Posted on 01/17/2008 8:04:00 AM PST by flevit
This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.
Alan Guth, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who agrees this overabundance is absurd, pointed out that some calculations result in an infinite number of free-floating brains for every normal brain, making it “infinitely unlikely for us to be normal brains.” Welcome to what physicists call the Boltzmann brain problem, named after the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who suggested the mechanism by which such fluctuations could happen in a gas or in the universe.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
My head hurts....
Oh...never mind.
some calculations result in an infinite number of free-floating brains for every normal brain, making it “infinitely unlikely for us to be normal brains.”
Most of those freefloating brains will be voting democrat this year.
when I did a search to see if this has been posted, it seems you posted something fairly similar a while back, thought you might be interested?
He needs to have another toke and restate his thesis.
The universe is a projection of the collective ego. It really is an illusion. Kind of like a hologram or a movie. It doesn’t exist at all. We just perceive it that way.
________________________
My part in the collective ego says what is a collective ego, how can you have an illusion without reality, and how can we percieve something if it doesn’t exist and if we don’t exist? Please don’t answer my rhetorical question!
My cosmotologist also cooks dinners for me. Now she won’t let me be her cosmotologist, even though the financial benefits are self-evident.
Now this is a COOL article.
It’s the sort of thing I hand to scientists around her who irk me for some reason, and makes them make funny noises by the time they go home :) - I love to hear a guy with a Phd who thinks he is better than everyone else blubber like a little kid who’s drooling with new teeth. /chuckle
At some point the question still answered remains, if there is no manufacturing of matter/energy - just a transfer from one to the other, where did the energy/matter come from? The big brain floating in space sounds like an attempt to visualize a god based on pure imagination, I prefer His own revelation.
And they called economics the ‘dismal science.’
We are the manifestation of God’s Mind... could it be that Stars are his Neurons? (He is pure energy you know..)
What’s this? The three bong hit Theory of Everything?
I’m hoping you weren’t being facetious there, because I completely agree with you. I forgot who did it, but I saw a picture, recently, of a computer-generated image of galactic superclusters, zoomed-out... Looked uncannily like a bunch neurons connected with each other. That’s when I had the thought you expressed above.
This is big time brain hurt! Too much for me. Still trying to figure out here if I’m a man who dreamed of being a butterfly, or am a butterfly dreaming myself to be a man. :)
Let’s see, if this article is correct, then I both exist simultaneously in every possible universe, and I randomly pop into random universes, having complete memories of an existence, yet actually being a different “individual” from femtosecond to femtosecond. So, I think it’s about time I popped over to the universe where I’m a billionaire.
Bye!
Black holes- God’s alzheimers!
As if the NYTimes could report anything accurately.
Well, bring some dough back and pass it out to the rest of us!
Guth is one of the founders and the creator of inflation. Whatever else is in the article is total nonsense.
Too much of that enthusiasm of the Methodists you hang around with has worn off on you. Suggest finding a few total Humean skeptics to provide some balance.
I still can't get my hands around Senator Edward's "Two Americas".
ping
Thanks, Civ. I thought this article was going to be about the surfer dude who has a theory of everything. His theory has a stark elegance that this one lacks.
I’m pinging my two favorite cosmologists, awesome freepers, to see what they think of this thingie.
Thank you for your encouragements and for the ping!
When a journalist writes about events, you often get nonsense. When a journalist writes about science, you always get nonsense.
In 1970 Penrose and Hawking published a paper which established the reality of singularities and the universe as the unltimate singularity at its inception. The two axioms for the paper were that the universe contains mass and that the general theory of relativity be correct. The GR has been so proven at this time that it should no longer be called a theory, it has risen to the level of a law as sure as the second law of thermo. Hawking and Penrose proved that the universe, space, time, and all that is contained within space-time started with a singularity even. The multiverse notion (and this crap is but another way of feeding that crap) is merely a mythology which can have zero chance of being substantiated else the ‘other’ universes wouldn’t be ‘other’ they would be part of our U.
That said, Lisa Randall’s notion of branes is more plausible.
The law of conservation of matter/energy cannot simply be discarded by the cosmologists, nor is it consistent with their naturalistic worldview to say that once the laws of the universe were different, it certainly is not scientific in the classical inductive sense.
Well, if inflation is correct then during that period a different set of ‘laws’ were in effect. Unless some means is found to integrate what took place during inflation with GR.
Universities pay for this?
No. None of the realistic theories do, because each event requires that entropy start very low and go high. Any scheme that goes on idefinitely eventually violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, so only incomplete speculations do so and they definitely don't deserve to be classed as theory.
Cosmologists have really lost any semblance of human thought. They spend hours contemplating the universe and their equations, which, to them, explain everything.
No. The NYT pays it's ignorant journalists to write babbling run ons.
I presume it's got something to do with Bohr's Copehagen Interpretation, which depends on "observers" before a quantum state can be established. But the author somehow fails to go there.
Here’s an excerpt from A-G’s article:
Scientific CosmologiesAt this point Alamo-Girl presents an exhaustive inventory of scientific cosmologies that have been, or are now popular, along with the names of their sponsors. If you check it out, you will find that most of them seem designed to obviate the necessity of a beginning of the universe.Of the various ways to categorize cosmologies, the most relevant from a Spiritual point of view is the attitude of a particular theory with regard to a beginning.
Few cosmologies these days allow for an infinite past in our universe simply because the measurement of the CMB [cosmic microwave background radiation] back in the 1960s indicates the universe (space/time) is expanding and therefore it had a “real” beginning. Einstein’s theory of relativity along with observations in astronomy suggested that the universe is expanding, much to his chagrin. His belief in an infinite universe became a prejudice to his own thinking and thus Einstein proposed a “cosmological constant” to avoid the consequences of his own theories. He later called his kluging of the numbers his greatest mistake.
Many other scientists were disturbed by the implication of a beginning and did some kluging of their own. In 1927, Georges Lemaître suggested that the expansion had stalled and resumed at various points due to gravity. At the time, Arthur Eddington was past his peak and already formulating ideas that seemed “kluged” to fit his own concept of the way things ought to be. For instance, he sought to unify quantum mechanics with relativity and gravity by what seemed to be a numerological analysis of fundamental constants. Also around the same time he disputed Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s model of gravitational collapse of stars/black holes, suggesting that the collapse would be stopped. Of course, Chandrasekhar was proven right and won a Nobel prize for this work.
And concerning cosmology, Eddington likewise resisted a beginning by stretching Lemaître’s theory to infinity. Both theories were disproven in the 1970s by Vahe Petrosian, who showed that a hesitating universe would confine galaxies and quasars to certain spatial limits which observations show have been exceeded. Moreover, further analysis shows that quasi-static periods over a trillion years would guarantee the formation of galaxies followed by a near immediate collapse of the universe to its original singularity.
Thus the past eternal models for a unique universe died. But the theological implications were not lost — because a beginning requires an uncaused cause; i.e., God.
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” — Robert Jastrow, physicist, in God and the Astronomers, New York: W.W. Norton, 1978, p. 116Even today, cosmologists struggle to propose theories that do not have a beginning. But to do this they turn to the possibility of multiverses and geometry (space/time) that must also be physically pre-existing and thus must also have had a beginning. There are two basic types: chaotic inflation (Andre Linde) and ekpyrotic or cyclic universes (Steinhardt, Turok, Ovrut, et al).
Linde famously concludes that a universe can be created in a laboratory (chaotic inflation) with a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter which would create a small chunk of vacuum (negative energy of the gravitational field) which would blow up to the galaxies we observe. It would however usually not be noticeable since the new universe would curve into itself making it about the size of an elementary particle.
In sum, the Linde theory proposes that the Planck-size region that expanded (quantum fluctuation) to our universe was merely a part of some larger pre-existing region of space/time. The presumption is that there would be no beginning of this process and no end, thus allowing for an infinite past.
But of a truth the multiverse only moves the goalpost by regression to an undetermined beginning — not infinity — because the model requires the pre-existence of space/time itself, which was likewise made. Physical causality is a fatal flaw to theories that rely on pre-existing geometries.
At bottom, geometry is required for physical causation and thus there can be no beginning (physical cosmology) without it; and yet there must also be a beginning for the geometry itself.
The ekpyrotic model suggests that this universe came about from the collision of two pre-existing three-dimensional branes in a space with an extra (fourth) hidden spatial dimension. Again, the snag is that the dimensions (geometry) must be pre-existing. There is also the presumption of pre-existing physical laws, including causality itself.
The ekpyrotic model led to the cyclic universe model, which suggests the universe (space) will expand and then crunch back and expand again as time marches on. It is considered a “weakness” in the theory that there had to be a beginning of time. Time is geometric in relativity.
The issue of a beginning is a question for theology and philosophy as well as science since it leaves one wondering why there is something rather than nothing and how anything can emerge from nothing at all. Those questions remain regardless of which cosmology one prefers.
In the theological sense, one may also wonder how God could exist in nothingness — timelessness and spacelessness. Here we can turn to mathematics to grasp a concept that might help: the number zero vs. null.
One could meditate about a line of all possible numbers. Zero would be at the center. Negative numbers would proceed in one direction –1, –2, –3 on to infinity. Positive numbers would proceed in the other direction 1, 2, 3 on to infinity. But if one were to reverse direction by decimal extensions counting from 1 and –1 towards zero, reducing by half (or any percentage less than 100) each time — the number would continually be smaller, but the process would never arrive at zero.
The same may be said of decimal extensions in other scenarios (such as the extension of 1/3) but zero is unique because it serves as a placemarker; e.g., 201 means there are no tens [in the second place to the "left" of the decimal point]. Not that “tens” don’t exist, but for this particular number there are no tens.
But null is much more than a placemarker — it is more like the zero we can identify but not approach. To use the 201 example, if we were to state 2_1 we would be saying that tens do not exist at all.
With regard to physical reality, null is infinite non-existence — empty, void. This is the context of a beginning, of Creation — not merely zero spatial and/or temporal dimensions but null itself — no physical laws, no physical constants, no causality, no energy/matter, no physical object or event. Consequently, no phenomenon, no mathematics, no logic, no reason, no qualia, no autonomy, no language, no universals. When everything else is removed, at null, “all that there is” is God Himself — thus the beginning and existence is an act of His will.
Jewish mystics use a Hebrew term for this state to describe God as creator: Ayn Sof. The term basically means “no-thing” — One without end from which all being emerges and into which all being dissolves.
In Athens, Paul used their own Greek philosophy/poetry to convey the meaning for Christians:
That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. — Acts 17:27-28Following is a summary of cosmologies by attitude toward a beginning according to Rudiger Vaas in his publication “Time before Time.” As previously noted, many of these models have already been discredited. But first a quote from Rudiger Vaas:
“Because we are able to assign a symbol to represent ‘infinity’ and manipulate such a symbol according to specific rules, one might assume that corresponding infinite entities (e.g., particles or universes) exist. But the actual (i.e., realized in contrast to potential or conceptual) physical (in contrast to mathematical) infinite has been criticized vehemently [as] being not constructible, implying contradictions, etc. (cf. Hilbert 1964, p. 136–151, Spitzer 2000, Ellis & Kirchner 2004, ch 5). If this were correct it should also apply to an infinite past.”
And yet on the basis of scientific observation, the big bang/inflationary universe model has been holding up rather well over time. From the observations of Wilson and Penzias, through the COBE satellite readings, the idea of a beginning of the universe is increasingly well validated by science.
Of course, the big bang/inflationary universe model is the cosmological model most “in sync” with Genesis.
I think this present NYT piece is devoted to the idea of the viability of the eternal universe models; i.e., models of the cosmos that do not require a beginning. One gathers that The Gray Lady’s science writers likewise eschew having to deal with the problem of a beginning from an “uncaused cause.”
Science is predicated on the law of causation: Science anticipates that all natural effects must have natural causes. But with respect to the singularity of the beginning, the scientific method not only has no information about what “caused” it; but it can’t get any either; nor has it any means of detecting what “went on” in this event. It is widely acknowledged that the laws of physics totally break down in the Planck era — an infinitesimally teensy (completely unmeasurable) moment in proto-time (if I may coin a word) — in which the big bang occurred. Evidently it is this recognition that converts scientists into philosophers, constructing cosmologies based on the way they want the world to be….
As we saw above, Rudiger Vaas puts this problem in a nutshell: Just because we are able to assign a symbol to represent ‘infinity’ and manipulate such a symbol according to specific rules does not give us any guarantee that the symbol necessarily corresponds with the reality of the universe as it actually exists, or how it actually moves in space and time.
To sum up, there was no time before the big bang, and also no space, no laws of nature physical or otherwise, not even a law of causation; not even logic, mathematics, or geometry. There was NOTHING. The cosmic mystery is that SOMETHING came out of NOTHING. On my view, following Genesis, the very “seeds” of all these principles and laws were laid in at the inception event. And the evolution of our expanding universe continues to manifest them to this day, as a sort of “guide to the system,” blueprint, or “implicate order” of the universe, as David Bohm called it. This is the unchangeable divine logos in which all natural change finds its living context and possibilities.
In closing, I’d like to mention that all the (non-big-bang) alternative cosmological proposals entertain notions that would be impossible to observe or validate by the means of science. So one wonders why a scientist (as such) would bother to construct them.
The obvious answer can be drawn from the above, and so doesn’t need restatement here. :^)
Thank you ever so much for writing, dear Kevmo, and for your kind words of encouragement!
Here’s an excerpt from A-G’s article:
Scientific CosmologiesAt this point Alamo-Girl presents an exhaustive inventory of scientific cosmologies that have been, or are now popular, along with the names of their sponsors. If you check it out, you will find that most of them seem designed to obviate the necessity of a beginning of the universe.Of the various ways to categorize cosmologies, the most relevant from a Spiritual point of view is the attitude of a particular theory with regard to a beginning.
Few cosmologies these days allow for an infinite past in our universe simply because the measurement of the CMB [cosmic microwave background radiation] back in the 1960s indicates the universe (space/time) is expanding and therefore it had a “real” beginning. Einstein’s theory of relativity along with observations in astronomy suggested that the universe is expanding, much to his chagrin. His belief in an infinite universe became a prejudice to his own thinking and thus Einstein proposed a “cosmological constant” to avoid the consequences of his own theories. He later called his kluging of the numbers his greatest mistake.
Many other scientists were disturbed by the implication of a beginning and did some kluging of their own. In 1927, Georges Lemaître suggested that the expansion had stalled and resumed at various points due to gravity. At the time, Arthur Eddington was past his peak and already formulating ideas that seemed “kluged” to fit his own concept of the way things ought to be. For instance, he sought to unify quantum mechanics with relativity and gravity by what seemed to be a numerological analysis of fundamental constants. Also around the same time he disputed Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s model of gravitational collapse of stars/black holes, suggesting that the collapse would be stopped. Of course, Chandrasekhar was proven right and won a Nobel prize for this work.
And concerning cosmology, Eddington likewise resisted a beginning by stretching Lemaître’s theory to infinity. Both theories were disproven in the 1970s by Vahe Petrosian, who showed that a hesitating universe would confine galaxies and quasars to certain spatial limits which observations show have been exceeded. Moreover, further analysis shows that quasi-static periods over a trillion years would guarantee the formation of galaxies followed by a near immediate collapse of the universe to its original singularity.
Thus the past eternal models for a unique universe died. But the theological implications were not lost — because a beginning requires an uncaused cause; i.e., God.
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” — Robert Jastrow, physicist, in God and the Astronomers, New York: W.W. Norton, 1978, p. 116Even today, cosmologists struggle to propose theories that do not have a beginning. But to do this they turn to the possibility of multiverses and geometry (space/time) that must also be physically pre-existing and thus must also have had a beginning. There are two basic types: chaotic inflation (Andre Linde) and ekpyrotic or cyclic universes (Steinhardt, Turok, Ovrut, et al).
Linde famously concludes that a universe can be created in a laboratory (chaotic inflation) with a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter which would create a small chunk of vacuum (negative energy of the gravitational field) which would blow up to the galaxies we observe. It would however usually not be noticeable since the new universe would curve into itself making it about the size of an elementary particle.
In sum, the Linde theory proposes that the Planck-size region that expanded (quantum fluctuation) to our universe was merely a part of some larger pre-existing region of space/time. The presumption is that there would be no beginning of this process and no end, thus allowing for an infinite past.
But of a truth the multiverse only moves the goalpost by regression to an undetermined beginning — not infinity — because the model requires the pre-existence of space/time itself, which was likewise made. Physical causality is a fatal flaw to theories that rely on pre-existing geometries.
At bottom, geometry is required for physical causation and thus there can be no beginning (physical cosmology) without it; and yet there must also be a beginning for the geometry itself.
The ekpyrotic model suggests that this universe came about from the collision of two pre-existing three-dimensional branes in a space with an extra (fourth) hidden spatial dimension. Again, the snag is that the dimensions (geometry) must be pre-existing. There is also the presumption of pre-existing physical laws, including causality itself.
The ekpyrotic model led to the cyclic universe model, which suggests the universe (space) will expand and then crunch back and expand again as time marches on. It is considered a “weakness” in the theory that there had to be a beginning of time. Time is geometric in relativity.
The issue of a beginning is a question for theology and philosophy as well as science since it leaves one wondering why there is something rather than nothing and how anything can emerge from nothing at all. Those questions remain regardless of which cosmology one prefers.
In the theological sense, one may also wonder how God could exist in nothingness — timelessness and spacelessness. Here we can turn to mathematics to grasp a concept that might help: the number zero vs. null.
One could meditate about a line of all possible numbers. Zero would be at the center. Negative numbers would proceed in one direction –1, –2, –3 on to infinity. Positive numbers would proceed in the other direction 1, 2, 3 on to infinity. But if one were to reverse direction by decimal extensions counting from 1 and –1 towards zero, reducing by half (or any percentage less than 100) each time — the number would continually be smaller, but the process would never arrive at zero.
The same may be said of decimal extensions in other scenarios (such as the extension of 1/3) but zero is unique because it serves as a placemarker; e.g., 201 means there are no tens [in the second place to the "left" of the decimal point]. Not that “tens” don’t exist, but for this particular number there are no tens.
But null is much more than a placemarker — it is more like the zero we can identify but not approach. To use the 201 example, if we were to state 2_1 we would be saying that tens do not exist at all.
With regard to physical reality, null is infinite non-existence — empty, void. This is the context of a beginning, of Creation — not merely zero spatial and/or temporal dimensions but null itself — no physical laws, no physical constants, no causality, no energy/matter, no physical object or event. Consequently, no phenomenon, no mathematics, no logic, no reason, no qualia, no autonomy, no language, no universals. When everything else is removed, at null, “all that there is” is God Himself — thus the beginning and existence is an act of His will.
Jewish mystics use a Hebrew term for this state to describe God as creator: Ayn Sof. The term basically means “no-thing” — One without end from which all being emerges and into which all being dissolves.
In Athens, Paul used their own Greek philosophy/poetry to convey the meaning for Christians:
That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. — Acts 17:27-28Following is a summary of cosmologies by attitude toward a beginning according to Rudiger Vaas in his publication “Time before Time.” As previously noted, many of these models have already been discredited. But first a quote from Rudiger Vaas:
“Because we are able to assign a symbol to represent ‘infinity’ and manipulate such a symbol according to specific rules, one might assume that corresponding infinite entities (e.g., particles or universes) exist. But the actual (i.e., realized in contrast to potential or conceptual) physical (in contrast to mathematical) infinite has been criticized vehemently [as] being not constructible, implying contradictions, etc. (cf. Hilbert 1964, p. 136–151, Spitzer 2000, Ellis & Kirchner 2004, ch 5). If this were correct it should also apply to an infinite past.”
And yet on the basis of scientific observation, the big bang/inflationary universe model has been holding up rather well over time. From the observations of Wilson and Penzias, through the COBE satellite readings, the idea of a beginning of the universe is increasingly well validated by science.
Of course, the big bang/inflationary universe model is the cosmological model most “in sync” with Genesis.
I think this present NYT piece is devoted to the idea of the viability of the eternal universe models; i.e., models of the cosmos that do not require a beginning. One gathers that The Gray Lady’s science writers likewise eschew having to deal with the problem of a beginning from an “uncaused cause.”
Science is predicated on the law of causation: Science anticipates that all natural effects must have natural causes. But with respect to the singularity of the beginning, the scientific method not only has no information about what “caused” it; but it can’t get any either; nor has it any means of detecting what “went on” in this event. It is widely acknowledged that the laws of physics totally break down in the Planck era — an infinitesimally teensy (completely unmeasurable) moment in proto-time (if I may coin a word) — in which the big bang occurred. Evidently it is this recognition that converts scientists into philosophers, constructing cosmologies based on the way they want the world to be….
As we saw above, Rudiger Vaas puts this problem in a nutshell: Just because we are able to assign a symbol to represent ‘infinity’ and manipulate such a symbol according to specific rules does not give us any guarantee that the symbol necessarily corresponds with the reality of the universe as it actually exists, or how it actually moves in space and time.
To sum up, there was no time before the big bang, and also no space, no laws of nature physical or otherwise, not even a law of causation; not even logic, mathematics, or geometry. There was NOTHING. The cosmic mystery is that SOMETHING came out of NOTHING. On my view, following Genesis, the very “seeds” of all these principles and laws were laid in at the inception event. And the evolution of our expanding universe continues to manifest them to this day, as a sort of “guide to the system,” blueprint, or “implicate order” of the universe, as David Bohm called it. This is the unchangeable divine logos in which all natural change finds its living context and possibilities.
In closing, I’d like to mention that all the (non-big-bang) alternative cosmological proposals entertain notions that would be impossible to observe or validate by the means of science. So one wonders why a scientist (as such) would bother to construct them.
The obvious answer can be drawn from the above, and so doesn’t need restatement here. :^)
Thank you ever so much for writing, dear Kevmo, and for your kind words of encouragement!
I apologize for the double post!
He is in the process of operating that cycle within an infinite "Do-Loop." ;o)
Thanks for the ping!
ping
No. You do.
Just a reminder that George Noory of Coast is always looking for guests and the show craves topics such as cosmology.
Who is this “George Noory of Coast?” I’ve never heard of him.
The universe is a projection of the collective ego. It really is an illusion. Kind of like a hologram or a movie. It doesn’t exist at all. We just perceive it that way.
That means matter (and therefore material items) does not exist. Then you won’t mind if I take your stuff!
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