Multiverse or Singleverse?!
- Thread starter TankAss95
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That's a double-negative in my book, " comprehend infinity."
Eternity, endlessness, forever, the department of motor vehicles, it's all the same in concept. But just because we can't see the end of it, doesn't mean it's incomprehensible. There is no way to "practice" infinity, otherwise it wouldn't be so.
But I think people mistake the idea of infinity by imagining it to be this imaginary line that just extends out from you forever, just look at the symbol! It's as simple as a loop, nothing more.
Entropy's a lot more fascinating to me anyway. Let's not get hung up on what's essentially a mathematical placeholder value.
But I'm glad I stumbled across this thread, 'cause have I got a highly relevant, recently released, book for you all. I just got done reading it and it's the most entertaining and refreshing piece of poetic theory (what I like to slam theoretics) I've heard in so long. I got really tired of reading pseudo-physics disguised as mystery schools and scientific ponzi schemes, so Scott M. Tyson's book "The Unobservable Universe" really struck a nice chord with me. And he's not a nut case, went to John Hopkins, worked at IBMs VLSI Laboratory, Johns Hopkins Universitys Applied Physics Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Westinghouses Advanced Technology Laboratory. and was an advisor to the Office of the Secretary of Defense on space computing technology planning. If that helps anchor some better attention.
Besides really being in tune with my personal beliefs, he does a good job of getting one to question our current scientific paradigms. It's just an amazing read and if you looked in this thread, I'm sure you'll find it more than worth your time to check out.
Here's a little novel theatrical style trailer hyping the book (voice over by the author):
Eternity, endlessness, forever, the department of motor vehicles, it's all the same in concept. But just because we can't see the end of it, doesn't mean it's incomprehensible. There is no way to "practice" infinity, otherwise it wouldn't be so.
But I think people mistake the idea of infinity by imagining it to be this imaginary line that just extends out from you forever, just look at the symbol! It's as simple as a loop, nothing more.
Entropy's a lot more fascinating to me anyway. Let's not get hung up on what's essentially a mathematical placeholder value.
But I'm glad I stumbled across this thread, 'cause have I got a highly relevant, recently released, book for you all. I just got done reading it and it's the most entertaining and refreshing piece of poetic theory (what I like to slam theoretics) I've heard in so long. I got really tired of reading pseudo-physics disguised as mystery schools and scientific ponzi schemes, so Scott M. Tyson's book "The Unobservable Universe" really struck a nice chord with me. And he's not a nut case, went to John Hopkins, worked at IBMs VLSI Laboratory, Johns Hopkins Universitys Applied Physics Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Westinghouses Advanced Technology Laboratory. and was an advisor to the Office of the Secretary of Defense on space computing technology planning. If that helps anchor some better attention.
Besides really being in tune with my personal beliefs, he does a good job of getting one to question our current scientific paradigms. It's just an amazing read and if you looked in this thread, I'm sure you'll find it more than worth your time to check out.
Here's a little novel theatrical style trailer hyping the book (voice over by the author):
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I like the idea of a multi verse. In fact, I've been thinking along those lines for some years now, referring to the universe we live in as 'our universe'. To me the Big Bang is like a raindrop falling in a pond and the expanding universe it created, is the ripple traveling across the pond. Other raindrops (varying in size) create their own ripples and can eventually overlap or start within another raindrops ripple. In other words, if this is true, then another big bang could very well happen within our universe.
Expanding on this, is 'our' Big Bang really all that big, the way big bangs go? I would call a quark pair popping in and out of existence a tiny bang and these have been observed. I believe that these happen all the time and are most frequent among 'bangs'. Groups of quarks (varying in size) could pop in and out of exitence too. But sometimes quark pairs do not 'blink out' and live on as matter and anti-matter particles, maybe even grouped together. For all I know, the universe could be full of this 'fresh' material, either as 'normal' matter of dark matter.
By the way, it is my understanding that the Big Bang happened when a tiny fraction of a large group of these quark pairs failed to extinguish each other, resulting in all the mass and energy we have in our universe.
Could a multi verse be proven to exist? Maybe. The fact that our universe's expansion rate is increasing, could be an indication.
BobK
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I would say leaving it as "singleverse" is fine in this context, since it does emphasize the contrast with "multi", even though pedantically speaking it should be "universe".
Just because you can't doesn't mean that nobody else can. There are seven billion people in the world right now, and you're claiming that not a single one of them can comprehend infinity regardless of any training or (mathematical?) ability they may have.
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- TankAss95
They way I understood it was that our minds could only work with finite amounts. To imagine infinite, we need something to compare it to.BobK
I do understand the meaning of infinity, but I cannot see how anyone could comprehend it (or imagine it) in practice.
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MazdaPrice
That's just stating the obvious. Given an infinite amount of chances, there will be an infinite amount of outcomes that fit in those conditions.
And given an infinite amount of time, the immortal monkey will eventually reproduce every price of literature ever written.
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Again, something which could be proven.
Relating it back to the OP, the concept of infinity could prove that we live in an infinite universe or that there are an infinite number of other universes.
Just because we don't believe that it is possible, doesn't make it impossible. Our understanding could be wrong and it's arrogant of us to assume that the status quo will always be correct.
Relating it back to the OP, the concept of infinity could prove that we live in an infinite universe or that there are an infinite number of other universes.
Just because we don't believe that it is possible, doesn't make it impossible. Our understanding could be wrong and it's arrogant of us to assume that the status quo will always be correct.
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MazdaPrice
I can't see how we could prove that we live in an infinite universe. And multiple infinite's are impossible.
Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zE-IZynfKM&feature=youtube_gdata_player
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- Toyinster
Very interesting, I'm always fascinated how we (the human race) change our views and beliefs over the course of history...
... I had some jehovah witnesses knock on the door a few months back asking me whether I belived in a single creator or relied on the scientific theories. They were not very impressed when I said I liked the idea of membrane theory and that the big bang was perhaps sparked by two of these membranes coming together and it could be happening all the time. It reminded me of how the Catholic Church sought to silence Galileo and later had to lift the ban on his book.
... I had some jehovah witnesses knock on the door a few months back asking me whether I belived in a single creator or relied on the scientific theories. They were not very impressed when I said I liked the idea of membrane theory and that the big bang was perhaps sparked by two of these membranes coming together and it could be happening all the time. It reminded me of how the Catholic Church sought to silence Galileo and later had to lift the ban on his book.
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Why can't 'we' comprehend it? I watched that video and I understood it.
Add 1 to Graham's number and it gets bigger. Add another one and it gets even bigger still. And you could go on adding units to it forever and it would forever increase in numerical size. Just because it's a number that is not of practical use and would take an awfully long time to write down, doesn't mean we can't imagine how large it is. Of course we can, it's just much, much larger than the next largest number we can think of.
Numbers are a quantity that can easily be measured. The universe is not.
How many units are in pi? For how long do people remain dead?
I think that infinity is possible. Possible.
I agree, but at the same time, how can we disprove whether we live within multiple universes or not?
Unfalsifiability means that we can argue the toss as much as we like, but we can't prove or disprove it either way.
Add 1 to Graham's number and it gets bigger. Add another one and it gets even bigger still. And you could go on adding units to it forever and it would forever increase in numerical size. Just because it's a number that is not of practical use and would take an awfully long time to write down, doesn't mean we can't imagine how large it is. Of course we can, it's just much, much larger than the next largest number we can think of.
Numbers are a quantity that can easily be measured. The universe is not.
How many units are in pi? For how long do people remain dead?
I think that infinity is possible. Possible.
I agree, but at the same time, how can we disprove whether we live within multiple universes or not?
Unfalsifiability means that we can argue the toss as much as we like, but we can't prove or disprove it either way.
BobK
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"If you think you understand infinity, then you do not understand infinity..."
Its a quote from the video below and probably is true for the most part. We have an abstract understanding of infinity as a whole but as we drill down into the details of it, we quickly loose our understanding. A singularity in physics appears as the physical universe tends towards infinity, such as the density of mass within the event horizon of a black hole. Our understanding of physics starts to break down at this point as all sorts of bizarre things are suggested by our current models of physics. Yet mathematical interpretations of infinity suggest that infinities exist.
The bottom line is that the top theoretic physicists don't fully understand what we would describe as an infinity, but that's not to say they don't have any comprehension of what it is.
I believe Tankass's point is somewhat valid, even if its probably not correct in its entirety.
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As for the topic at hand, I think the poll is lacking probably the most important option.
'We simply don't know yet'
I went for the infinite multiverse option, but this means very little, at this point its merely more than a guess. No one can say with any real certainty. I don't really believe in the infinite multiverse at all, but if you were to push for an opinion I would suggest that may be the most likely in my humble opinion.
Its a quote from the video below and probably is true for the most part. We have an abstract understanding of infinity as a whole but as we drill down into the details of it, we quickly loose our understanding. A singularity in physics appears as the physical universe tends towards infinity, such as the density of mass within the event horizon of a black hole. Our understanding of physics starts to break down at this point as all sorts of bizarre things are suggested by our current models of physics. Yet mathematical interpretations of infinity suggest that infinities exist.
The bottom line is that the top theoretic physicists don't fully understand what we would describe as an infinity, but that's not to say they don't have any comprehension of what it is.
I believe Tankass's point is somewhat valid, even if its probably not correct in its entirety.
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As for the topic at hand, I think the poll is lacking probably the most important option.
'We simply don't know yet'
I went for the infinite multiverse option, but this means very little, at this point its merely more than a guess. No one can say with any real certainty. I don't really believe in the infinite multiverse at all, but if you were to push for an opinion I would suggest that may be the most likely in my humble opinion.
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- Wardez
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Well I think it's important to think back at how the multi-verse theory arose in the first place. It came about as a... to put it into barbaric simplicity, a way to have more "room" for string theorists and super gravitists to reconcile their theories across dimensions (as many as eleven). This was necessary to explain away things like super position, which is an artifact of higher quantum physics, by simply giving the particles a place to be if they're simply not here. So the physicist asked himself, " Why not just another dimension? ... *does math* meh, it works for now."
That's pretty much the attitude toward the theory as a whole - a placeholder.
I used to love the idea, now after doing a lot more reading (armchair physicist) I've come to realize it really isn't necessary, it's just that us using our limited concept of dimension in order to divide up hyperspace in order to try and define the state of our matter within it.
Really fun stuff to think about.
Oh and you can't have an infinite universe with entropy, that's a pretty solid jab against the infinite universe. Eventually everything's going to blink out, over trillions of years according to our current best understanding. But there's also the cosmological constant which Einstein came up with to explain how the universe could stay static, this was before he saw Hubble's results proving the expansion of our universe. But it's a mysterious "anti-gravity" ('nother placeholder name ala "dark matter") force which seems to act more like a spring. Einstein abandoned it because he felt it was wrong, but it's gained new traction through use in a new theory of a static, non big bang, universe model. Excited to hear more from that as well.
But people in this thread seem to be shy about using the word belief. Believe what you want, because it's cool, because it has the best evidence, whatever. Belief isn't a scary term that's supposed to put a cap on anything, it's just what you use to pursue new knowledge. There's a lot more belief than fact in physics, trust me. So go for it, pretend like it is fact and keep going till you get slapped in the face with evidence against it or you become a Nobel Prize winner.
That's pretty much the attitude toward the theory as a whole - a placeholder.
I used to love the idea, now after doing a lot more reading (armchair physicist) I've come to realize it really isn't necessary, it's just that us using our limited concept of dimension in order to divide up hyperspace in order to try and define the state of our matter within it.
Really fun stuff to think about.
Oh and you can't have an infinite universe with entropy, that's a pretty solid jab against the infinite universe. Eventually everything's going to blink out, over trillions of years according to our current best understanding. But there's also the cosmological constant which Einstein came up with to explain how the universe could stay static, this was before he saw Hubble's results proving the expansion of our universe. But it's a mysterious "anti-gravity" ('nother placeholder name ala "dark matter") force which seems to act more like a spring. Einstein abandoned it because he felt it was wrong, but it's gained new traction through use in a new theory of a static, non big bang, universe model. Excited to hear more from that as well.
But people in this thread seem to be shy about using the word belief. Believe what you want, because it's cool, because it has the best evidence, whatever. Belief isn't a scary term that's supposed to put a cap on anything, it's just what you use to pursue new knowledge. There's a lot more belief than fact in physics, trust me. So go for it, pretend like it is fact and keep going till you get slapped in the face with evidence against it or you become a Nobel Prize winner.
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Sorry for being picky, but Dark Matter is not place holder for inflation, Dark energy is the place holder for that. Dark matter is the placeholder which holds Galaxies together.
Place holder may be somewhat disingenuous term though, Dark Energy, Dark Matter may be names for processes which we do not understand, nor do we have substantial evidence for them outside of mathematics. They are an uncomfortable topic for physicists as they are effectively something to make the models work.
That said, the Higgs Boson has been a placeholder particle (of which is fundamental to the standard model of particle physics) for years; it's becoming increasingly apparent that the Higgs Boson is not just a place holder, but that it is very much real, we will know by the end of this year. Evidence of Dark Matter is also gathering momentum, it seems its status of 'placeholder' may not be for much longer, dark energy however...
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Shy is probably the wrong word. I am careful about using the word belief particularly in a debate which religion, science, philosophy etc. feature. Its a word that can easily be taken in the wrong context, for example, belief is often confused with faith, I can understand why this happens of course.
I think it was important in my last post to highlight that my opinion of the multi/singurverse was just an opinion and not a belief. The word belief might (to some people) indicate that I have a tangible affiliation to the notion that there is an infinite number of universe, this of course isn't true, its no more than a hunch; I don't think my opinion has any real validity.
If you asked me 'Do you believe there is life to be found outside earth in this uni/multiverse'? I would say 'yes'. I believe that there most likely is, again there is little validity behind my opinion, so its probably worthless but I would suggest that is a personal belief even if I am open to the notion that I may be wrong.
I guess I would use the word belief, as something I am reasonably confident to be correct, even if I couldn't say with certainty. When I eat my dinner later, I am confident in my belief that it hasn't been poisoned, i could of course be wrong, but I don't think I am (I will find out later). I wouldn't toss a coin and say I believe its going to be heads, I would not feel confident in my assessment, I would call it a guess.
Going by the above standard, my poll answer is a guess not a belief.
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Exorcet
Sorry, I fail at mathematics.
My view (or hypothesis, whatever) is that infinity cannot be found in nature (infinite matter/energy, I mean) but only as a mathematical concept or the supernatural (God).
My hypothesis is that if you take a rocket, and just travelled in a perfectly straight line across the universe (for a very long time
) you would eventually end up where you started. This is similar to the fact that if I travelled in a straight line across the earth I would end up where I started at.Don't ask me where I got this from, or to prove this idea, it's just what I feel is most plausible. I am happy to accept the multiverse theory if it has more evidence, but as of yet, I cannot accept it as part of nature, and especially as the ultimate reality. It just adds more questions rather than answers.
I can't grasp my mind around infinity. It seems too mind boggling.
Jubby
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My hypothesis is that if you take a rocket, and just travelled in a perfectly straight line across the universe (for a very long time
Don't ask me where I got this from, or to prove this idea, it's just what I feel is most plausible. I am happy to accept the multiverse theory if it has more evidence, but as of yet, I cannot accept it as part of nature, and especially as the ultimate reality. It just adds more questions rather than answers.
I can't grasp my mind around infinity. It seems too mind boggling.
I understand how you think... but on Earth, you don't travel in a "straight line". It's a curve. Now, if you're insinuating that the universe curves in on itself... that's another idea.
Using what I remember as the accepted theories; Since the universe is infinite and increasing in size, and mass cannot travel faster than the speed of light, then if you would just be continuously approaching the edge of the universe without ever reaching it.
My thought for the single/multiverse; I don't think we have enough information as of yet to begin accepting the multiverses yet. Is it possible, yes.
Dotini
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We have enough evidence that our particular universe is non-random enough to warrant the multiverse belief. In fact, that is the very foundation of it.
The Copernican Principle teaches all thinking people, especially scientists, that Earth is not the center of the universe and not unique. However, the fly in the ointment is the growing set of observations of physical constants that must be just so in order to support conscious life. In other words, anything but random.
The multiverse concept neatly solves this problem by positing (assuming) the existence of other universes which do not support life. This renders our own universe less unique and more random, and allows scientists to rationally assert that our universe has not been designed in any way, and avoids the need for a designer to set all our physical constants to the just so figure.
Since the multiverse idea is an assumption and not demonstrated, it may of course be disputed. Both sides of the argument are quite rational.
Respectfully submitted,
Steve
Jubby
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I agree that there is enough to warrant the discussion, but I truly think that before we go trying to figure out if there are other universes, we need to figure out our own.
I got you! I would think you'd need a massive singularity to create a gravitational field that would make our universe bend in on itself. I'd think it's far fetched, but not entirely impossible.
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I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but infinity is actually is quite simple. (Or at least it has always seemed simple to me).
Okay, lets start with time. Time shall be represented by a clock that ticks. Eventually, it must stop ticking. (e.i. time must come to an end at some point)
Infinite time (e.i. Infinity) is not a clock that ticks forever, but instead a clock that never ticks at all. Because counting to infinity is as useless to us as it is to nature itself. Real infinity is where time doesn't exist.
Okay, lets start with time. Time shall be represented by a clock that ticks. Eventually, it must stop ticking. (e.i. time must come to an end at some point)
Infinite time (e.i. Infinity) is not a clock that ticks forever, but instead a clock that never ticks at all. Because counting to infinity is as useless to us as it is to nature itself. Real infinity is where time doesn't exist.
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No time whatsoever. Terms such as "how long" are completely irrelevant when referring to infinity. Infinity is the absence of time, not time going on endlessly.
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