Ruminations on aliens and multiverses (Introduction)
by David Turell 
, Tuesday, June 23, 2015, 20:29 (3440 days ago)
Can't prove anything about these topics:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/does-a-multiverse-fermi-paradox-disprove-the-multiverse/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20150623-"If reality is actually composed of a vast, vast number of realities, and if ‘anything' can, does, and must happen, and happen many, many, times, this presumably has to include the possibility of living things (whatever they're composed of) skipping between universes willy-nilly. After all, just because physics in our universe makes that look kind of tricky, it doesn't prevent the physics of a huge number of other universes from saying ‘sure, go right ahead!'-"And there's the rub. Discounting our all-to-human capacity for self-delusion, there is absolutely no hard evidence that we are being, or ever have been, visited by stuff from other realities. (And really, if you do feel inclined to comment and tell me I'm wrong about that, save your breath, sorry)."
Ruminations on multiverses
by David Turell , Tuesday, June 23, 2015, 20:40 (3440 days ago) @ David Turell
More conjectures with no proof. Endless prattle:-http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/science/humankinds-existentially-lucky-numbers.html?_r=0-"Finally there are followers of a middle path, who seek to prove that the universe is not accidental but inevitable, with its set of defining numbers as constrained and mutually consistent as the solution to a Sudoku puzzle.-"That was the goal of string theory when it rose to prominence three decades ago. The mathematics, with its extra dimensions and pretzel geometries, was so mesmerizing that the theory seemed almost certain to be true — a tightly woven description, when ultimately deciphered, of a universe just like our own.-"Instead, string theory spiraled off in another direction, predicting a whole multitude of other universes, each with a different physics and each unobservable except for our own. Maybe some of the other universes have spawned different kinds of conscious beings, made from something other than atoms and just as puzzled (in some unfathomable equivalent of puzzlement) as we are.-"Or maybe the whole multiverse thing is just an elaborate way of saying that there are endless ways that this Universe (singular and with a capital U) might have unfolded — counterfactual histories, no more real than a hypothetical Earth on which the Mayans ally with the Incas to fight a thermonuclear war against beings on the moon.-"For years now theorists have been torn between those who reject the multiverse as “a cop-out of infinite proportions,” as Natalie Wolchover and Peter Byrne wrote last year in Quanta, and those who insist the idea is too powerful to be wrong, even if there is no way to verify that any of the other universes exist.-"Plenty of multiverse skeptics remain open to some version of string theory, one that doesn't require redefining what counts as real. Maybe, lurking still hidden in the thicket, is a magic equation, showing that this universe is, after all, the only one that can be."
Ruminations on multiverses; Paul Davies
by David Turell , Saturday, August 15, 2015, 00:51 (3388 days ago) @ David Turell
A nice review article of his pronouncements against the theory:-http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/physicist-paul-davies-killer-argument-against-the-multiverse/-"In addition to the reductio ad absurdum advanced above, Professor Paul Davies has other objections to the multiverse. In an interview last year on Closer to Truth titled, Are There Multiple Universes? (August 23, 2014), Professor Davies explained why he finds the multiverse hypothesis intellectually unsatisfying:- "It's not an unreasonable speculation. However, it falls far short of being a complete theory of existence, which it's often presented as. That is, if there's a multiverse, we can forget about all the mysteries of the universe because it's all explained: everything's out there somewhere. End of story. Well, it's simply not true, because to get a multiverse, you need a universe-generating mechanism - something has got to make all those Big Bangs go “Bang!” - so you're going to need some laws of physics to do that. All of the theories of the multiverse assume quantum mechanics, quantum physics, to give the element of spontaneity to make the bangs happen. They assume pre-existing space and time, they assume the normal notion of causality - a whole host of things. You write down a list, there's about ten different basic assumptions they have to make to get the theory to work. And you can say, well, “Where did they all come from? What about these meta-laws that generate universes and impose effective local by-laws, as Martin Rees would call it, upon these universes? What is this distribution mechanism? How does that work? Where do those rules come from? So all you've done is shift the problem of existence up from the level of universe to the level of multiverse. But you haven't explained it."
Ruminations on multiverses; Paul Davies
by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Saturday, August 15, 2015, 01:26 (3388 days ago) @ David Turell
He makes many of the same points we all have made, though I cringe that he blatantly refuses to follow them through to their logical conclusion that our universe was designed.
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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.
Ruminations on multiverses; Paul Davies
by David Turell , Saturday, August 15, 2015, 04:22 (3388 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained
Tony: He makes many of the same points we all have made, though I cringe that he blatantly refuses to follow them through to their logical conclusion that our universe was designed.-As a highly respected scientist he has to couch his ideas carefully. he has alays come across as a deist to me.
Ruminations on origin of life; Paul Davies
by David Turell , Saturday, August 15, 2015, 14:34 (3387 days ago) @ David Turell
Always with bright challenging ideas. We should intensely study microbes to see if truly different forms of life exist on Earth:-http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/are-we-alone-paul-davies-on-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life/6685530-For starters he thinks SETI is don all wrong:-"The major problem, Professor Davies says, is that the current strategy only picks up messages deliberately being sent to Earth—and that doesn't make sense.-"'The strategy so far is to point a radio telescope at a hopeful star for maybe half an hour, and then hop from star to star in the hope of picking up a message,' he says.-"'The question is, is ET on a planet, around a star, beaming a message at us? That's not credible. It's not credible that a civilisation 1,000 light years away would be beaming messages at Earth. Why should they?-"'If they can see Earth, if they have super-duper advanced technology, they have the ability to see our planet and to figure that there is intelligent life on it—moderately intelligent life on it—but they see Earth as it was 1,000 years ago. There were no radio telescopes; there was no radio.-"'In another 1,000 years they will hear the words I'm speaking now [and say], "Aha! There is intelligent life on Earth! We'll send them a message!" But it's too soon, and so we shouldn't be looking for deliberately directed messages, but looking for beacons instead.'-(BBella, this is why I doubt alien intrusion, the time it takes to travel.)-So he says lets study life here:- "For Professor Davies, the big question is whether Earth-like planets are likely to have life on them. And that can only be answered, he says, if we understand how life began in the first place.-"'Is it the case that a planet that is like Earth is likely to have life on it? We can only answer that question if we know the mechanism that turns non-life into life,' he says.-"'If we knew what did it, we could estimate the odds. We don't know what did it and so we've got these two points of view: [either] it's a bizarre fluke, it won't happen twice, [or] somehow it's built into the nature of the universe, and life will pop up all over the place.'-"He says the idea that needs to be tested is whether life is, in fact, 'a cosmic imperative', as Nobel prize-winning biologist Christian de Duve believed.-"'If life does pop up obligingly in Earth-like conditions, no planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so shouldn't life have started many times over right here on our home planet? How do we know it didn't? Has anybody actually looked?' asks Davies.-"'When I worked on these ideas with my friend Charley Lineweaver at the ANU some years ago ... [it] turned out that really nobody had even thought of this possibility.'-"He argues that the focus should be on examining microbes, since most life on earth is microbial. The right kind of investigation could unearth what scientists describe as a 'shadow biosphere'.-"'You can't tell by looking what are microbes made of. You don't know how it ticks, you've got to delve into its biochemical innards to work that out, and if you go looking for life as we know it, you're not going to discover life as we don't know it,' he says.-"'Those teeming microbes—of which probably only about less than 1 per cent have actually been characterised, let alone cultured and sequenced—we don't know what they are. There's plenty of room at the bottom for microbial life that would be radically alternative to known life.'"
Ruminations on origin of life; Paul Davies
by BBella , Saturday, August 15, 2015, 22:56 (3387 days ago) @ David Turell
"'The question is, is ET on a planet, around a star, beaming a message at us? That's not credible. It's not credible that a civilisation 1,000 light years away would be beaming messages at Earth. Why should they? > > "'If they can see Earth, if they have super-duper advanced technology, they have the ability to see our planet and to figure that there is intelligent life on it—moderately intelligent life on it—but they see Earth as it was 1,000 years ago. There were no radio telescopes; there was no radio. > > "'In another 1,000 years they will hear the words I'm speaking now [and say], "Aha! There is intelligent life on Earth! We'll send them a message!" But it's too soon, and so we shouldn't be looking for deliberately directed messages, but looking for beacons instead.' > > (BBella, this is why I doubt alien intrusion, the time it takes to travel.)-...said the Earth man. I do not doubt it at all, especially given how far technology can advance in just a hundred, thousand, etc years. But also, alien's don't have to come from outside our solar system, they may be based here on Earth or another dimension, etc. I have no idea. But the possibilities are endless....
Ruminations on multiverses; Paul Davies
DAVID: nice review article of his pronouncements against the theory:-http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/physicist-paul-davies-killer-argument...-QUOTE: "In addition to the reductio ad absurdum advanced above, Professor Paul Davies has other objections to the multiverse. In an interview last year on Closer to Truth titled, Are There Multiple Universes? (August 23, 2014), Professor Davies explained why he finds the multiverse hypothesis intellectually unsatisfying:-"It's not an unreasonable speculation. However, it falls far short of being a complete theory of existence, which it's often presented as. That is, if there's a multiverse, we can forget about all the mysteries of the universe because it's all explained: everything's out there somewhere. End of story. Well, it's simply not true, because to get a multiverse, you need a universe-generating mechanism - something has got to make all those Big Bangs go “Bang!” - so you're going to need some laws of physics to do that. All of the theories of the multiverse assume quantum mechanics, quantum physics, to give the element of spontaneity to make the bangs happen. They assume pre-existing space and time, they assume the normal notion of causality - a whole host of things. You write down a list, there's about ten different basic assumptions they have to make to get the theory to work. And you can say, well, “Where did they all come from? What about these meta-laws that generate universes and impose effective local by-laws, as Martin Rees would call it, upon these universes? What is this distribution mechanism? How does that work? Where do those rules come from? So all you've done is shift the problem of existence up from the level of universe to the level of multiverse. But you haven't explained it."-TONY: He makes many of the same points we all have made, though I cringe that he blatantly refuses to follow them through to their logical conclusion that our universe was designed.-DAVID: As a highly respected scientist he has to couch his ideas carefully. he has alays come across as a deist to me.-We all make the same points about every hypothesis, because as he so rightly points out, no hypothesis can escape from the shackles of cause and effect. What caused the Big Bang (if it happened)? What caused the universe? What caused the multiverse (if there is such a thing)? What caused God (if he exists)? “First cause” is a philosophical cop-out: if you can say God has always been there, you might as well say universes have always been there. And “the rules” have always been there. Chicken and egg. If you say rules require a maker, the next question is who makes the maker? We can never know the origin of the universe for the simple reason that we can never know what existed before whatever cause we opt for. But Davies, you and I are stubborn and imaginative and indefatigable and idealistic, because we still keep trying to grasp the ungraspable. Aren't we humans wonderful?
Ruminations on multiverses; Paul Davies
by David Turell , Sunday, August 16, 2015, 19:06 (3386 days ago) @ dhw
Davies: So all you've done is shift the problem of existence up from the level of universe to the level of multiverse. But you haven't explained it."[/i] > > TONY: He makes many of the same points we all have made, though I cringe that he blatantly refuses to follow them through to their logical conclusion that our universe was designed. > > DAVID: As a highly respected scientist he has to couch his ideas carefully. he has alays come across as a deist to me.-> dhw: We can never know the origin of the universe for the simple reason that we can never know what existed before whatever cause we opt for. But Davies, you and I are stubborn and imaginative and indefatigable and idealistic, because we still keep trying to grasp the ungraspable. Aren't we humans wonderful?-Yes, we are so wonderful we are the obvious pinnacle of evolution.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Wednesday, September 09, 2015, 04:36 (3363 days ago) @ David Turell
Multiverses can be the result of continuing inflation according to some, but really they would only be strange extension of this universe, not truly separate. More pie in the sky assumptions:-https://theconversation.com/the-theory-of-parallel-universes-is-not-just-maths-it-is-science-that-can-be-tested-46497-It is important to keep in mind that the multiverse view is not actually a theory, it is rather a consequence of our current understanding of theoretical physics. This distinction is crucial. We have not waved our hands and said: “Let there be a multiverse”. Instead the idea that the universe is perhaps one of infinitely many is derived from current theories like quantum mechanics and string theory.-***-However, for string theory to work mathematically, it requires at least ten physical dimensions. Since we can only observe four dimensions: height, width, depth (all spatial) and time (temporal), the extra dimensions of string theory must therefore be hidden somehow if it is to be correct. To be able to use the theory to explain the physical phenomena we see, these extra dimensions have to be “compactified” by being curled up in such a way that they are too small to be seen. Perhaps for each point in our large four dimensions, there exists six extra indistinguishable directions?-A problem, or some would say, a feature, of string theory is that there are many ways of doing this compactification -10500 possibilities is one number usually touted about. Each of these compactifications will result in a universe with different physical laws - such as different masses of electrons and different constants of gravity. However there are also vigorous objections to the methodology of compactification, so the issue is not quite settled.-But given this, the obvious question is: which of these landscape of possibilities do we live in? String theory itself does not provide a mechanism to predict that, which makes it useless as we can't test it. But fortunately, an idea from our study of early universe cosmology has turned this bug into a feature.-***-While the exact details of the theory are still being hotly debated, inflation is widely accepted by physicists. However, a consequence of this theory is that there must be other parts of the universe that are still accelerating. However, due to the quantum fluctuations of space-time, some parts of the universe never actually reach the end state of inflation. This means that the universe is, at least according to our current understanding, eternally inflating. Some parts can therefore end up becoming other universes, which could become other universes etc. This mechanism generates a infinite number of universes.-By combining this scenario with string theory, there is a possibility that each of these universes possesses a different compactification of the extra dimensions and hence has different physical laws.-***-The universes predicted by string theory and inflation live in the same physical space (unlike the many universes of quantum mechanics which live in a mathematical space), they can overlap or collide. Indeed, they inevitably must collide, leaving possible signatures in the cosmic sky which we can try to search for.-The exact details of the signatures depends intimately on the models - ranging from cold or hot spots in the cosmic microwave background to anomalous voids in the distribution of galaxies. Nevertheless, since collisions with other universes must occur in a particular direction, a general expectation is that any signatures will break the uniformity of our observable universe.-These signatures are actively being pursued by scientists. Some are looking for it directly through imprints in the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang. However, no such signatures are yet to be seen. Others are looking for indirect support such as gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time as massive objects pass through. Such waves could directly prove the existence of inflation, which ultimately strengthens the support for the multiverse theory.-Comment: Gravitational waves only prove Einstein's theories and inflation, little more.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
DAVID: Multiverses can be the result of continuing inflation according to some, but really they would only be strange extension of this universe, not truly separate. More pie in the sky assumptions:-https://theconversation.com/the-theory-of-parallel-universes-is-not-just-maths-it-is-sc...-QUOTE: “It is important to keep in mind that the multiverse view is not actually a theory, it is rather a consequence of our current understanding of theoretical physics. This distinction is crucial. We have not waved our hands and said: “Let there be a multiverse”. Instead the idea that the universe is perhaps one of infinitely many is derived from current theories like quantum mechanics and string theory.”-It is not a theory, but it is a consequence of our understanding of current theories. If a theory is derived from theories, how does that make it anything other than a theory? Here are some more quotes: “...the issue is not quite settled.” “String theory itself does not provide a mechanism for that, which makes it useless as we can't test it.” “...the exact details of the theory are still being hotly debated.” “...which could become other universes etc.” “...These signatures are actively being pursued by scientists...However, no such signatures are yet to be seen.” “Such waves could directly prove the existence of inflation, which ultimately strengthens the support for the multiverse theory.” -Yep, the multiverse theory is not a theory, and its support is strengthened by all the evidence that has not yet been found.-If this is the current level of scientific debate, it's no wonder some folk turn to religion.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Wednesday, September 09, 2015, 14:31 (3362 days ago) @ dhw
“Such waves could directly prove the existence of inflation, which ultimately strengthens the support for the multiverse theory[/i].” > > dhw: Yep, the multiverse theory is not a theory, and its support is strengthened by all the evidence that has not yet been found. > > If this is the current level of scientific debate, it's no wonder some folk turn to religion.-All a house of cards
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Sunday, April 03, 2016, 21:39 (3155 days ago) @ David Turell
A new essay covering the arguments on both sides of the question from different scientists:-http://www.space.com/32452-can-science-explain-the-multiverse.html-"the same set of facts, theories and inferences that imply a multiverse also severely limit, and perhaps proscribe completely, humans' capacity to conduct high-grade scientific studies, experimental or observational, to detect a possible multiverse. So is the search for a multiverse "science?" -***-"Van Fraassen said he is not a "scientific realist," meaning that he does not accept that the scientific criterion of success is "truth in every respect" or "truth, period." He said he rejects the prevailing notion that science can penetrate deeper than "just what's observable" and "postulate all things needed in order to explain observable things." -***-"Princeton physics professor J. Richard Gott described the boundaries of science in terms of what science can and cannot know. "We've learned a great deal about the universe — age, structure, initial conditions, how it started, how it's developing. But a theologian might say, 'Well, have you really answered the question of why is there a universe, as opposed to no universe at all?' It's easy to imagine no universe at all. Science is not prepared to answer this question, at least not at the present time," he said. -***-"Ellis, who is well known for challenging the multiverse, argued that "attempts to exempt speculative theories of the universe from experimental verification undermine science. "Because we cannot see them," Ellis told me, "we can't prove anything about them," emphasizing skeptical commentary similar to what he shared in my essay on the multiverse.-**-"'This is a very powerful argument," Linde noted in response. "You cannot prove anything about things that you cannot see. Fortunately, this argument is wrong. Here's what's often missed in the discussion of the multiverse: If we have many experimental or observational facts that can be explained only in the context of one particular theory (e.g., multiverse), these facts constitute experimental or observational evidence in favor of this theory." multiverse.-"'Thus, anybody disliking the theory of the multiverse," Linde continued, "should be asked to present an explanation of these observational or experimental facts in any other context, not involving a multiverse. Many people tried. Nobody succeeded. That's why we take it so seriously." -***-"Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the pioneers of this new way of thinking about science, said that assuming "different versions of the multiverse idea, the anthropic principle is just common sense." The reason, he said, was that "if there is a vast number of universes — in which the various constants [of physics], including the energy in empty space [known as the cosmological constant], vary from universe to universe — it is natural that we will be only in the kind of universe that could support life."-"I couldn't make any sense of this 'anthropic principle'," Linde explained, "until I proposed a model of an inflationary universe consisting of many different parts with different properties [different laws of physics]. The same picture appears in a much more convincing way in [cosmic] eternal chaotic inflation and finally became even more convincing after the discovery of 10^500 vacua in string theory." -"This theoretical finding was that there are (very roughly) 10^500 different, theoretically feasible configurations or ways that string theory can generate different, theoretically feasible laws of physics (based on all the possible stable, geometrical or topological configurations of an infinitesimally small, higher-dimensional "manifold" that string theory proposes as the foundation of space and time and particles and forces). -***-"In response, Ellis stated that Linde's argument requires three parts: experimental or observational facts to be explained, a viable theory that can explain these facts and no other theory that can work as well. And Ellis claimed that for the multiverse, "there are problems with each part.'"-Comment: Linde's dependence on String theory skips the fact that strings are not proven. Article goes on and on, round and round. Review it for full flavor.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
DAVID: A new essay covering the arguments on both sides of the question from different scientists:-http://www.space.com/32452-can-science-explain-the-multiverse.html-I was particularly struck by one of the quotes:-QUOTE: "'This is a very powerful argument," Linde noted in response. "You cannot prove anything about things that you cannot see. Fortunately, this argument is wrong. Here's what's often missed in the discussion of the multiverse: If we have many experimental or observational facts that can be explained only in the context of one particular theory (e.g., multiverse), these facts constitute experimental or observational evidence in favor of this theory." multiverse. "'Thus, anybody disliking the theory of the multiverse," Linde continued, "should be asked to present an explanation of these observational or experimental facts in any other context, not involving a multiverse. Many people tried. Nobody succeeded. That's why we take it so seriously." -The agnostic cannot resist putting on his theist hat. If you substitute the word “God” for the word “multiverse”, you will see why the God theory has to be taken seriously.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Monday, April 04, 2016, 18:23 (3154 days ago) @ dhw
> dhw: QUOTE: "'This is a very powerful argument," Linde noted in response. "You cannot prove anything about things that you cannot see. Fortunately, this argument is wrong. Here's what's often missed in the discussion of the multiverse: If we have many experimental or observational facts that can be explained only in the context of one particular theory (e.g., multiverse), these facts constitute experimental or observational evidence in favor of this theory." multiverse. > "'Thus, anybody disliking the theory of the multiverse," Linde continued, "should be asked to present an explanation of these observational or experimental facts in any other context, not involving a multiverse. Many people tried. Nobody succeeded. That's why we take it so seriously." > > The agnostic cannot resist putting on his theist hat. If you substitute the word “God” for the word “multiverse”, you will see why the God theory has to be taken seriously.-Exactly my point in presenting the discussion. Linde won't allow himself to view the issue of God.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Wednesday, August 31, 2016, 23:10 (3005 days ago) @ David Turell
Basically not worth anything as a theory, but it helps avoid theologic questions:-http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/the-multiverse-as-imagination-killer/497417/-"It might be true. I'm not really interested in the science of multiverse theory so much as its impact on the way we think about ourselves, but it helps to state the problem. That problem is wave function collapse. At a quantum level, particles don't exist as solid objects in space but as probability waves describing the various positions that could potentially be occupied. This is demonstrated by the famous double-slit experiment: set up a laser to fire electrons one by one at a screen through a metal plate with two slits, and then see where they land. If each electron were to pass through one slit or another, you'd get two straight bands of light; instead, you get a pattern of rippling bands. Interference—as if rather than one particle, there had been two waves. The electrons have passed through both slits, simultaneously. However, if you set up a recording device to monitor the slits themselves, the wave function collapses back into solidity: all that's observed is one electron passing through one slit.-"The hidden question: who decides which slit?-"In his 1951 book Der evangelische Glaube und das Denken der Gegenwart, the German academic Karl Heim gave us a perfectly workable answer: God did it. The Almighty, in His infinite benevolence, carefully tends to the waveform collapse of every particle, working on the tiniest levels to create a world kinder to human life.-"Heim's work has been enormously influential in the field of theology, but for some reason it's generally rejected by the scientific community. Instead, thousands of physicists—big names like Stephen Hawking (who called it ‘trivially true'), Brian Greene, and Neil deGrasse Tyson included—pay lip service to the many-worlds interpretation: the particle still passed through both slits; one here, and one in another universe, created especially for the occasion. It certainly sounds more scientific than Heim's theory, which tries to shoehorn a Bronze Age concept into an increasingly inhospitable reality. The only snag is that there's actually very little difference. There's no way we could ever carry out any experiment to test for the multiverse's existence in the world, because it's not in our world. It's an article of faith, and not a very secure one. What's more likely: a potentially infinite number of useless parallel universes, or one perfectly ordinary God?-***-"The multiverse is a prop, a way to explain away things that can't otherwise be explained."-Comment: Faith in multiverses or faith in God. I don't see another choice.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
David's comment: Faith in multiverses or faith in God. I don't see another choice. -Why not the one universe, infinite and eternal, constantly renewing and changing itself through interplay between energy and matter?
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Friday, September 02, 2016, 00:24 (3004 days ago) @ dhw
David's comment: Faith in multiverses or faith in God. I don't see another choice. > > > dhw: Why not the one universe, infinite and eternal, constantly renewing and changing itself through interplay between energy and matter?-That requires multiple Big Bangs, for which there is no evidence. we have a spatially flat universe from all evidence which means it expands until a heat death.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
David's comment: Faith in multiverses or faith in God. I don't see another choice.-dhw: Why not the one universe, infinite and eternal, constantly renewing and changing itself through interplay between energy and matter?-DAVID: That requires multiple Big Bangs, for which there is no evidence. we have a spatially flat universe from all evidence which means it expands until a heat death.-Leaving aside the fact that the Big Bang theory remains a theory, we have no idea what preceded it, and there is no evidence for ANY theory, including that of an eternal form of conscious energy which you call God and which you think caused the Big Bang and therefore must have preceded the Big Bang. There is no objection you can raise to my hypothesis that cannot be raised against every other hypothesis. -QUOTE: "The first option is to grant Koonin's theory that we won a lottery against mind-staggering odds, requiring a near infinite number of unseen, untestable universes. -Another option is ONE universe going back through eternity, as above, and that too offers an infinite number of combinations, making the odds irrelevant.-QUOTE: The second option arises out of our observation that the universe and this particular planet seem to be incredibly fine-tuned to support life. It may be more rational, therefore, to conclude that there is, in fact, just one Creator who is greatly interested in Earth and its inhabitants. -That is a colossal leap of reasoning, and totally ignores the equal mystery of the origin of a ”Creator”. And why only one anyway? Our distant ancestors believed in multiple gods, as do many people today. QUOTE: So the choice is between an infinite number of universes to explain our monstrous stroke of luck, or a Creator of the cosmos who has a purpose in mind for humanity. I suggest we go with Ockham's Razor and opt for the latter.-If we go with Ockham's Razor, we have an infinite, eternal universe which eventually was bound to come up with a combination for life. (But see my final comment.) One mighty stroke of luck, as opposed to the complexities of an unsourced, unknown, unknowable mind so vast that it can create and encompass billions of solar systems that come and go for no apparent reason...etc. etc. -David's comment: Since the multiverse is unprovable and a cop-out, I'll stick with Ockham and God. I've offered Koonin's odds before.-Since every explanation (including the one I have offered above) is an unprovable cop-out, I'll stay on my fence.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Friday, September 02, 2016, 23:19 (3003 days ago) @ dhw
> DAVID: That requires multiple Big Bangs, for which there is no evidence. we have a spatially flat universe from all evidence which means it expands until a heat death. > > dhw: Leaving aside the fact that the Big Bang theory remains a theory, we have no idea what preceded it, and there is no evidence for ANY theory, including that of an eternal form of conscious energy which you call God and which you think caused the Big Bang and therefore must have preceded the Big Bang. There is no objection you can raise to my hypothesis that cannot be raised against every other hypothesis.-You have simply sidestepped my statement of current measurements that show we have a flat universe that should continue to stretch out and finally die. And we see it actually flying apart at great speed based on the fully accepted supernova studies. I base my theories on what we observe as facts about this universe. I agree we don't know what preceded the arrival of this universe.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
DAVID: That requires multiple Big Bangs, for which there is no evidence. we have a spatially flat universe from all evidence which means it expands until a heat death.-dhw: Leaving aside the fact that the Big Bang theory remains a theory, we have no idea what preceded it, and there is no evidence for ANY theory, including that of an eternal form of conscious energy which you call God and which you think caused the Big Bang and therefore must have preceded the Big Bang. There is no objection you can raise to my hypothesis that cannot be raised against every other hypothesis.-DAVID: You have simply sidestepped my statement of current measurements that show we have a flat universe that should continue to stretch out and finally die. And we see it actually flying apart at great speed based on the fully accepted supernova studies. I base my theories on what we observe as facts about this universe. I agree we don't know what preceded the arrival of this universe.-We do not even know if the universe is finite or infinite, and whether or not the big bang theory is correct, we do not - as you admit - know what preceded it. Current measurements can only be based on what is observable, and if the universe is infinite and eternal, the observable is relatively no bigger than a grain of sand on a beach zillions of miles long. Atheist scientists also base their theories on what are believed to be facts about this universe, so that argument doesn't help you much. As I see it (a purely subjective view, just like everybody else's), we have nothing but theories based on totally inadequate evidence. Hence, my hypothesis is no more and no less likely than any other.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Saturday, September 03, 2016, 20:58 (3002 days ago) @ dhw
> DAVID: You have simply sidestepped my statement of current measurements that show we have a flat universe that should continue to stretch out and finally die. And we see it actually flying apart at great speed based on the fully accepted supernova studies. I base my theories on what we observe as facts about this universe. I agree we don't know what preceded the arrival of this universe. > > dhw: We do not even know if the universe is finite or infinite, and whether or not the big bang theory is correct, we do not - as you admit - know what preceded it. Current measurements can only be based on what is observable, and if the universe is infinite and eternal, the observable is relatively no bigger than a grain of sand on a beach zillions of miles long. Atheist scientists also base their theories on what are believed to be facts about this universe, so that argument doesn't help you much. As I see it (a purely subjective view, just like everybody else's), we have nothing but theories based on totally inadequate evidence. Hence, my hypothesis is no more and no less likely than any other.-Atheists go well beyond the facts. They conjure up an unlimited universe which goes well beyond the CMB which they admit limits us to 300 million years after the big bang. It is best to deal with what we do know. The rest of the stuff you brought up is theoretical imagination.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another wild view
by David Turell , Saturday, September 03, 2016, 22:38 (3002 days ago) @ David Turell
Conjuring up alternative fine tuning results in a universe that can make carbon easily. Therefore it can possibly exist! The games folks play to sell the multiverse and get rid of our fine tuning:-https://www.newscientist.com/article/2104223-stars-burning-strangely-make-life-in-the-multiverse-more-likely/-Your existence depends on an improbable threesome. A delicate reaction within stars called the triple-alpha process, which creates carbon, ... Now, two researchers argue that stars in other universes might have alternative ways of producing carbon, giving life as we know it a greater chance in multiple universes.-The triple-alpha process gets its name from the three helium nuclei involved, which are also known as alpha particles. When the universe formed, it mostly consisted of hydrogen and helium, the simplest elements in the periodic table. Heavier elements were forged by the first stars, which fused the lighter nuclei together.-There's just one problem with this tidy model. Fuse two alpha particles together and you end up with a nucleus of four protons and four neutrons - namely beryllium-8, an isotope of the fourth element in the periodic table. But beryllium-8 is highly unstable and falls apart into two alpha particles within a fraction of a second. That means there isn't much of it in our universe.-“The natural stepping stone towards bigger elements is not present,” says Fred Adams of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.-That's no way to build a cosmos - yet puzzlingly, here we are. In the 1950s, astronomer Fred Hoyle figured out a solution. He argued that the abundance of carbon in the universe must be the result of a coincidence between the energy levels of alpha particles and carbon-12.-Hoyle said that because the energy of three alpha particles creates carbon-12 with more energy than it needs, this extra energy must be equal to an excited state of carbon-12, allowing it to decay to its ground state and remain stable. This so-called “resonance” between the energy values makes it possible to form carbon by fusing three alpha particles together.-Experiments later proved him right, but the resonance introduced its own problems. It occurs at a very particular value, 7.644 megaelectronvolts (MeV), and calculations show that the triple-alpha reaction is very sensitive to this value. Vary it by 0.1 MeV and the reaction will slow, producing less carbon, and a change of more than 0.3 MeV will halt carbon production altogether.-Hoyle and others argued that this means our universe must have been fine-tuned for life. That resonance could have occurred at a range of energies, and the fact that it just happened to occur at the point we needed it to for our existence makes us astonishingly lucky.-The odds of this happening at random are very low, and some argue that the only way to explain it is if our universe is just one of many in a multiverse. In that case, each universe could have slightly different values for the fundamental constants of physics. Life would arise only in suitable universes, meaning we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves in one of these. (my bold)-But now Adams and his colleague Evan Grohs have argued that if other universes have different fundamental constants anyway, it's possible to create a universe in which beryllium-8 is stable, thus making it easy to form carbon and the heavier elements.-For this to happen would require a change in the binding energy of beryllium-8 of less than 0.1 MeV - something that the pair's calculations show should be possible by slightly altering the strength of the strong force, which is responsible for holding nuclei together.-Simulating how stars might burn in such a universe, they found that the stable beryllium-8 would produce an abundance of carbon, meaning life as we know it could potentially arise. “There are many more working universes than most people realise,” says Adams.-These universes would arguably be more logical, he says, with stars steadily building elements along the periodic table without having to resort to the triple-alpha process. “We tend to think not only is our universe fine-tuned for us, we also think this is the best universe one could design,” says Adams. “In some sense, we've designed a better universe.” ( my bold) “It's an interesting point, that there is another way of treating the physics that is no bigger than the tweaking you need to get rid of the carbon resonance,” says Martin Rees of the University of Cambridge.-But Rees points out that we don't really know if the multiverse exists, let alone if different universes would have different physics. “We need a measure of the relative probability of all those things to decide whether we should be surprised that we're in the universe we are in,” he says. ( my bold)-Comment: I love these flights of fancy. The bold areas show the thought pattern of the research folks and Rees' answer. We have life on the universe we live in. They have the temerity to assume our universe has a poor design compared to theirs. Ours works. They don't know if the small change in strong force they propose doesn't affect anything else. Since it holds together nuclei in atoms it may well do odd things elsewhere. Yipes!
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
DAVID: You have simply sidestepped my statement of current measurements that show we have a flat universe that should continue to stretch out and finally die. And we see it actually flying apart at great speed based on the fully accepted supernova studies. I base my theories on what we observe as facts about this universe. I agree we don't know what preceded the arrival of this universe.-dhw: We do not even know if the universe is finite or infinite, and whether or not the big bang theory is correct, we do not - as you admit - know what preceded it. Current measurements can only be based on what is observable, and if the universe is infinite and eternal, the observable is relatively no bigger than a grain of sand on a beach zillions of miles long. Atheist scientists also base their theories on what are believed to be facts about this universe, so that argument doesn't help you much. As I see it (a purely subjective view, just like everybody else's), we have nothing but theories based on totally inadequate evidence. Hence, my hypothesis is no more and no less likely than any other.-DAVID: Atheists go well beyond the facts. They conjure up an unlimited universe which goes well beyond the CMB which they admit limits us to 300 million years after the big bang. It is best to deal with what we do know. The rest of the stuff you brought up is theoretical imagination.-I'm surprised you can't balance your statement by acknowledging that theists also go well beyond the facts. And I'm surprised you don't acknowledge that nobody even knows whether the universe is limited or unlimited. There are VAST gaps in our knowledge, and that is precisely why the rest of the stuff HAS to be theoretical imagination, and why my hypothesis is no more and no less likely than any other.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Sunday, September 04, 2016, 18:45 (3001 days ago) @ dhw
> dhw: I'm surprised you can't balance your statement by acknowledging that theists also go well beyond the facts. And I'm surprised you don't acknowledge that nobody even knows whether the universe is limited or unlimited. There are VAST gaps in our knowledge, and that is precisely why the rest of the stuff HAS to be theoretical imagination, and why my hypothesis is no more and no less likely than any other. - This is one theist who tries to use only the established facts about he universe to reach conclusions. I stick by my statements. My only contention beyond proven fact is God.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
dhw: I'm surprised you can't balance your statement by acknowledging that theists also go well beyond the facts. And I'm surprised you don't acknowledge that nobody even knows whether the universe is limited or unlimited. There are VAST gaps in our knowledge, and that is precisely why the rest of the stuff HAS to be theoretical imagination, and why my hypothesis is no more and no less likely than any other. See also your new post concerning dark matter. - DAVID: This is one theist who tries to use only the established facts about he universe to reach conclusions. I stick by my statements. My only contention beyond proven fact is God. - Sounds convincing when you condense your contentions to a single word. But as I understand it, you have concluded that the big bang (a theory, not a proven fact) was caused by a form of pure energy that has always existed and has always been conscious, and deliberately created all the billions of solar systems extinct and extant for the purpose of making conditions that would be conducive to life on Earth. He then built the first living organisms and programmed them with lots of innovations and natural wonders, but sometimes dabbled, in order to produce humans. - Here are what I think most of us would call the proven facts (though some philosophers would doubt even that): there is a universe which contains Planet Earth, on which there is life, ranging from microorganisms to insects, fish, birds, and all sorts of animals including humans. Life in this earthly form demands a complex combination of conditions and materials. The atheist can take precisely the same facts and conclude that they are the result of one chance combination out of an infinite number of combinations. Why is his conclusion less factual or more hypothetical than yours? He can't prove chance, and you can't prove God. Over and over again, you have acknowledged that your conclusions do NOT depend on science or on facts but on faith, and I would say the same applies to the conclusions of the atheist.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Monday, September 05, 2016, 18:24 (3000 days ago) @ dhw
> dhw: Here are what I think most of us would call the proven facts (though some philosophers would doubt even that): there is a universe which contains Planet Earth, on which there is life, ranging from microorganisms to insects, fish, birds, and all sorts of animals including humans. Life in this earthly form demands a complex combination of conditions and materials. The atheist can take precisely the same facts and conclude that they are the result of one chance combination out of an infinite number of combinations. Why is his conclusion less factual or more hypothetical than yours? He can't prove chance, and you can't prove God. Over and over again, you have acknowledged that your conclusions do NOT depend on science or on facts but on faith, and I would say the same applies to the conclusions of the atheist.-It all depends on how you view 'chance' and the odds involved. The atheists have had to invent a multiverse to get rid of my fine tuning arguments. Invention is the sign of a weak argument.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
dhw: Here are what I think most of us would call the proven facts (though some philosophers would doubt even that): there is a universe which contains Planet Earth, on which there is life, ranging from microorganisms to insects, fish, birds, and all sorts of animals including humans. Life in this earthly form demands a complex combination of conditions and materials. The atheist can take precisely the same facts and conclude that they are the result of one chance combination out of an infinite number of combinations. Why is his conclusion less factual or more hypothetical than yours? He can't prove chance, and you can't prove God. Over and over again, you have acknowledged that your conclusions do NOT depend on science or on facts but on faith, and I would say the same applies to the conclusions of the atheist.-DAVID: It all depends on how you view 'chance' and the odds involved. The atheists have had to invent a multiverse to get rid of my fine tuning arguments. Invention is the sign of a weak argument.-And because you cannot accept invention by chance, you invent an eternal, immaterial, sourceless mind. But you cannot see that both sets of inventions are based on the same set of facts, while both sets of conclusions are what you have dismissed as “theoretical imagination”.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Tuesday, September 06, 2016, 15:54 (2999 days ago) @ dhw
> DAVID: It all depends on how you view 'chance' and the odds involved. The atheists have had to invent a multiverse to get rid of my fine tuning arguments. Invention is the sign of a weak argument. > > dhw: And because you cannot accept invention by chance, you invent an eternal, immaterial, sourceless mind. But you cannot see that both sets of inventions are based on the same set of facts, while both sets of conclusions are what you have dismissed as “theoretical imagination”.-When I point out to you only the two possibilities of chance and design exist, you sit on your fence, say both are impossible, and continue to sit. Both are unreasonable? You are the perfect agnostic.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
DAVID: It all depends on how you view 'chance' and the odds involved. The atheists have had to invent a multiverse to get rid of my fine tuning arguments. Invention is the sign of a weak argument.-dhw: And because you cannot accept invention by chance, you invent an eternal, immaterial, sourceless mind. But you cannot see that both sets of inventions are based on the same set of facts, while both sets of conclusions are what you have dismissed as “theoretical imagination”.-DAVID: When I point out to you only the two possibilities of chance and design exist, you sit on your fence, say both are impossible, and continue to sit. Both are unreasonable? You are the perfect agnostic.-No, no, no, I don't say both are impossible. I say that I find both inventions equally difficult to believe, since I can see no evidence for either. That is why, as you have agreed over and over again, belief requires faith.-David's comment (under “Respiratory mitochondrial form”): As techniques of resolution improve the complexity will only become more obvious and the odds of chance dwindle to nothingness. The research road ahead is clear, more and more complexity: chance has no chance of being the correct solution to the question of why is there life.-This is a major reason for my inability to believe in chance. However, we are looking at developments that have been perfected over thousands of millions of years by organisms which may be intelligent enough to invent them. That is why the concept of the intelligent cell is so important. Even if there is a God, there is no need to have him painstakingly working out every single detail of every single complexity for every single organism if you grant that he might have given organisms the means to work it all out for themselves.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Wednesday, September 07, 2016, 15:30 (2998 days ago) @ dhw
David: The research road ahead is clear, more and more complexity: chance has no chance of being the correct solution to the question of why is there life.[/i] > > dhw: This is a major reason for my inability to believe in chance. However, we are looking at developments that have been perfected over thousands of millions of years by organisms which may be intelligent enough to invent them. That is why the concept of the intelligent cell is so important. Even if there is a God, there is no need to have him painstakingly working out every single detail of every single complexity for every single organism if you grant that he might have given organisms the means to work it all out for themselves.-I couldn't agree more that God may have given organisms the ability to 'work it out for themselves'. I would just like proof that such a mechanism exists. Until then pre-planning or dabble.
Ruminations on multiverses; Another view
by David Turell , Saturday, October 29, 2016, 06:41 (2947 days ago) @ David Turell
The LHC has found the Higgs, but is size is too small for the expectations in the standard model. It is considered 'unnatural' which means it doesn't really fit. All the values of particles are unexplained. They just are. As a result any opening to new physics which might support the idea of a multiverse does not exist:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/10/25/no-the-lhc-hasnt-shown-that-we-l...
If you believe Scientific American then “New Physics Complications Lend Support to Multiverse Hypothesis.” From Vox you can learn that “If the LHC can’t find answers to questions like ‘why is the Higgs so light?’ scientists might grow to accept a more out-of-the-box idea: the multiverse.” And according to Business Insider, “If supersymmetry is wrong, [it would] lend more credence to other theories, like the idea that we live in a multiverse.”
The multiverse – a conjectured endless collection of universes – was once the realm of science fiction, but now it’s science. Physicists have conjectured that the laws of nature in each of the universes would be slightly different, and the possibilities are limitless. In some universes electrons would be much heavier than they are in ours, or atoms would decay faster, or gravity would be much stronger. Really anything could happen.
***
Many of the other universes, however, would not contain living beings, because not every combination of natural possibilities for the laws of physics allows for sufficiently complex structures to form. A universe that expands too fast, for example, or that recollapses too quickly, would contain merely a well-mixed soup of elementary particles which, for all we know, wouldn’t write essays.
So some physicists think that their models for the early universe demonstrate there wouldn’t be only one universe but infinitely many. Ok then, you might say, weird enough, but what does this have to do with the LHC?
***
The standard model contains many parameters for which they have no deeper explanation, and they are hoping that there exists an underlying – more fundamental – theory from which the parameters can be calculated.
A parameter that irks theoretical physicists particularly is the mass of the recently discovered Higgs-boson. It comes out to be about 125 GeV. That value is somewhat more than 100 times the mass of a proton and, on its own, sounds pretty unremarkable. But the Higgs-boson is a special particle in that it’s the only known (fundamental) scalar, which means it has spin zero. As a consequence of this, the mass of the Higgs-boson acquires correction terms from quantum fluctuations, and these correction terms are very large – larger than the observed value by almost 15 orders of magnitude.
***
You need two constants that are equal for the first 15 digits and then differ in the 16th. If you’d pick two random numbers this would be extremely unlikely. It seems hand-selected and hence in need of explanation.
For this reason, physicists say that the small mass of the Higgs-boson is “not natural.”
The Higgs mass is the only parameter in the standard model which is not natural. Physicists understood this long before the Higgs itself was discovered, and for this reason many of them believed that the LHC would also find evidence for new physics besides the Higgs. The new physics, so they thought, was necessary to explain the smallness of the Higgs mass and thereby make it natural.
***
The way things went, however, the LHC found the Higgs but no evidence for anything new besides that. No supersymmetry, no extra-dimensions, no black holes, no fourth generation, nothing. This means that the Higgs-mass just sits there, boldly unnatural.
***
Since theoretical physicists haven’t found an explanation for the smallness of the Higgs-mass, they now try to accept that there simply may be no explanation. And if there is no explanation, so the argument goes, then no single value is special, and this must mean that all possible mass values have the same right to existence. In this case there should be a universe for any possible value of the Higgs mass. And for any possible value of every other particle’s mass. In other words, there should be a multiverse which contains universes for all possible combinations of parameters.
So, in a nutshell, the argument is that since theoretical physicists can’t explain the mass of the Higgs, any parameter can take on any possible value and we live in a multiverse.
It’s an interesting argument but it’s logically inconsistent. It relies on an expectation about what we mean by a “random number” or its probability distribution, respectively. There are infinitely many such distributions. The requirement that the numbers in the standard model should obey a certain distribution is merely a hypothesis that turned out to be incompatible with observation.
That, really, is all we can conclude from the data: physicists had a hypothesis for what is “natural.” It turned out to be wrong.
This doesn’t mean there is no multiverse. There might or might not be one. It just means the LHC results don’t tell us anything about it.
Comment: No proof, only conjecture. conjured up to deny fine tuning suggests God.
Ruminations on multiverses; Quantum types
by David Turell , Friday, January 27, 2017, 01:10 (2857 days ago) @ David Turell
There are two types of multiverses: branched tiny local ones as in quantum theory or multiple diverse ones like soap bubbles in every direction:
http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/the-multiple-multiverses-may-be-one-and-the-same?utm_sou...
"Physicists and philosophers have long argued over what quantum theory means, but, in some way or other, they agree that it reveals a vast realm lying beyond the range of our senses. Perhaps the purest incarnation of this principle—the most straightforward reading of the equations of quantum theory—is the many-worlds interpretation, put forward by Hugh Everett in the 1950s. In this view, everything that can happen does in fact happen, somewhere in a vast array of universes, and the probabilities of quantum theory represent the relative numbers of universes experiencing one outcome or another. Indeed, it turns out our classical ‘world’ is only a small part of a much larger reality.
"This array of universes seems, at first glance, to be very different from the one that cosmologists talk about. The cosmological multiverse grew out of models that seek to explain the uniformity of the universe on scales larger than galaxies. The putative parallel universes are distant, distinct regions of spacetime, the result of their own local big bangs, evolving from their own bubbles of quantum foam (or whatever it is that universes sprout from). They are out there in roughly the same way that galaxies are—you could imagine getting in a starship and traveling to them.
"Everett’s many worlds, in contrast, are down here. The concept emerged from efforts to understand the process of laboratory measurement. Particles leaving trails in cloud chambers, atoms deflected by magnets, hot objects emitting light: it was these sorts of hands-on experiments that motivated quantum theory and the search for a coherent interpretation. The quantum “branching” that occurs during a measurement gives rise to new worlds that overlap with the space where we live.
"And yet these two kinds of multiverses have much in common. We can visit either sort only in our mind’s eye. Try as you might to reach another bubble universe in your starship, the intervening space would expand faster than you could possibly cross it; bubbles are thus cut off from one another. Likewise, we are by our very nature blind to other universes in the quantum multiverse. These other worlds, though real, remain forever out of view.
"Moreover, although the quantum multiverse was not developed for cosmology, it is peculiarly well suited to it. In conventional quantum mechanics—the Copenhagen view, embraced by Niels Bohr and his collaborators—one has to distinguish between the observer and the thing being observed. That’s fine for standard laboratory physics. The observer is you, and the experiment is the thing you’re observing. But what if the object under investigation is the entire universe? You can’t get “outside” the universe in order to measure it. The many-worlds interpretation makes no such artificial distinctions. In a new paper, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll, together with graduate students Jason Pollack and Kimberly Boddy, directly applies the many-worlds interpretation to creation of universes in the cosmological multiverse. “Everything that’s very wishy-washy in conventional quantum mechanics becomes, in principle calculable [in the Everett view],” Carroll says.
"Finally, the two kinds of multiverse make identical predictions for our observations. The only difference is that they situate the possible outcomes in different places. Carroll sees an equivalence between “the cosmological multiverse, where different states are located in widely separated regions of spacetime, with a localized multiverse, where the different states are all right here, just in different branches of the wave function.”
***
"Not everyone accepts the multiverse, let alone that varieties of multiverse are similar. But, keeping in mind that these ideas are still tentative, let’s see where they take us. They suggest a radical idea: that the two multiverses may not, in fact, be distinct—that the many-worlds view is the same as the cosmological multiverse. If they seem different, that is because we have been thinking about reality in the wrong way.
***
"Hugh Everett didn’t live long enough to witness the renewal of interest in his version of quantum mechanics. He died of a heart attack in 1982, at the age of 51. A staunch atheist, he was certain that this was the end; his wife, following his instructions, threw his ashes out with the trash. His message, however, may finally be taking root. It can be summed up in four words: Take quantum mechanics seriously. When we do so, we find that the world is—surprise!—larger and richer than we had imagined. Just as Voltaire’s silkworm saw only his web, we see only a small sliver of the multiverse, but, thanks to Everett and those who followed in his footsteps, we may yet slip through the crack in the crystalline shell, “where the earth and the heavens meet,” and glimpse what lies beyond."
Comment: I've skipped a lot of theoretical possibilities the author presents, but the point is obvious. We sit in a small corner of reality watching quanta cross back and forth across a wall we cannot cross to understand the other side.
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
by David Turell , Sunday, March 12, 2017, 18:56 (2812 days ago) @ David Turell
A theist philosopher tackles the question:
http://nautil.us//issue/46/balance/evil-triumphs-in-these-multiverses-and-god-is-powerl...
"The challenge that the multiverse poses for the idea of an all-good, all-powerful God is often focused on fine-tuning. If there are infinite universes, then we don’t need a fine tuner to explain why the conditions of our universe are perfect for life, so the argument goes. But some kinds of multiverse pose a more direct threat. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physicist Hugh Everett III and the modal realism of cosmologist Max Tegmark include worlds that no sane, good God would ever tolerate. The theories are very different, but each predicts the existence of worlds filled with horror and misery.
***
"Everett’s many-worlds and Tegmark’s modal realism both seem to imply that there are huge numbers of horrific universes inhabited solely by such unfortunates. Someone like myself, who remains attracted to the traditional picture of God as loving creator, is bound to find such consequences shocking, and will wonder just how strong the evidence is for these theories.
***
"A theist may also take comfort in the fact that the many-worlds interpretation is still far from scientific orthodoxy. Although beloved by Oxford philosophers and accepted by a growing number of theoretical physicists, the theory remains highly controversial, and there are fundamental problems still being hashed out by the experts.
***
"There is one way, then, in which Everett’s multiverse poses less of a challenge to the theist than Tegmark’s. Everett’s theory doesn’t predict that God won’t do anything for people with short, miserable lives, and it doesn’t predict that God won’t somehow compensate them in an afterlife. Rather, it only predicts that there will be many more short, miserable lives than just the ones in our universe; whereas Tegmark’s theory implies that there have to be worlds in which there are short miserable lives and no afterlife.
"Adding insult to injury, since the horrifying worlds are consequences of pure mathematics, they exist as a matter of absolute necessity—so there is nothing God can do about it! The resulting picture will remain offensive to pious ears: A God who loved all creatures, but was forced to watch infinitely many of them endure lives of inconsolable suffering, would be a God embroiled in a tragedy.
"But there is still hope for the theist.
"Unlike the Everettian many worlds, which issue from experimental theories in physics and so are harder to dismiss, Tegmark’s theory is based on frail philosophical arguments. Take, for example, his claim that the physical universe is a purely mathematical structure: Why should we accept this? Ordinarily, physicists use mathematical structures as models for how the physical world might work, but they do not identify the mathematical model with the world itself. Tegmark’s reason for taking the latter approach is his conviction that physics must be purged of anything but mathematical terms. Non-mathematical concepts, he says, are “anthropocentric baggage,” and must be eliminated for objectivity’s sake. But why think that the only objective descriptions that can truly apply to things as they are in themselves are mathematical descriptions? So far as I can see, he never justifies this assumption. And such a counterintuitive starting point isn’t enough to threaten one’s belief in a benevolent God.
***
"... the idea that we inhabit a multiverse doesn’t have to undermine a belief in God. Every theist should take seriously the possibility that there might exist more universes, simply on the grounds that God would have reason to create more good stuff. Indeed, an infinitely ingenious, resourceful, and creative Being might be expected to work on canvases the size of worlds—some filled with frenetic activity, others more like vast minimalist paintings, many maybe even featuring intelligent beings like ourselves. And the theories of physicists such as Alan Guth and Andrei Linde—whose multiverse is an eternally inflating field that spins off baby universes—or Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok—whose multiverse amounts to an endless cyclical universe punctuated by big bangs and big crunches—are arguably compatible with this theological vision.
"It may turn out that our world is fairly middling, one among the many universes that were good enough for God to create. And the idea of a multiverse consisting of disconnected spacetime universes may make it easier to believe that our world—our universe—is a part of a larger one that is on balance very good and created by a perfectly benevolent deity."
Comment: A philosopher who swallows the possibility of a multiverse and then defends God is dancing on the head of a pin with innumerable angels, but as John Leslie notes God might have created a multiverse.
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
DAVID: A theist philosopher tackles the question:
http://nautil.us//issue/46/balance/evil-triumphs-in-these-multiverses-and-god-is-powerl...
DAVID’s comment: A philosopher who swallows the possibility of a multiverse and then defends God is dancing on the head of a pin with innumerable angels, but as John Leslie notes God might have created a multiverse.
Here’s my take on this profound question: If God exists, and multiverses exist, multiverses could be evil and God could be evil. If God exists, and multiverses exist, multiverses could be good and God could be good. But God may not exist, and multiverses may not exist, and even if they do, we can’t know that they do, and we can’t know whether they are good or evil. That’s philosophy for you. However….
DAVID’s afterthought (“Goldylocks”): ...our universe is about 8.78 billion years old. In that period of time there could have been another galaxy that had an Earth and life.
Yes indeed. And before our universe, or parallel to our universe, there could have been or could be other universes with life. Welcome to the speculators’ party.
DAVID: Considering how quickly life appeared on Earth after it formed, there literally could be many solar systems with life, possibly with folks like us discussing the mysteries of existence. Some been and gone long before us. God could be a very busy fellow comparing the different results with each type of human race produced. […] Actually, this scenario is just as reasonable as thinking ours is the only life-bearing one ever. That we may not be unique does not bother me at all.
In fact, I’d have thought you would prefer this speculation to your original exclusivity hypothesis, since it seems highly unlikely to me that a God would be satisfied with just one experiment/show/spectacle (whatever you like to call it) throughout eternity, while a one-off scenario would reduce the odds against chance. However, I really don’t know why you persist in imagining that your God can only think in terms of human races. Do you believe he’s THAT obsessed with the likes of you and me? On the other hand, I rather like the image of the “fellow comparing the different results”. It sort of humanizes him, and conveys the idea that maybe he creates life as an experiment/show/spectacle that he can watch as and when he pleases.
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
by David Turell , Tuesday, March 14, 2017, 17:37 (2810 days ago) @ dhw
DAVID: Considering how quickly life appeared on Earth after it formed, there literally could be many solar systems with life, possibly with folks like us discussing the mysteries of existence. Some been and gone long before us. God could be a very busy fellow comparing the different results with each type of human race produced. […] Actually, this scenario is just as reasonable as thinking ours is the only life-bearing one ever. That we may not be unique does not bother me at all.dhw:In fact, I’d have thought you would prefer this speculation to your original exclusivity hypothesis, since it seems highly unlikely to me that a God would be satisfied with just one experiment/show/spectacle (whatever you like to call it) throughout eternity, while a one-off scenario would reduce the odds against chance. However, I really don’t know why you persist in imagining that your God can only think in terms of human races. Do you believe he’s THAT obsessed with the likes of you and me? On the other hand, I rather like the image of the “fellow comparing the different results”. It sort of humanizes him, and conveys the idea that maybe he creates life as an experiment/show/spectacle that he can watch as and when he pleases.
Thank you for recognizing that your keep humanizing Him. He may 'compare' but that doesn't humanize Him the way you want to. Certainly multiple groups of humans can be speculated upon as a possibility. As for obsessing over humans, I still accept humans are his end point, even if you don't like the idea of making us so important, because it obviously upsets your even balanced agnosticism.
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
DAVID: Considering how quickly life appeared on Earth after it formed, there literally could be many solar systems with life, possibly with folks like us discussing the mysteries of existence. Some been and gone long before us. God could be a very busy fellow comparing the different results with each type of human race produced. […] Actually, this scenario is just as reasonable as thinking ours is the only life-bearing one ever. That we may not be unique does not bother me at all.
dhw:In fact, I’d have thought you would prefer this speculation to your original exclusivity hypothesis, since it seems highly unlikely to me that a God would be satisfied with just one experiment/show/spectacle (whatever you like to call it) throughout eternity, while a one-off scenario would reduce the odds against chance. However, I really don’t know why you persist in imagining that your God can only think in terms of human races. Do you believe he’s THAT obsessed with the likes of you and me? On the other hand, I rather like the image of the “fellow comparing the different results”. It sort of humanizes him, and conveys the idea that maybe he creates life as an experiment/show/spectacle that he can watch as and when he pleases.
DAVID: Thank you for recognizing that your keep humanizing Him. He may 'compare' but that doesn't humanize Him the way you want to. Certainly multiple groups of humans can be speculated upon as a possibility. As for obsessing over humans, I still accept humans are his end point, even if you don't like the idea of making us so important, because it obviously upsets your even balanced agnosticism.
Sorry, but it was you who used the image of a fellow comparing results, so how can that possibly not be “humanizing”? And sorry again, but I see absolutely nothing wrong with speculating that a conscious mind which creates a conscious mind might (a) have something in common with what it creates, and (b) might have a reason for creating it. And I see nothing wrong in studying the history of life in order to speculate on (a) whether God exists, and (b) if he does, what might be his intentions and his nature. But I agree that multiple groups of humans can be speculated upon as a possibility. So might multiple groups of intelligent jabberwockys, and so might no groups of anything at all.
I don’t know why you use the word “accept” in relation to humans being God’s initial purpose. It is entirely your speculation. Personally, I agree that we are special. I don’t agree that your God must have designed every organism and lifestyle in order to keep life going until he could dabble with the pre-human brain or until his brain enlargement programme could switch itself on. THAT is the sticking-point between us, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my agnosticism.
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
by David Turell , Wednesday, March 15, 2017, 18:02 (2809 days ago) @ dhw
dhw: Sorry, but it was you who used the image of a fellow comparing results, so how can that possibly not be “humanizing”? And sorry again, but I see absolutely nothing wrong with speculating that a conscious mind which creates a conscious mind might (a) have something in common with what it creates, and (b) might have a reason for creating it. And I see nothing wrong in studying the history of life in order to speculate on (a) whether God exists, and (b) if he does, what might be his intentions and his nature. But I agree that multiple groups of humans can be speculated upon as a possibility. So might multiple groups of intelligent jabberwockys, and so might no groups of anything at all.
God might compare the groups of humans He created, if such exist, but I don't think as a creator He would compare them as a human would. Would He root for one over another as a human would, or would He just sit back and observe how they do, in a non-human way? We just don't know. Is His consciousness like ours? Again unknown.
dhw: I don’t know why you use the word “accept” in relation to humans being God’s initial purpose. It is entirely your speculation. Personally, I agree that we are special. I don’t agree that your God must have designed every organism and lifestyle in order to keep life going until he could dabble with the pre-human brain or until his brain enlargement programme could switch itself on. THAT is the sticking-point between us,
As I've explained, He has the right to chose any method of getting to creating humans in any way He chooses. He may be in total control yet look limited.
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
dhw: Sorry, but it was you who used the image of a fellow comparing results, so how can that possibly not be “humanizing”?
DAVID: God might compare the groups of humans He created, if such exist, but I don't think as a creator He would compare them as a human would. Would He root for one over another as a human would, or would He just sit back and observe how they do, in a non-human way?
Sitting back and observing is just what we do in the theatre or cinema. And it is perfectly feasible that he would do so just as we do. What sort of non-human way of observing can you think of if the observer is as conscious as we are?
DAVID: We just don't know. Is His consciousness like ours? Again unknown.
No, we don’t know, any more than we know whether God exists, or what was the origin of life, or what is God’s purpose and nature if he exists. So once again, please do not use the unknowability as an excuse for rejecting any speculations that differ from your own presumptions. It is perfectly possible that a conscious creator would share attributes with his conscious creations.
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
by David Turell , Thursday, March 16, 2017, 14:52 (2808 days ago) @ dhw
dhw: Sitting back and observing is just what we do in the theatre or cinema. And it is perfectly feasible that he would do so just as we do. What sort of non-human way of observing can you think of if the observer is as conscious as we are?
DAVID: We just don't know. Is His consciousness like ours? Again unknown.
dhw: No, we don’t know, any more than we know whether God exists, or what was the origin of life, or what is God’s purpose and nature if he exists. So once again, please do not use the unknowability as an excuse for rejecting any speculations that differ from your own presumptions. It is perfectly possible that a conscious creator would share attributes with his conscious creations.
You are right. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that some of God's personality attributes are similar to ours in some way. However, we go to the movies or theater to enjoy the performance. We don't just observe, which is what God might do.
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
dhw: Sitting back and observing is just what we do in the theatre or cinema. And it is perfectly feasible that he would do so just as we do. What sort of non-human way of observing can you think of if the observer is as conscious as we are?
DAVID: We just don't know. Is His consciousness like ours? Again unknown.
dhw: No, we don’t know, any more than we know whether God exists, or what was the origin of life, or what is God’s purpose and nature if he exists. So once again, please do not use the unknowability as an excuse for rejecting any speculations that differ from your own presumptions. It is perfectly possible that a conscious creator would share attributes with his conscious creations.
DAVID: You are right. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that some of God's personality attributes are similar to ours in some way. However, we go to the movies or theater to enjoy the performance. We don't just observe, which is what God might do.
It’s an amazing concept: a God who creates with no purpose other than to observe, and who might have absolutely no feelings whatsoever. It would mean that prior to his invention of life, he had had no personal experience of enjoyment, love, boredom, curiosity, sympathy, empathy, the good, the bad and the ugly. It took living forms to invent them. If that were true, I would rate your God as infinitely superior to us in the sciences and in sheer mental and physical power, and infinitely inferior to us and some of our fellow animals in every other conceivable way. I’m pleased to hear that you are now willing to accept the possible “humanization” of your God by agreeing that he may have attributes similar to our own. We are making progress.
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
by David Turell , Saturday, March 18, 2017, 00:13 (2807 days ago) @ dhw
dhw: It’s an amazing concept: a God who creates with no purpose other than to observe, and who might have absolutely no feelings whatsoever. It would mean that prior to his invention of life, he had had no personal experience of enjoyment, love, boredom, curiosity, sympathy, empathy, the good, the bad and the ugly. It took living forms to invent them. If that were true, I would rate your God as infinitely superior to us in the sciences and in sheer mental and physical power, and infinitely inferior to us and some of our fellow animals in every other conceivable way. I’m pleased to hear that you are now willing to accept the possible “humanization” of your God by agreeing that he may have attributes similar to our own. We are making progress.
Not much progress. If God is all alone, to whom does He relate to have all the emotional feelings you ascribe to Him? He might have created humans so that we could relate to him so He could observe our feelings and find out what emotions are like. That could be it. He's lonely and needed us to realte to!
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
dhw: It’s an amazing concept: a God who creates with no purpose other than to observe, and who might have absolutely no feelings whatsoever. It would mean that prior to his invention of life, he had had no personal experience of enjoyment, love, boredom, curiosity, sympathy, empathy, the good, the bad and the ugly. It took living forms to invent them. If that were true, I would rate your God as infinitely superior to us in the sciences and in sheer mental and physical power, and infinitely inferior to us and some of our fellow animals in every other conceivable way. I’m pleased to hear that you are now willing to accept the possible “humanization” of your God by agreeing that he may have attributes similar to our own. We are making progress.
DAVID: Not much progress. If God is all alone, to whom does He relate to have all the emotional feelings you ascribe to Him? He might have created humans so that we could relate to him so He could observe our feelings and find out what emotions are like. That could be it. He's lonely and needed us to relate to!
Thank you for a brilliant answer. We are making huge progress! Let us substitute your humanized “lonely” for my humanized “bored”, if that is what you prefer. It gives us a very logical reason for his creating life. And indeed one can well imagine him designing all sorts of creatures, or creating a mechanism which would do its own designing, so that he could find some diversion to relieve the burden of his loneliness. He might possibly have wanted to create a mind like his own, and experimented. Or he might possibly have had the idea of designing a mind like his own during the course of his experiments. (I link experimentation to dabbling.) Or he might have been delighted to find that the mechanism he had designed to do its own designing actually came up with a mind like his own without him dabbling. All of these hypotheses fit in perfectly, not only with the history of life on Earth but also with the hypothesis that God may have been lonely and required some relief from his loneliness. Wouldn’t you say they are just as likely as your God saying to himself at the very beginning: “I’ll relieve my loneliness by creating humans that I can relate to, but first I shall have to design the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch’s lifestyle, the fly’s compound eye because…” either for the next 3.X billion years he is incapable of getting what he wants, or he just wants to do it that way for reasons you and I can’t even guess at, because such a decision makes no sense to either of us?
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
by David Turell , Saturday, March 18, 2017, 13:32 (2806 days ago) @ dhw
dhw: We are making progress.[/i]
DAVID: Not much progress. If God is all alone, to whom does He relate to have all the emotional feelings you ascribe to Him? He might have created humans so that we could relate to him so He could observe our feelings and find out what emotions are like. That could be it. He's lonely and needed us to relate to!
Thank you for a brilliant answer. We are making huge progress! Let us substitute your humanized “lonely” for my humanized “bored”, if that is what you prefer. It gives us a very logical reason for his creating life. And indeed one can well imagine him designing all sorts of creatures, or creating a mechanism which would do its own designing, so that he could find some diversion to relieve the burden of his loneliness. He might possibly have wanted to create a mind like his own, and experimented. Or he might possibly have had the idea of designing a mind like his own during the course of his experiments. (I link experimentation to dabbling.) Or he might have been delighted to find that the mechanism he had designed to do its own designing actually came up with a mind like his own without him dabbling. All of these hypotheses fit in perfectly, not only with the history of life on Earth but also with the hypothesis that God may have been lonely and required some relief from his loneliness. Wouldn’t you say they are just as likely as your God saying to himself at the very beginning: “I’ll relieve my loneliness by creating humans that I can relate to, but first I shall have to design the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch’s lifestyle, the fly’s compound eye because…” either for the next 3.X billion years he is incapable of getting what he wants, or he just wants to do it that way for reasons you and I can’t even guess at, because such a decision makes no sense to either of us?
I'm glad you like my thoughts about loneliness. It does offer a different approach about God's possible personality. If He is all-knowing, then this discussion is a n on-starter. He knows all about emotions and relationships without experiencing them. But since I try not to use Biblical impressions of God, He may have to experience relating to us, His creations.
However, you finished your reasonable paragraph with a note about life's diversity and the length of time for evolution of humans with total misunderstanding, as usual.
We do not know if God is limited in any way in explaining the length of time for human evolution. If He is control of the rate of evolution, as I believe, then the rapid appearance of life earlier on Earth and the sudden appearance of the Cambrian Explosion, tells us He can move quickly when He wants to. Look at how quickly human development occurred in the past eight million years. As for the diversity, it is balance of nature/energy supply, nothing more. As for making no sense, I like my sensible answers to the questions.
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
Dhw: Wouldn’t you say they are just as likely as your God saying to himself at the very beginning: “I’ll relieve my loneliness by creating humans that I can relate to, but first I shall have to design the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch’s lifestyle, the fly’s compound eye because…” either for the next 3.X billion years he is incapable of getting what he wants, or he just wants to do it that way for reasons you and I can’t even guess at, because such a decision makes no sense to either of us?
DAVID: I'm glad you like my thoughts about loneliness. It does offer a different approach about God's possible personality. If He is all-knowing, then this discussion is a n on-starter. He knows all about emotions and relationships without experiencing them. But since I try not to use Biblical impressions of God, He may have to experience relating to us, His creations.
I do like this approach, and I think it is one element of so-called process theology: that God is not immutable and all-knowing but is involved, like ourselves, in a process of “becoming”. In other words, he learns and experiences as he goes along. Needless to say, you can apply this to evolution – he learns as he goes along (or, if my autonomous inventive mechanism hypothesis is correct, he learns as it goes along).
DAVID: However, you finished your reasonable paragraph with a note about life's diversity and the length of time for evolution of humans with total misunderstanding, as usual.
We do not know if God is limited in any way in explaining the length of time for human evolution. If He is control of the rate of evolution, as I believe, then the rapid appearance of life earlier on Earth and the sudden appearance of the Cambrian Explosion, tells us He can move quickly when He wants to. Look at how quickly human development occurred in the past eight million years. As for the diversity, it is balance of nature/energy supply, nothing more. As for making no sense, I like my sensible answers to the questions.
There is no misunderstanding, unless you are backtracking on your original agreement with me, which I have now quoted several times, that it does not make sense if an all-powerful God sets out with the intention of producing humans, but first produces the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch’s lifestyle (plus all the other natural wonders extant and extinct) in order to keep life going until humans appear. The only explanation you could offer was that your God might be limited, i.e. not all-powerful. I have offered alternatives to your two hypotheses, and you have agreed they fit in with the history of life as we know it.
There is no disagreement between us on the proposal that diversity is the result of the changing balance of nature, as caused by the changing energy supply. We have agreed that this has nothing whatsoever to do with humans being the “endpoint” of evolution.
Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil
by David Turell , Sunday, March 19, 2017, 14:19 (2805 days ago) @ dhw
DAVID: I'm glad you like my thoughts about loneliness. It does offer a different approach about God's possible personality. If He is all-knowing, then this discussion is a n on-starter. He knows all about emotions and relationships without experiencing them. But since I try not to use Biblical impressions of God, He may have to experience relating to us, His creations.
I do like this approach, and I think it is one element of so-called process theology: that God is not immutable and all-knowing but is involved, like ourselves, in a process of “becoming”. In other words, he learns and experiences as he goes along. Needless to say, you can apply this to evolution – he learns as he goes along (or, if my autonomous inventive mechanism hypothesis is correct, he learns as it goes along).
DAVID: As for the diversity, it is balance of nature/energy supply, nothing more. As for making no sense, I like my sensible answers to the questions.[/i]
dhw: There is no misunderstanding, unless you are backtracking on your original agreement with me, which I have now quoted several times, that it does not make sense if an all-powerful God sets out with the intention of producing humans, but first produces the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch’s lifestyle (plus all the other natural wonders extant and extinct) in order to keep life going until humans appear. The only explanation you could offer was that your God might be limited, i.e. not all-powerful. I have offered alternatives to your two hypotheses, and you have agreed they fit in with the history of life as we know it.
There is no disagreement between us on the proposal that diversity is the result of the changing balance of nature, as caused by the changing energy supply. We have agreed that this has nothing whatsoever to do with humans being the “endpoint” of evolution.
Thank you. We agree.
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
by David Turell , Wednesday, January 24, 2018, 00:26 (2495 days ago) @ David Turell
They are probably figments of the imagination of scientists who do not want to give up a source of speculative papers and grant money:
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/01/22/579666359/scientific-theory-and-the-multiv...
"Today, the idea that we live in a multiverse has become popular in the foundations of physics. The multiverse collects all universes in which the constants of nature — Newton's constant and about two dozen more — can take on any value. Each combination of constants is realized in infinitely many universes.
"And not only the constants can change from one universe to another, the locations of particles relative to each other can also be different. Since there are infinitely many universes in which to arrange the particles, some of these universes will be very similar to our own, just that eventually some initially tiny deviation will lead to an alternative history. Thus, somewhere in the multiverse our lives play out in any which way you can imagine.
"But before you pack your bags and search for a universe more to your liking, let me add there's no way to cross over into another universe or even interact with one. This only works in science fiction. Indeed, to my taste, the multiverse itself is already too close to fiction.
Many theoretical physicists have argued the conclusion that we live in a multiverse is based on sound scientific reasoning. But that isn't so — and I will tell you why.
***
"If Ockham could see what physicists are doing here, he'd pray for God to bring reason back to Earth. You should remove unnecessary assumptions, alright. But certainly you shouldn't remove assumptions that you need to describe observations. If you do, you'll just get a useless theory, equations from which you can't calculate anything.
"These useless theories which lack assumptions necessary to describe observations are what we now call a multiverse. And they're about as useful as Ockham's prayers.
"Since you cannot calculate anything in the multiverse, the assumptions which physicists removed must then be replaced with something else. That "something else" is a probability distribution on the multiverse, which tells you not what we do observe, but what we are likely to observe. But it is simpler to assume a constant than an infinite number of universes with a probability distribution over them. Therefore, Ockham's razor should shave off the multiverse. It's superfluous. Unfortunately, this argument carries little weight among many of today's theoretical physicists who value the multiverse because it excuses boundless speculation.
***
"Let me also add that these examples of "predictive" multiverses are ad hoc constructs invented for the very reason of convincing skeptics that some types of multiverses can have observable consequences. Don't fall for it. Just because a theory is falsifiable doesn't mean it's scientific. For a theory to be scientific its predictions must also have a reasonable chance to accurately describe reality. Construing up one of an infinite number of multiverse variants has no reasonable chance.
***
"Why then has the idea become popular? A cynic may argue it's because the multiverse offers infinitely many new opportunities for paper writing. But I don't want to feign hypotheses.
Let me thus stick to the facts: To our best knowledge, assuming the existence of any universe besides our own is unnecessary to explain anything we have ever observed. In the best case, then, the multiverse is an interpretation.
"You can believe that the seeming arbitrariness of the constants of nature is due to an infinite number of other universes. You can believe that, but you don't have to. Science cannot confirm that the other universes exist, but it also cannot rule them out. Just like science cannot rule out the gods and angels."
Comment: Sabine Hossenfelder at her best. Like string theory theory not likely to be of any help in understanding the universe.
Ruminations on multiverses: excellent review
by David Turell , Thursday, July 26, 2018, 18:57 (2311 days ago) @ David Turell
Why this figment of a theory exists, based on what we know:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/07/17/what-is-and-isnt-scientific-abo...
"According to the leading ideas of theoretical physics, however, our Universe may be just one minuscule region of a much larger multiverse, within which many Universes, perhaps even an infinite number, are contained. Some of this is actual science, but some is nothing more than speculative, wishful thinking. Here's how to tell which is which.
"In the 1980s, a large number of theoretical consequences of inflation were worked out, including:
what the seeds for large-scale structure should look like,
that temperature and density fluctuations should exist on scales larger than the cosmic horizon,
that all regions of space, even with fluctuations, should have constant entropy,
and that there should be a maximum temperature achieved by the hot Big Bang.
In the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, these four predictions were observationally confirmed to great precision. Cosmic inflation is a winner.
"Inflation tells us that, prior to the Big Bang, the Universe wasn't filled with particles, antiparticles and radiation. Instead, it was filled with energy inherent to space itself, and that energy caused space to expand at a rapid, relentless, and exponential rate. At some point, inflation ends, and all (or almost all) of that energy gets converted into matter and energy, giving rise to the hot Big Bang. The end of inflation, and what's known as the reheating of our Universe, marks the start of the hot Big Bang. The Big Bang still happens, but it isn't the very beginning. (my bold)
***
"If you then require inflation to have the properties that all quantum fields have:
that its properties have uncertainties inherent to them,
that the field is described by a wavefunction,
and the values of that field can spread out over time,
you reach a surprising conclusion.
***
"Inflation doesn't end everywhere at once, but rather in select, disconnected locations at any given time, while the space between those locations continues to inflate. There should be multiple, enormous regions of space where inflation ends and a hot Big Bang begins, but they can never encounter one another, as they're separated by regions of inflating space. Wherever inflation begins, it is all but guaranteed to continue for an eternity, at least in places.
"Where inflation ends for us, we get a hot Big Bang. The part of the Universe we observe is just one part of this region where inflation ended, with more unobservable Universe beyond that. But there are countlessly many regions, all disconnected from one another, with the same exact story.
"That's the idea of the multiverse. As you can see, it's based on two independent, well-established, and widely-accepted aspects of theoretical physics: the quantum nature of everything and the properties of cosmic inflation. There's no known way to measure it, just as there's no way to measure the unobservable part of our Universe. But the two theories that underlie it, inflation and quantum physics, have been demonstrated to be valid. If they're right, then the multiverse is an inescapable consequence of that, and we're living in it.
"So what? That's not a whole lot, is it? There are plenty of theoretical consequences that are inevitable, but that we cannot know about for certain because we can't test them. The multiverse is one in a long line of those. It's not particularly a useful realization, just an interesting prediction that falls out of these theories.
"So why do so many theoretical physicists write papers about the multiverse? About parallel Universes and their connection to our own through this multiverse? Why do they claim that the multiverse is connected to the string landscape, the cosmological constant, and even to the fact that our Universe is finely-tuned for life?
***
"As I've explained before, the Multiverse is not a scientific theory on its own. Rather, it’s a theoretical consequence of the laws of physics as they’re best understood today. It’s perhaps even an inevitable consequence of those laws: if you have an inflationary Universe governed by quantum physics, this is something you’re pretty much bound to wind up with. But — much like String Theory — it has some big problems: it doesn't predict anything we either have observed and can't explain without it, and it doesn't predict anything definitive we can go and look for.
"Because even though it's obviously a bad idea, they don't have any better ones.
***
"But when people then contend that they can draw conclusions about fundamental constants, the laws of physics, or the values of string vacua, they're no longer doing science; they're speculating. Wishful thinking is no substitute for data, experiments, or observables. Until we have those, be aware that the multiverse is a consequence of the best science we have available today, but it doesn't make any scientific predictions we can put to the test."
Comment: Multiverse may be worthless, but the article is a great review of what we know.
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
by David Turell , Thursday, July 11, 2019, 15:02 (1961 days ago) @ David Turell
Sabine Hossenfelder again :
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-multiverse-is-religion-not-science.html
"Universes besides our own are logically equivalent to gods. They are unobservable by assumption, hence they can exist only in a religious sense. You can believe in them if you want to, but they are not part of science.
"I know that this is not a particularly remarkable argument. But physicists seem to have a hard time following it, especially those who happen to work on the multiverse. Therefore, let me sort out some common misunderstandings.
"First. The major misunderstanding is that I am saying the multiverse does not exist. But this is not what I am saying. I am saying science does not tell us anything about universes we cannot observe, therefore claiming they exist is not science.
"Second. They will argue the multiverse is simple. Most physicists who are in favor of the multiverse say it’s scientific because it’s simpler to assume that all universes of a certain type exist than it is to assume that only one of them exist.
"That’s a questionable claim. But more importantly, it’s beside the point. The simplest assumption is no assumption. And you do not need to make any statement about the existence of the multiverse to explain our observations. Therefore, science says, you should not. As I said, it’s the same with the multiverse as with god. It’s an unnecessary assumption. Not wrong, but superfluous.
"Third. They’ll claim the existence of the multiverse is a prediction of their theory.
It’s not. That’s just wrong. Just because you can write down a theory for something, doesn’t mean it exists*. We determine that something exists, in the scientific sense, if it is useful to describe observation. That’s exactly what the multiverse is not.
"Fourth. But then you are saying that discussing what’s inside a black hole is also not science
"That’s equally wrong. Other universes are not science because you cannot observe them. But you can totally observe what’s inside a black hole. You just cannot come back and tell us about it. Besides, no one really thinks that the inside of a black hole will remain inaccessible forever. For these reasons, the situation is entirely different for black holes. If it was correct that the inside of black holes cannot be observed, this would indeed mean that postulating its existence is not scientific.
"Fifth. But there are types of multiverses that have observable consequences.
"That’s right. Physicists have come up with certain types of multiverses that can be falsified. The problem with these ideas is conceptually entirely different. It’s that there is no reason to think we live in such multiverses to begin with. The requirement that a hypothesis must be falsifiable is certainly necessary to make the hypothesis scientific, but not sufficient.
"To sum it up. The multiverse is certainly an interesting idea and it attracts a lot of public attention. There is nothing wrong with that in principle. Entertainment has a value and so has thought-stimulating discussion. But do not confuse the multiverse with science, because it is not. "
comment: 'nuff said
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
DAVID: Sabine Hossenfelder again:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-multiverse-is-religion-not-science.html
QUOTE: "Universes besides our own are logically equivalent to gods. They are unobservable by assumption, hence they can exist only in a religious sense. You can believe in them if you want to, but they are not part of science.”
DAVID: 'nuff said
Thank you for this absolutely brilliant article.
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
by David Turell , Friday, July 12, 2019, 15:50 (1960 days ago) @ dhw
DAVID: Sabine Hossenfelder again:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-multiverse-is-religion-not-science.html
QUOTE: "Universes besides our own are logically equivalent to gods. They are unobservable by assumption, hence they can exist only in a religious sense. You can believe in them if you want to, but they are not part of science.”
DAVID: 'nuff said
dhw: Thank you for this absolutely brilliant article.
She is the most clear-thinking theoretical physicist I know.
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
by David Turell , Friday, July 19, 2019, 22:12 (1953 days ago) @ David Turell
Another view that agrees:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/07/16/you-must-not-trust-experiments-...
"Most scenarios involving parallel Universes like this are untestable, as we're restricted to living in our own Universe, disconnected from any others. Yet if one particular idea is right, there might be an experimental signature awaiting our investigations. But even if it yields positive results, you shouldn't trust it. Here's why.
"Whenever you have an experimental or observational result you cannot explain with your current theories, you have to take note of it. Robust measurements that defy the expectations of our predictions might turn out to be nothing — they might go away with more, improved data — or they might simply be errors. This has famously been the case many times,
***
"However, sometimes there are results that really do appear to be puzzles: the experiments shouldn't turn out the way they did if the Universe works the way we think it does. These results often turn out to be omens that we're about to discover new physics, but they also frequently turn out to be red herrings that lead nowhere. Even worse, they can turn out to be duds, where they only appear to be interesting because someone, somewhere, made an error.
***
"In all of these cases, as well as many others, it's important to get both the theoretical and the experimental work right. From a theoretical point of view, that means having a strong quantitative understanding about the expected signal that your new theory predicts as compared to the background signal that the prevailing theory predicts. You must understand what signals should be generated by both your new theory and the one it's seeking to supersede.
"From an experimental point of view, this translates into understanding your backgrounds/noise, and looking for an excess signal superimposed atop that background. Only by comparing your observed signal with the anticipated background and seeing a clear excess can you ever hope to have a robust detection. It was only when the evidence for the Higgs boson passed a certain significance that we could claim a definitive detection.
***
"Any time you get a positive signal from an experiment, you cannot simply take that signal at face value. Signals can only be understood in relation to the noise background of the experiment, which is a combination of every other physical process that contributes to the result. Unless you quantify that background and understand the source of everything that your final signal is composed of, you cannot hope to conclude you've discovered a new phenomenon in nature.
"Science progresses one experiment at a time, and it's always the full suite of evidence that must be considered in evaluating our theories at any given time. But there is no greater false flag than an experiment pointing to a new signal extracted against a poorly understood background. In the endeavor of pushing our scientific frontiers, this is the one area that demands the highest level of skeptical scrutiny. Mirror matter and even a mirror Universe might be real, but if you want to make that extraordinary claim, you'd better make sure your evidence is equally extraordinary."
Comment: We live in this universe. How do we look out? The theory currently in vogue is if an other universe bumped into ours there should be a telltale circle in the CMB. There isn't. All the attempts are is to get rid of the appearance that the universe had a starting point and looks created.
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
by David Turell , Monday, October 07, 2019, 15:29 (1873 days ago) @ David Turell
Another negative review:
https://aeon.co/essays/post-empirical-science-is-an-oxymoron-and-it-is-dangerous?utm_so...
"There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience, or just plain ordinary bullshit, opening the door to all manner of metaphysics masquerading as science. This is ‘post-empirical’ science, where truth no longer matters, and it is potentially very dangerous.
"It’s not difficult to find recent examples. On 8 June 2019, the front cover of New Scientist magazine boldly declared that we’re ‘Inside the Mirrorverse’. Its editors bid us ‘Welcome to the parallel reality that’s hiding in plain sight’.
***
"as so often happens these days, a few physicists have suggested that this is a problem with ‘a very natural explanation’. They claim that the neutrons are actually flitting between parallel universes. They admit that the chances of proving this are ‘low’, or even ‘zero’, but it doesn’t really matter. When it comes to grabbing attention, inviting that all-important click, or purchase, speculative metaphysics wins hands down.
***
"I, for one, prefer a science that is rational and based on evidence, a science that is concerned with theories and empirical facts, a science that promotes the search for truth, no matter how transient or contingent. I prefer a science that does not readily admit theories so vague and slippery that empirical tests are either impossible or they mean absolutely nothing at all.
***
"The philosopher Karl Popper argued that what distinguishes a scientific theory from pseudoscience and pure metaphysics is the possibility that it might be falsified on exposure to empirical data. In other words, a theory is scientific if it has the potential to be proved wrong.
***
"And, no matter how much we might want to believe that God designed all life on Earth, we must accept that intelligent design makes no testable predictions of its own. It is simply a conceptual alternative to evolution as the cause of life’s incredible complexity. Intelligent design cannot be falsified, just as nobody can prove the existence or non-existence of a philosopher’s metaphysical God, or a God of religion that ‘moves in mysterious ways’. Intelligent design is not science: as a theory, it is simply overwhelmed by its metaphysical content.
***
"But, for me at least, there has to be a difference between science and pseudoscience; between science and pure metaphysics, or just plain ordinary bullshit.
***
"Today, we’re blessed with two extraordinary theories. The first is quantum mechanics. This is the basis for the so-called standard model of particle physics that describes the workings of all known elementary particles. It is our best theory of matter. The second is Einstein’s general theory of relativity that explains how gravity works, and is the basis for the so-called standard model of Big Bang cosmology. It is our best theory of space, time and the Universe.
***
"To work satisfactorily, Big Bang cosmology requires rather a lot of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’, such that ‘what we can see’ accounts for an embarrassingly small 5 per cent of everything we believe there is in the Universe. If dark matter is really matter of some kind, then it’s simply missing from our best theory of matter. Changing one or more of the constants that govern the physics of our Universe by even the smallest amount would render the Universe inhospitable to life, or even physically impossible. We have no explanation for why the laws and constants of physics appear so ‘fine-tuned’ to evolve a Goldilocks universe that is just right.
***
"it has been argued, intelligent design is hardly less testable than many multiverse theories. To dismiss intelligent design on the ground that it is untestable, and yet to accept the multiverse as an interesting scientific hypothesis, may come suspiciously close to applying double standards. As seen from the perspective of some creationists, and also by some non-creationists, their cause has received unintended methodological support from multiverse physics.
***
"is it asking too much that they make their assertions with some honesty? Instead of ‘the multiverse exists’ and ‘it might be true’, is it really so difficult to say something like ‘the multiverse has some philosophical attractions, but it is highly speculative and controversial, and there is no evidence for it’?"
Comment: well stated.
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
QUOTES: And, no matter how much we might want to believe that God designed all life on Earth, we must accept that intelligent design makes no testable predictions of its own. It is simply a conceptual alternative to evolution as the cause of life’s incredible complexity.
…is it asking too much that they make their assertions with some honesty? Instead of ‘the multiverse exists’ and ‘it might be true’, is it really so difficult to say something like ‘the multiverse has some philosophical attractions, but it is highly speculative and controversial, and there is no evidence for it’?
DAVID: well stated.
Again it's a pleasure to agree with you! Thank you for this excellent exposé of double standards. It’s good to have such balanced articles on the agnostic website.
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
by David Turell , Tuesday, October 08, 2019, 15:28 (1872 days ago) @ dhw
QUOTES: And, no matter how much we might want to believe that God designed all life on Earth, we must accept that intelligent design makes no testable predictions of its own. It is simply a conceptual alternative to evolution as the cause of life’s incredible complexity.
…is it asking too much that they make their assertions with some honesty? Instead of ‘the multiverse exists’ and ‘it might be true’, is it really so difficult to say something like ‘the multiverse has some philosophical attractions, but it is highly speculative and controversial, and there is no evidence for it’?
DAVID: well stated.
dhw: Again it's a pleasure to agree with you! Thank you for this excellent exposé of double standards. It’s good to have such balanced articles on the agnostic website.
Thank you. Agreed.
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
by David Turell , Thursday, May 28, 2020, 20:42 (1639 days ago) @ David Turell
Peter Woit takes on parallel universes:
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11767
"I never thought I would see this happen: a university PR department correcting media hype about its research. You might have noticed this comment here a week ago, about a flurry of media hype about neutrinos and parallel universes. A new CNN story does a good job of explaining where the nonsense came from. The main offender was New Scientist, which got the parallel universe business somehow from Neil Turok
"The ANITA scientists and their institution’s PR people were not exactly blameless, having participated in a 2018 publicity campaign to promote the idea that they had discovered not a parallel universe, but supersymmetry. They reported an observation here, which led to lots of dubious speculative theory papers, ... The University of Hawaii in December 2018 put out a press release announcing that UH professor’s Antarctica discovery may herald new model of physics. One can find all sorts of stories from this period about how this was evidence for supersymmetry,
"It’s great to see that the University of Hawaii has tried to do something at least about the latest “parallel universe” nonsense, putting out last week a press release entitled Media incorrectly connects UH research to parallel universe theory. CNN quotes a statement from NASA (I haven’t seen a public source for this), which includes:
"Tabloids have misleadingly connected NASA and Gorham’s experimental work, which identified some anomalies in the data, to a theory proposed by outside physicists not connected to the work. Gorham believes there are more plausible, easier explanations to the anomalies.
"The public understanding of fundamental physics research and the credibility of the subject have suffered a huge amount of damage over the past few decades, due to the overwhelming amount of misleading, self-serving BS about parallel universes and failed speculative ideas put out by physicists, university PR departments and the journalists who mistakenly take them seriously. I hope this latest is the beginning of a new trend of people in all these categories starting to fight hype, not spread it."
Comment: Part of the problem is the vast number of news outlets need startling news to draw enough readers. Thanks to Woit and Hossenfelder who try to bring sanity to the news.
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
by David Turell , Sunday, July 12, 2020, 21:57 (1594 days ago) @ David Turell
Another negative article:
https://medium.com/the-infinite-universe/i-do-not-believe-in-the-multiverse-the-case-fo...
"The problem with it is that it fails Ockham’s razor and rests on the most tenuous physical arguments. It tells us that not only are there an infinite number of alternate realities out there but that this must be so because it is the only way to explain quantum theory coherently. The latter statement is hardly true, and the strawman argument that its only rival is something called “wavefunction collapse” is also false.
***
"To say that the universe is one of many parallel ones is just one of many possible explanations. Being confined to this point in time and space in a potentially infinite universe where we have only been observing its expansion for the last 100 years, we can hardly make such bold claims. The answer is neither “we are special” nor “many universes”, it is “we don’t know”.
"I’m not going to beat around the bush here: I don’t believe in the multiverse. Not only is it scientifically premature, I think it is logically weak too, on par with the simulation hypothesis in terms of philosophical merit.
***
"While Bohmian mechanics has some issues with relativity (which I have written about extensively elsewhere) as well as how to interpret particle creation and annhilation, it reestablishes realism and does away with the notion that how we choose to observe the universe changes reality itself.
"In the double slit experiment, unlike the multiverse, Bohmian mechanics says the photon goes through one slit or the other, not both, but that the wavefunction guides it into a wave interference pattern anyway. When you try to observe which slit it went through you are interfering with the wavefunction and particle and so you no longer get the pattern. It is very straightforward.
***
"Far from refuting Bohr, it upholds his interpretation on the whole because it says that experimenters are just viewing different aspects of reality through their experimental setups, not changing it. How they look at reality changes how they see it, but the underlying state is definite. While experiments destroy or alter the state of the particles under observation, they do not fundamentally change what is real for the observer. That is relativism not subjectivism.
"I would suggest that Bohmian mechanics accurately extends and reinterprets Bohr’s original ideas of complementarity, putting them on a more solid mathematical footing. It rejects subjectivism and positivism (anti-realism) and embraces relativism in a single universe. In addition, it mathematically refines quantum theory, opening the door to potential tests of its validity. So far, the multiverse invites no such tests. (my bold)
"As for the anthropic principle, like I said, it’s a big universe and we have really been looking at it for a short time. We don’t even know answers to questions like: what really happened at the Big Bang, what is time, and what is beyond the observable universe. We don’t know what happens inside black hole singularities where new laws of physics may exist. Do the same laws of physics apply in the parts of the universe we can’t see? It seems lazy to jump to the MWI to explain our own existence because we think it is too big a coincidence. We don’t even have the knowledge to say such a thing. While we have discovered in the past 100 years that the universe is vast with countless stars and planets, it may be vaster still and yet still be one universe."
Comment: We should not let our confusion about quantum reality to drive us to the nutty conclusion there are multiple parallel universes.
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
QUOTE: "To say that the universe is one of many parallel ones is just one of many possible explanations. Being confined to this point in time and space in a potentially infinite universe where we have only been observing its expansion for the last 100 years, we can hardly make such bold claims. The answer is neither “we are special” nor “many universes”, it is “we don’t know”.
An answer which of course extends to all the major questions we keep asking!
DAVID: We should not let our confusion about quantum reality to drive us to the nutty conclusion there are multiple parallel universes.
Perhaps we should not let our confusion about all aspects of reality drive us to any nutty conclusions at all!
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
by David Turell , Monday, July 13, 2020, 15:35 (1593 days ago) @ dhw
QUOTE: "To say that the universe is one of many parallel ones is just one of many possible explanations. Being confined to this point in time and space in a potentially infinite universe where we have only been observing its expansion for the last 100 years, we can hardly make such bold claims. The answer is neither “we are special” nor “many universes”, it is “we don’t know”.
dhw: An answer which of course extends to all the major questions we keep asking!
DAVID: We should not let our confusion about quantum reality to drive us to the nutty conclusion there are multiple parallel universes.
dhw: Perhaps we should not let our confusion about all aspects of reality drive us to any nutty conclusions at all!
Agreed.
Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real
by David Turell , Saturday, January 30, 2021, 23:26 (1392 days ago) @ David Turell
Peter Woit pitches in:
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12161
"I’ve written extensively here and elsewhere about the real problem with all claims by theorists to be studying the multiverse: they’re Theorists Without a Theory, lacking any sort of viable theory which could make the usual sort of scientific predictions. The main problem with the Quanta article is at the beginning:
"What lies beyond all we can see? The question may seem unanswerable. Nevertheless, some cosmologists have a response: Our universe is a swelling bubble. Outside it, more bubble universes exist, all immersed in an eternally expanding and energized sea — the multiverse.
"The idea is polarizing. Some physicists embrace the multiverse to explain why our bubble looks so special (only certain bubbles can host life), while others reject the theory for making no testable predictions (since it predicts all conceivable universes). But some researchers expect that they just haven’t been clever enough to work out the precise consequences of the theory yet.
"Now, various teams are developing new ways to infer exactly how the multiverse bubbles and what happens when those bubble universes collide.
"The big problem is with:
they just haven’t been clever enough to work out the precise consequences of the theory yet.
"The reference to “precise consequences” is a common misleading rhetorical move, implying that there is no problem getting “imprecise consequences”, that the problem is just getting those extra digits of numerical precision. What’s really going on is that we know of no theoretical consequences of the multiverse, precise or imprecise, because there is no viable theory. The logic here is pretty much pure wishful thinking: if you look at colliding Bose-Einstein condensates and see a particular pattern, then if you saw a pattern like that in the CMB, you could try and infer something about your unknown multiverse theory. It’s not unusual for theorists to work on speculative ideas involving some degree of wishful thinking, but this is a case of taking that to an extreme."
Comment: If you are given enough grant money you can follow any daydream. Without any benefit
Ruminations on multiverses; they negate fine tuning
by David Turell , Wednesday, March 03, 2021, 23:38 (1360 days ago) @ David Turell
They are just an unprove ploy to avoid the import of fine tuning:
https://evolutionnews.org/2021/03/multiverse-myth-frees-atheists-from-real-science/
"If you’re hard-set at denying the existence of God, fine-tuning of the cosmos to allow the existence of man is not an easy observation to elide.
"Deniers of God’s existence have clung to one main gambit to avoid the design implications of the fine-tuning of the universe — the multiverse. The multiverse is a theoretical inference drawn from the mathematical description of the early moments of the Big Bang. The equations of relativity imply the possible existence of many companion “universes” to ours. It seems that we cannot observe them, which makes their status as scientific observations dubious. But the multiverse has, for atheists, played a much more important role than that ordinarily played by untestable inferences from equations.
"Atheists acknowledge the obvious: the likelihood that chance can account for the constellation of physical parameters that lead to the emergence man in our universe is vanishingly small. Instead, atheists argue that if the laws of physics differ slightly in each universe in the multiverse, then the probability across all of the universes — the multiverse — that the values of forces in one universe would permit life to arise becomes much higher.
***
"What atheists have done is invoke a concept of multiverse that is conceptually unintelligible and scientifically unobservable. This unintelligible unobservable probability landscape is convenient for atheists, who can merely assert that it accounts for fine-tuning without providing even a shred of evidence or logic. The “multiverse” theory frees atheists from real science, which is the only condition in which atheism can survive."
Comment: We've been over all of this before. The conjecture is unproveable and therefore worthless. We have Karl Popper's word.
Ruminations on multiverses; denied again
by David Turell , Thursday, May 13, 2021, 18:11 (1289 days ago) @ David Turell
Still has proponents without any proof:
https://iai.tv/articles/the-seduction-of-the-multiverse-auid-1806?_auid=2020
"Today, physicists still lack evidence of other universes, or even good ideas for obtaining evidence. Many nonetheless insist our cosmos really is just a mote of dust in a vast “multiverse.” One especially eloquent and passionate multiverse theorist is Sean Carroll. His faith in the multiverse stems from his faith in quantum mechanics, which he sees as our best account of reality.
In his book Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll asserts that quantum mechanics describes not just very small things but everything, including us. “As far as we currently know,” he writes, “quantum mechanics isn’t just an approximation to the truth; it is the truth.” And however preposterous it might seem, a multiverse, Carroll argues, is an inescapable consequence of quantum mechanics.
***
"This hypothesis, which came to be called the many-worlds theory, has been refined over the decades. It no longer entails acts of measurement, or consciousness (sorry New Agers). The universe supposedly splits, or branches, whenever one quantum particle jostles against another, making their wave functions collapse. This process, called “decoherence,” happens all the time, everywhere. It is happening to you right now. And now. And now. Yes, zillions of your doppelgangers are out there at this very moment, probably having more fun than you. Asked why we don’t feel ourselves splitting, Everett replied, “Do you feel the motion of the earth?” Carroll addresses the problem of evidence, sort of. He says philosopher Karl Popper, who popularized the notion that scientific theories should be precise enough to be testable, or falsifiable, “had good things to say about” Everett’s hypothesis, calling it “a completely objective discussion of quantum mechanics.” (Popper, I must add, had doubts about natural selection, so his taste wasn’t irreproachable.)
***
"Physicists have proposed even stranger multiverses, which science writer Tom Siegfried describes in his book The Number of the Heavens. String theory, which posits that all the forces of nature stem from stringy thingies wriggling in nine or more dimensions, implies that our cosmos is just a hillock in a sprawling “landscape” of universes, some with radically different laws and dimensions than ours. Chaotic inflation, a supercharged version of the big bang theory, suggests that our universe is a minuscule bubble in a boundless, frothy sea.
"In addition to describing these and other multiverses, Siegfried provides a history of the idea of other worlds, which goes back to the ancient Greeks. (Is there anything they didn’t think of first?) Acknowledging that “nobody can say for sure” whether other universes exist, Siegfried professes neutrality on their existence. But he goes on to construct an almost comically partisan defense of the multiverse, declaring that “it makes much more sense for a multiverse to exist than not."
***
"I am not a multiverse denier, any more than I am a God denier. Science cannot resolve the existence of either God or the multiverse, making agnosticism the only sensible position. I see some value in multiverse theories. Particularly when presented by a writer as gifted as Sean Carroll, they goad our imaginations and give us intimations of infinity. They make us feel really, really small—in a good way.
"But I’m less entertained by multiverse theories than I once was, for a couple of reasons. First, science is in a slump, for reasons both internal and external. Science is ill-served when prominent thinkers tout ideas that can never be tested and hence are, sorry, unscientific. Moreover, at a time when our world, the real world, faces serious problems, dwelling on multiverses strikes me as escapism—akin to billionaires fantasizing about colonizing Mars. Shouldn’t scientists do something more productive with their time?"
Comment: I'm with Horgan. Multiverse discussion is entertaining fluff, nothing more.