Parallel Universes

[hi-fi-dave]

Originally Posted by suckamc

Lest my post fade into the past... I'll do the most shameful thing anyone can do: quote myself.



57.5% of us say "the evidence is clear," and 0% can say what the evidence is.

43.7% of all statistics are made up right on the spot. Yogi Beara


Gotta love that guy!

[hi-fi-dave]

Has anyone seen the clip "What the Beep do we know?" What do some of the knowledgeable physics people think?

http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/wha...do_we_know.php

[scott757]

I wanted an "It's Possible" option as I'm not really sure. But I probably lean towards...Yes.

[VaughnC]

If there's enough room for one universe to expand into, then there's probably enough room for a few more universii .

[bigdaddy]

Let's remember to be clear on what a theory is in science. Essentially, it's a hypothesis that has mathematical and/or empirical support and is not contradicted by any firm empirical evidence, not one iota.

I'm not a science teacher, but I, at one point, was a kid who paid attention in science class, and that does not mach the definition of a theory I was taught. A theory is an attempt to explain a set of empirical observations. Theories, or at least parts of theories can most certainly be contradicted by empirical evidence. The easiest example of this is the contrast between the two theories about light - the particle theory and the wave theory.

[Dave Klausner]

Pardon the long post (in fact, it's so long, I had to break it into 2 posts!) but this is something I wrote in another forum, that I think is pretty appropriate. Funny how bright people tend to come around to the same questions, no matter what their interests.
The easy answer as to why we think there are multiple universes, is that the math indicates it. It’s so counterintuitive, however, and in fact, so counter to basic precepts we have about reality, that a little background is order to see why we should go where the math leads us.

First, we have to look at the ways in which we make sense of our surroundings. In college, I took a course in human intelligence, and the first day, the professor asked us to write down our definition of it. I put down “the ability to participate in a conceptual alternative to the perceptual here and now”, which I think is still a good starting point. We humans are model makers, and have the ability to hold concepts in our minds that are completely removed from the situation we are currently experiencing. I would hold, however, that even what we are experiencing is itself a model. Take vision, for instance. Obviously, what we see seems very “real” to us, but if you look at our visual apparatus, we have a bunch of discrete cells, which have varying sensitivity to various wavelengths of light. These cells are in clusters, which send electrical signals (themselves the result of chemical processes) through our nerves, to our brain, which assembles the data and synthesizes the solid and continuous world we “see” from the data. The compound eyes of the fly paint a very different picture of the world to its nervous system, but it doesn’t seem any less “real” to the fly.

This is one of the meanings of the Buddhist koan “Who is the Master who makes the grass green?” - it is our nervous system. A scientist will tell you that green light has a wavelength between 4920 and 5770 angstroms, but what is the “experience” of green? Certainly, a colorblind (dichromatic vision) person has a different experience than a typical (trichromatic) person does, and we can only guess what the experience is to an animal with four types of cones (tetrachromatic), which is quite common in other species. When you and I see “green”, are we having the same internal experience of it? We can never really know. By the way, is “greenness” an aspect of the object itself? The grass is made of colorless atoms, but we see it as green since it reflects green light. From a strictly scientific perspective, since it absorbs red light preferentially, the grass itself might be properly considered to have the property of “redness”, and “greenness” merely reflects the limitations of our sense organs.

Because it’s all we know, we are tempted to conclude that what we see is all there is to perceive, but a bee looking over a field of flowers, can tell which ones are ready to give up their nectar, because it can see into the UV spectrum, which is where the plants advertise their ripeness to the insects that will help them pollinate. A viper can “see” into the infrared spectrum (though not with its eyes) and lives in a different perceptual realm than we do. Animals with more highly developed senses of smell than we have can detect all manner of information or “truths” about their environment than we cannot - sharks can detect electrical impulses that tell them about their world, elephants can hear subsonic sounds that are below our ability to perceive, etc. And I’m sure the chemical world of the termite’s senses is no less “real” to it, but it would be quite alien to us.

Our ears are a sensory system, wherein we are sensitive to variances in air pressure, and have cells that trigger electrochemical impulses based on frequency, amplitude, and time differences. It is our brains that assemble this jumble of electrical data into Beethoven’s Ninth, and into an experience that is unique to each of us. We can go down the list of our senses, but in the end, there are only electrical impulses that our brains - the “three pound universe” - use to synthesize our reality. Interestingly, scientists have measured brain activity during the experience of an event and the recalling of that event, and there is absolutely no difference in brain activity. As far as the brain is concerned, whatever it is synthesizing *is* reality. This is not surprising considering how real dreams can be, but the implication that all our *reality* is a construct - a very useful and intuitive one , but a construct none the less - takes some getting used to. We are truly far greater artists than we realize.

So, we have a number of different types of models that we can use - which do we use in any given situation? I think even an atheist can see that a model of faith is useful when dealing with death, or in a 12 step program, but using that model to stand in the middle of the road and pray that God won’t let the the cars hit you is probably not the best model for that situation. Similarly, the physicist may say: “My body is not a *solid* object - it’s mostly empty space through which there is a ‘dance of energy’ (as Fritjof Capra put it), and the same is true of the car. In addition, two objects can never *touch* - the closest we can possibly come to one another is the Planck length apart - so I’m safe.” That would also not be the best model. The Buddhist who says “’The *car* is an illusion, and *I* am an illusion” will also likely not fare very well in the street (I am reminded of the story of the Zen pupil who after days of meditation rushes to the master to announce his enlightenment - “Master - I have it! *I* do not exist!” The master smacks him in the nose with his staff - “Then what hurts?”).

There is a story of a Zen conference, where a number of the great thinkers in Zen were sitting around a table discussing whether or not the table were in fact “real.” The great scholar D.T. Suzuki was silent the whole time. After hours of discussion, the rest of the scholars asked Dr. Suzuki whether he thought the table were real. “Yes” was the answer. “In what sense is the table real?” they asked him. “In every sense” was the reply. I take that to mean that whether you are looking at the table as Capra’s dance of energy, or examining the type of wood it made from, or the analyzing the style of its construction, or it triggers a memory of the dining room in your grandparents’ house, each of those models is “real” and valid in some sense.

Since Heisenberg, we have realized that we cannot measure an object’s position and its velocity at the same time. It’s not just that we can’t measure them - an object really doesn’t possess such qualities - they are constructs that we are trying to impose on “reality.” There is a famous experiment in physics called the experiment with two slits, and the Reader’s Digest version of that is that you can set up a light source, and have it shine onto a surface through a very thin slit cut in an opaque material. When you do so, we get the exact pattern we would expect if light were a particle. If we have two slits, however, now the interference pattern we see is exactly that predicted if light were a wave. So which is it, particle or wave? We can only conclude that “particles” and “waves” are our own constructs, and depending on how we set up the experiment, we can make light (or reality) appear one way or the other. It’s a little like the sculptor who sees a bust of Shakespeare in a rock, and uses his chisel to chip away all the extra bits. Depending on how he uses his chisel, it could be a bust of Lincoln instead, but it was his act that made the result seem like the person we recognize. This is part of what is meant when it is said we live in an observer created universe.

[Dave Klausner]

(Part 2)

In science, we place emphasis on models that have greater predictive power, and it’s here that we come to the model of mathematics. Math is a model of the world that for the most part is greatly removed from normal experiential models, but it’s an extraordinarily powerful predictive model. The basic concept of number is easy to grasp (if Johnny has 5 apples and we take away 2... ) but as we learn more math, things get less intuitive. By the time we are dealing with the circumference of a circle, we have been introduced to pi, an irrational number. We can’t conceive of there being an actual amount of something where the number doesn’t eventually resolve, but we can accept that we are dealing with ideals here, and that an ideal circle may have such a property, since no ideal circle exists in “reality.”.

Eventually, we get to imaginary numbers, like the square root of -2. At this point, even in some idealized vision, there can never be such a number - it’s clearly a completely fabricated construct. And yet, the math that uses such numbers yields highly predictable results, and in fact, the computer you are reading this on could not have been designed without them. By the time we get to quantum mechanics, the math gets even stranger. Now, we no longer have a single correct answer to a problem, we have multiple ones, each of which is equally correct. This is the point where Einstein said that “God does not play dice with the world”, and looked for a way out (but never found one), and where Neils Bor said “anyone who understands quantum mechanics has not looked into it deeply enough.” The predictive power of the math of quantum mechanics is unbelievably good. The precision is as good as measuring the distance across the entire United States to within the width of a human hair.

Erwin Schrodinger developed the famous “Schrodinger’s Cat” paradox to illustrate the conundrum. Imagine a box, with a cat inside it, and we have some sort of mechanism hinged on a quantum reaction - the decay of a nucleus - that will release a poison into the box, and kill the cat. According to the math, there is a point in time in which the correct answer to “has the nucleus decayed?” is that both yes and no are equally true. And yet, we know that if we open the box, we will see either a live cat or a dead cat and not both, or some cat that is in a state between the two. What happens to those other “true” answers is still debated, but there are a few theories, one of which is the Copenhagen Interpretation, which says that the act of observation “collapses the state vector”, and thus we see only one possibility. This places a huge premium on consciousness. The other leading theory is the “Many Worlds” interpretation of Everett, Graham, and Wheeler, which basically says that anything that can happen, does happen, somewhere in space-time. As Murray Gell-Man put it “everything not forbidden is compulsory.” As completely counterintuitive as this seems, the math works, and is a great predictor, and in ways that are easily seen, such as nuclear energy (or bombs) and a host of technologies.

At this point, not only is the math so removed from experiential reality that it defies imagination, but it defies basic tenets of what we hold reality to be, based on the model that our senses have been giving us all our lives. In the fascinating film “What the Bleep do I Know?”, a scientist talks about work he is doing, where they can create a situation where a single “object” is in two places at once. This “object” is large enough to take a photo of with an electron microscope, and he can show you a picture of two little blobs, in two different places, that are actually the same object at the same time. It’s not that you would call him a liar when he says they are the same object, but neither can your mind, so used to certain constructs of reality, really resolve the fact that that is one object in two places at once.

When I was in grade school, we had neutrons, protons, and electrons, and photons, but that was it - everything was made of them, and electrons orbited around the nucleus like little planets. Now, not only do we know that the electrons exist in a “probability cloud” around the nucleus and are not in any “place” at any “time”, but the cast of subatomic characters has grown to include neutrinos, muons, tau particles, up-quarks, down-quarks, strange-quarks, charmed-quarks, bottom-quarks, top quarks, gluons, W- and Z-bosons, Higgs bosons (possibly) and many, many more. It’s a big unruly mess. However, we have the Standard Model, whose math explains it all, and whose predictive powers are great. The Standard Model does not account for gravity, however, which has a separate theory. The holy grail of physics has been to develop a Unified Field Theorem - a “theory of everything” - that unites them. Scientists like nice, neat relationships, and so it was hoped that the UFT would be a nice, neat theorem.

Enter String Theory, which is unfortunately, not at all nice and neat, but seems to work, and whose predictions are “true” and useable. Unfortunately, in the same way that Newtonian physics is “true” for most reactions on the easily observable scale, but falls apart when dealing with the very small or the very fast, String Theory only works for certain sets of parameters. Just as Einstein’s math works for the very small and the very fast, and in fact, all of Newtonian math can be derived from it, Super String Theory works for all sets of parameters, and all the permutations of the various forms and equations of String Theory can be derived from it. Unfortunately, we are stuck with the 10 to the 500th power possible “correct” answers for possible universe configurations (the cornerstone of the Multiverse theory). The construct of Super String Theory, while about as counter intuitive as you can get, is nonetheless an extraordinarily useful model - in fact, much more useful, and a better predictor, than any “intuitive” construct for certain situations. At some point, we find ourselves asking in what sense is the universe “real”? In every sense.

As for non-mathematical evidence supporting String Theory, some scientists are looking for remnants of strings from the time of the Big Bang, blown up to galactic dimensions in the Great Inflation. These strings can only be detected by their gravity, but we are getting more sophisticated with such searches, and it may be only a matter of time before we have solid evidence of them. This is as good a time as any to talk about the “electromagnetic bias” we have. Until recently, everything we know about anything at great distances, and certainly anything about space, came from electromagnetic radiation. Unfortunately, most of the “stuff” in the universe, neither absorbs not emits electromagnetic radiation. We became aware of the so called “dark matter” only recently, and only by the gravitational effects it has on everything else. Once we get beyond the electromagnetic bias and more fully embrace gravitational detection (and who knows how many other additional modalities we will discover we need), we can greatly expand our models and our understanding of the universe.

This brings me to a story of Nasrudin, the Sufi protagonist who is either the wisest man in the village or the biggest fool, and whose tales are thought experiments along the lines of the Buddhist koans. One dark night, Nasrudin was observed on his hands and knees beneath a street lamp, frantically searching through the dirt for something. The townspeople gathered, curious as to what was going on, and eventually they asked him what he was looking for. "I'm searching for my keys" was the reply. "Where did you lose them?" they asked. "Over there" he said, gesturing out into the darkness. "Then why are you searching over here?" came the question. "Because the light is so much better here."

Is Nasrudin the wise man, and it means that there are things so beyond our understanding, that we are not ready to explore them, and so we are forced to search within our understanding if the answers are to have any meaning at all? Or is he the fool, and it means that we have to accept that the “truth” is beyond where it is comfortable for our minds to look for it, and that to really find it, we have to crawl out into the darkness, beyond our experiential comfort zone, on our hands and knees, feeling around for the truth?

If we can find remnants of primordial strings, we will add to the mathematical evidence that the rest of String Theory is likely correct, but is there any hope of actually detecting other universes, and possibly even finding out about them? Is there any information from other pocket universes in the cosmic landscape that we can detect? Possibly. The cosmic horizon, the bright light at the edge of the universe that is the earliest remnants of the Big Bang, receding from us at the speed of light, is difficult (in fact, currently impossible) for us to see beyond. However, there are cosmic microwaves we can detect, whose origins may well be from beyond the cosmic horizon.

Black holes are somewhat better studied versions of event horizons, and a lot of the math points toward certain conclusions, the most intuitive interpretation of which, is that non-local information from beyond the event horizon, can contain multidimensional information, much in the same way that a piece of a hologram can contain multidimensional image information. It would appear that much as we can examine part of the information in a hologram, and deduce much about its projected “structure”, we may be able to extrapolate a lot about the structure of universes beyond the cosmic horizon from the fragments of microwaves we are detecting. George Smoot, one of the leaders in cosmic microwave detection has likened a cosmic microwave map of the sky to “the face of God.” It is indeed a very interesting time to be a physicist.

[joemilitello]

It was my understanding...

that there would be no math.

(Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford many moons ago.)

[Anna_Laurel]

I have a gut feeling that a lot of the eggheads in those deep-think-tanks are trying to read too much into the "evidence", which in my eyes, rather than indicating the presence of multiple universes, simply points to additional dimensions that we do not, and/or cannot perceive in the way that we think of perception (time being an example).

What turns my head into jelly is the thing about physically separated quark particles responding to remote stimuli. If anybody can wrap their noggin around that one, I'm all ears and I'll buy the beer.

[VanR]

Give them a week and they'll change that theory to something else they made up.

[fetishfrog]

Thx Dave,

That was a cool read.

[Anna_Laurel]

Well, like my dad used to say when I would run to him and yell something like, "They've almost got EVERYTHING figured out...EVERYTHING......look at this book!"


Dad: "Why?"

[Crimson Queen]

Originally Posted by fetishfrog

Thx Dave,

That was a cool read.

Awesome read!

[greggorypeccary]

Originally Posted by bigdaddy

I'm not a science teacher, but I, at one point, was a kid who paid attention in science class, and that does not mach the definition of a theory I was taught. A theory is an attempt to explain a set of empirical observations. Theories, or at least parts of theories can most certainly be contradicted by empirical evidence. The easiest example of this is the contrast between the two theories about light - the particle theory and the wave theory.

How is that different from what Jon said? The point is a theory can be falsifed by observable evidence. Theories like The Big Bang, or evolution, may have unknowns, but the evidence at hand does not falsify them.


And here here we go, arguing semantics.

[puffin]

Originally Posted by hi-fi-dave

Has anyone seen the clip "What the Beep do we know?" What do some of the knowledgeable physics people think?

I'm NOT one of 'em, but I thought the movie was far too casual in tying quantum mechanics/behaviors to the "macro universe" that we function in. I seem to recall most of the people interviewed for the film as non-scientists (or, at least, not physicists), who seemed convinced that things like telepathy and walking on water could be accomplished by "believing with every iota of my being." (paraphrased)

Which strikes me as simple naivety.