Late at night and I am busy on a political piece, but I will divert a few neurons to this.
I am reminded of the passage in one of Feynman's books about psychology being "cargo-cult science".
At first blush some of this talk seems to be reducing physics to mush--playing with assumed bell-curve distributions of constants which cannot by definition be checked.
What was that about "not falsifiable"?? 95% confidence level is still (technically) not falsified...
The other odd thought popping into my head (ok, alright, one of *many* -- as other Freepers know only too well by now) is this: "God does not play dice with the Universe" by a strange paradox, is true--by this presentation, the Universe itself is itself merely the result of ONE throw of the dice.
And so within any O-region, it appears "God does not play dice" because all we see is one throw.
What happens when two inflationary regions "just happen" to be close enough to encounter or interact with each other?
What are the odds of such a thing happening?
And why didn't *I* get to live in the Universe where Reagan beat Ford for the GOP nomination in 1976 and Carter never happened?
Thanks, Snarks, for the article. Good to the last drop as usual.
Cheers!
What happens when two inflationary regions "just happen" to be close enough to encounter or interact with each other?What are the odds of such a thing happening?
I've not seen a calculation of those odds, but they're probably quite small. This passage appears relevant:
With inflation, the two competing processes are the decay of the false vacuum and its “reproduction” by rapid expansion of the inflating regions. My calculations, and those of Andrei Linde, show that false-vacuum regions multiply much faster than they decay, and thus their volume grows without bound. At this very moment, some distant parts of the universe are undergoing exponential inflationary expansion. Other regions like ours, where inflation has ended, are also constantly being produced. They form “island universes” in the inflating sea of false vacuum. Because of inflation, the space between the islands rapidly expands, making room for more island universes to form.
Inflation is thus a runaway process that has stopped in our neighborhood, but still continues in other parts of the universe, causing them to expand at a furious rate and constantly spawning new island universes like our own.
However, let me also quote a passage from a different article (I quoted this passage in a post on another thread):
The following paragraph from page 3 of Anthony Aguirre & Steve Gratton, "Inflation Without a Beginning: a null boundary proposal" (2003, PDF format) is somewhat relevant, I think (my red fonting):
"An observer within a bubble can never leave, but will eventually be encountered by an encroaching bubble wall after a typical time τcoll, where τcoll-1 is related to the r-integral of Eq. (5) by some transformation between the bubble observer's proper time τ and cosmic time t. Since this rate depends on t−t0, a patient and very sturdy observer could in principle discover the global time at which it formed by counting the frequency of incoming bubbles."
From this point of view, islands colliding appears possible...
Bump for further reading.
But "95%" is an arbitrary number used because an early statistics book had a table of 5% confindence widths. (Things were done by hand then.) The "correct" confidence level is not a mathematical concept but is set by the practical consequences of making one decision or another.
But in QM, even when we see over 10**23 throws, things still behave as if at random. There would be experimental consequences were such not the case.