Gullible Jones wrote:There are hypotheses, actually, such as the colliding-brane thing from M-theory... None are backed by any evidence whatsoever though.
Reading that kind of terminology made my brain turn off when I read the latest Hawking book. And my degree is in physics.
There are two kinds of physics: the useful kind, and the kind that journalists write about.
Seriously, I think that just about sums it up. Public respect for science seems to be inversely proportional to its usefulness. The closer it approaches real-life, the less enamoured they are of it. They want it to be mystical, mysterious, and distant. Like a religion.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Re the latest Hawking book - my brain started bleeding when he mentioned the anthropic principle as something valid and useful. I find it difficult to believe that a guy like Hawking would fail to realize that the "principle" is at best a useless statement of the bleeding obvious; but great minds are as fallable as the rest of them, I guess.
Michio Kaku's latest book (Parallel Worlds) I found to be more shockingly worse though. The first few dozen pages basically took the form of: "Wank Superstring theory wank wank hyperspace wank wank higher dimensions wank Randall wank gravitons leaking off the brane wank wank wonderful wank wank absolutely not a kludge wank wank wank," ad infinitum. I wasn't able to finish it.
Kind of sad, seeing how good Hyperspace was (including Kaku's lambasting of the anthropic principle). I was left wondering if some editor had read a draft and sent Kaku a note saying, "Need more string theory wank, readers like the taste," or something.
Zixinus wrote:Is it accurate to say that it is impossible to know what happened "before" (yes, I get that you can't go more north then the North Pole) the Big Bang?
It is literally impossible, and not in a 50 years from now it will look insane that I said that sort of way.
I believe there's also a cyclical universe hypothesis where there's a cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches, so before the Big Bang there would have been another cycle. But IIRC Dark Energy may have put the kibosh on that, but don't quote me on it.
Junghalli wrote:I believe there's also a cyclical universe hypothesis where there's a cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches, so before the Big Bang there would have been another cycle. But IIRC Dark Energy may have put the kibosh on that, but don't quote me on it.
The fact that the universe appears to be accelerating in its expansion puts the whole notion of a big crunch in the category of "unlikely". (Aside from the KFC version -- damn that's tasty.) Even if there had been a series of bangs and crunches, they would be punctuated by singularities, and you can't get past a singularity.
73% of all statistics are made up, including this one.
Zixinus wrote:Is it accurate to say that it is impossible to know what happened "before" (yes, I get that you can't go more north then the North Pole) the Big Bang?
It is literally impossible, and not in a 50 years from now it will look insane that I said that sort of way.
Shouldn't it be possible to say something about the conditions that existed which caused the Big Bang?
Junghalli wrote:I believe there's also a cyclical universe hypothesis where there's a cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches, so before the Big Bang there would have been another cycle. But IIRC Dark Energy may have put the kibosh on that, but don't quote me on it.
Even if that were the case, time would be cyclical. There would still be no time outside of time. The problem with discussing matters of time is that people are so locked into the mindset of assuming time is constant that they act as if space-time itself exists within some larger absolute timeframe.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Here's a way to think about it. Consider falling into a black hole. Because you can't escape from the singularity after you cross the event horizon, you are locked into eventually colliding with it. Given any point in time after you fall past the event horizon, the singularity is always in your future. The Big Bang is (as I understand) a black hole in reverse; so by the reasoning above, given any point in time, the Big Bang singularity is always in the past. You can't get past it.
Surlethe wrote:Here's a way to think about it. Consider falling into a black hole. Because you can't escape from the singularity after you cross the event horizon, you are locked into eventually colliding with it. Given any point in time after you fall past the event horizon, the singularity is always in your future. The Big Bang is (as I understand) a black hole in reverse; so by the reasoning above, given any point in time, the Big Bang singularity is always in the past. You can't get past it.
I've wondered if death from an observer's perspective is at all like this, with time continually dilating as the observer comes closer and closer to the moment of expiring but never actually experiencing their own demise.
TithonusSyndrome wrote:
I've wondered if death from an observer's perspective is at all like this, with time continually dilating as the observer comes closer and closer to the moment of expiring but never actually experiencing their own demise.
That's a less than reassuring prospect. I, for one, would rather cease to exist.
It's Jodan, not Jordan. If you can't quote it right, I will mock you.
TithonusSyndrome wrote:I've wondered if death from an observer's perspective is at all like this, with time continually dilating as the observer comes closer and closer to the moment of expiring but never actually experiencing their own demise.
The brain has a finite processing speed so I doubt this dilation could continue indefinitely.
TithonusSyndrome wrote:I've wondered if death from an observer's perspective is at all like this, with time continually dilating as the observer comes closer and closer to the moment of expiring but never actually experiencing their own demise.
Perhaps, but I doubt it; there's no reason for the perception of time to slow down as death looms. And from the perspective of someone falling into a black hole, time for him doesn't do anything; he whizzes on past the event horizon and is eventually spaghettified as he approaches the singularity. It's the observer hovering above the hole who sees him slow down as he approaches the event horizon.
