most of us come equipped with. "Outside" also works, tho there is no space outside the universe, either... the universe sits in infinite probability.
Where probability "comes from" is probably a better question for deep, deep math geeks... the kind who forget to zip up when they dress and can't figure out the toaster, but can rattle off five thousand digits of pi without breaking a sweat. "Why does math work" is a sticky, tricky question. Hell, we don't even know if it does work... epistemology philosophers are working on scary things like the Gettier Problems, which will have profound repercussions on math and the sciences.
~ Soop.
Re:Religion (Score:2, Informative)
So allow me to adjust your argument so that it doesn't make this error: A religious belief on the part of an individual that someone else has to die (for whatever reason) might lead to a crime, whereas science deliberately stays out of questions of morality and sticks with questions of physical reality.
Now let me set my argument against this somewhat more sensible version of your argument. That science chooses to stay out of morality does not obviate the need for a belief set which doesn't choose to stay out of morality. The belief that doing harm to others cannot be scientifically proven to be true. But this belief is necessary to the functioning of a civil society. Of course organized religion is also not necessary to moral belief, but nobody is claiming that it is.
Your assertion that religious belief cannot be verified with the observer's own senses shows that you didn't understand my argument. Once again, I have to recommend Alston's book. Religious experience is considered by religious people to be one way of directly sensing the universe. Just as your eyes are one way of sensing the universe. The thing is though that there is no way to directly sense the universe. You have to interpret, compress, and manipulate every bit of input you come across before you can use, and in interpretation the directness is lost. This isn't less true for science than it is for religion.
Anyone claiming that science can be directly verified by the senses hasn't looked at the state of modern science either. Can you see an molecule? An atom? A quark? Do you even have time to verify all of the science on which even one scientific conclusion of the last 2 years is based? In science you have to take a great deal on faith. It's just that you are more comfortable with what you have to take on faith. That's cool -- but religious people are also comfortable with what they take on faith.
In conclusion: don't pit science against religion or religion against science. It doesn't work logically, and it doesn't do anyone any good.
Re:Multiverse to Nadaverse to Omniverse (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not really (Score:3, Informative)
Yep, and it goes as far as your sensory input. If you look at the development of neural systems in organisms, you can see the growth from simple neural nets in hydras up to complex information processors in humans. The engineering drive is the same- process input data and control the body. Neurons fire because they're connected to other firing neurons and because they have rules about upon which inputs they send their output. Where does the first input come from? Well, from stimulation of the retinas or the ear canal or the skin or any place where there's a nerve ending. These are organs designed to send an electrical charge on their "bus" back to nerve clusters in the spinal cord and brain for processing.
One of the things that I've found most fascinating is the theory that the mind can influence things at the subatomic level. During the 60s/70s, the USSR did some experiments with people who rumour said had strong psychokinetic abilities (ESP). Now, the Ruskies were into all kinds of bizarre things, they researched things that Western science wrote off as ridiculous.
On the contrary, the US dumped millions of dollars into researching remove viewing as a means of gathering covert data. The "experiments" and "projects" were failures, just as the Soviet ones were.
Anyway, they found some pretty interesting things. Like, they didn't find anybody that could move objects with their mind, or anything like that. But, they did find a few who could apparently alter the rate of nuclear decay. As you're probably aware (you read slashdot after all), subatomic decay is essentially random according to todays science. What they found was that these "psychics" could, in controlled conditions, speed up or slow down a number of a screen that measured decay. I can't recall if they were told what the number meant or not, but they could seemingly control the process at will.
I recall hearing somewhere that anyone could achieve results similar to this test without any effort at all. Systems on the edge of chaos are funny- one butterfly beats its wings, and the resulting probabilities collapse differently. IIRC, though, these tests have very poor reliability and don't amount to much.
Interesting. Could the mind impose itself onto low level randomness? If so, that could be the missing link between mind and body.
They found that link a very long time ago. It runs down your back in a bone sheath.
If mind can affect quantum probabilities, and our brains are in a state of quantum instability .... aah. You have mind controlling body. Such a thing would answer many questions.
Again, this doesn't take quantum hoodoo to explain. Brains are built to control bodies. They communicate through a bus of several major nerves that service the major sensory organs and muscles (read: I/O devices) of the body.
Theories you might be interested in (Score:1, Informative)
Re:A "Simple" Explanation (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Multiverse to Nadaverse to Omniverse (Score:2, Informative)
I know the odds of rolling 5 4s in a row are higher than rolling 4 4s but they're the same odds as any other specific combo (rolling 4 4s and 1 3, for example).