More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 31, 2022 - February 18, 2023
The present moment is no longer of fundamental significance because, according to Einstein, the past and the future are as real as the present.
in space-time, the longer the curve between two events, the less time passes on it.
How do you make a curve between two space-time events longer? By changing your velocity. The more you accelerate, the slower your proper time will pass. This effect is called time dilation
Once you agree that anything exists now elsewhere, even though you see it only later, you are forced to accept that everything in the universe exists now.
In this block universe, the future, present, and past exist in the same way; it’s just that we do not experience them the same way. And if all times exist similarly, then all our past selves—and grandparents—are alive the same way our present selves are.
According to the currently established laws of nature, the future, the present, and the past all exist in the same way. That’s because, regardless of exactly what you mean by exist, there is nothing in these laws that distinguishes one moment of time from any other. The past, therefore, exists in just the same way as the present. While the situation is not entirely settled, it seems that the laws of nature preserve information entirely, so all the details that make up you and the story of your grandmother’s life are immortal.
Because such creation stories can’t be falsified, we can’t tell if they are false, but being false is not their problem. The problem with these stories is that they are bad scientific explanations.
the God hypothesis has no quantifiable explanatory power. You can’t calculate anything from it. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it does make it unscientific.
Even inside stars, temperatures and densities do not exceed the ones we have produced on Earth. The only naturally occurring event we know of that can reach higher densities is a star that collapses to a black hole. Alas,
In Roger Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, for example, the entropy of the universe is actually destroyed at the end of each eon, so the next eon starts afresh in a low-entropy state. This does indeed explain the past-hypothesis. The price to pay is that information is also destroyed for good.
Sean Carroll thinks that new, low-entropy universes are created out of a larger multiverse, a process that can continue to happen indefinitely. And Julian Barbour posits that the universe started from a “Janus point” at which the direction of time changes, so actually there are two universes starting from the same moment in time. He argues that entropy isn’t the right quantity to consider and that we’d be better off thinking about complexity instead.
Loosely speaking, the simulation hypothesis has it that everything we experience was coded by an intelligent being, and we are part of that computer code.
Their line of argumentation usually closely follows Nick Bostrom’s argument, which, in a nutshell, goes like this: if there are (a) many civilizations, and these civilizations (b) build computers that run simulations of conscious beings, then (c) there are many more simulated conscious beings than real ones, so you are likely to live in a simulation.
physicists have looked for signs that natural laws really proceed step by step, like a computer code, but their search has come up empty-handed.
Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff would go on to write several papers together about microtubules, which are small tubes of proteins that can be found in cells, including neurons. The idea is that collections of microtubules in neurons can display quantum behavior. When these quantum states of the microtubules are reduced—that is, the quantum effects disappear—conscious awareness arises and free will becomes possible. This conjecture is called orchestrated objective reduction, or Orch OR for short.
Simply put, claiming that the constants of nature are fine-tuned for life is not a scientifically sound argument, because it depends on arbitrary assumptions. While a creator or a multiverse is not ruled out by science, science does not require their existence either.
The strong anthropic principle, however, makes a much bigger claim: that the existence of life today is the reason the universe is this way and not any other. Life doesn’t just constrain the constants; it explains them. At least that’s the idea.
To be more precise, the distribution of matter in the universe looks a little like the connectome, the network of nerve connections in the human brain. Neurons in the human brain, too, form clusters, and they connect by axons, long nerve fibers that send electrochemical impulses from one neuron to another.
The bottom line is, if the universe is thinking, it isn’t thinking very much. The amount of thinking that the universe could conceivably have done since it came into existence is limited by its enormous size—and size matters. The physics just doesn’t work out. If you want to do a lot of thinking, it helps to keep things small and compact.
