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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michio Kaku
Read between
January 14 - January 18, 2018
Linde calls this theory eternal, self-reproducing inflation, or “chaotic inflation,” because he envisions a never-ending process of continual inflation of parallel universes. “Inflation pretty much forces the idea of multiple universes upon us,” declares Alan Guth, who first proposed the inflation theory.
Fascinating. In spite of the fact that its origin can't be explained and we can't observe it working, we can declare what it means with 100% certainty.
The very idea of parallel universes was once viewed with suspicion by scientists as being the province of mystics, charlatans, and cranks. Any scientist daring to work on parallel universes was subject to ridicule and was jeopardizing his or her career, since even today there is no experimental evidence proving their existence.
A key admission and an indication that the reason this has moved mainstream has to do with imagination rather than science.
This tiny string, in turn, vibrates at different frequencies and resonances. If we were to pluck this vibrating string, it would change mode and become another subatomic particle, such as a quark. Pluck it again, and it turns into a neutrino. In this way, we can explain the blizzard of subatomic particles as nothing but different musical notes of the string. We can now replace the hundreds of subatomic particles seen in the laboratory with a single object, the string.
One object but hundreds of different ways to register itself with our clunky intruments based on what it's doing at the moment.
There was a Genesis.
But if time isn't infinite, how can stars be infinite? An infinite number of stars would require an infinite amount of time to form.
To a relativist, who can watch the motion of the marble on the bed from close up, it is obvious that there is no force at all. There is just the bending of the bed, which forces the marble to move in a curved line. To the relativist, there is no pull, there is only a push, exerted by the curved bed on the marble.
But this makes no sense. In the analogy the reason for the marble to roll across the curve toward the ball is the downward pull of gravity. Therefore, planets would have to be in absolute relation to an up or down. Probably, it's just the limitations of the analogy. If space bends in three dimensions it would answer that objection.
The problem lies not in relativity but in assuming that our common sense represents reality.
Nonsense. It does represent reality--just not the whole of reality. If it didn't it would never have come to be called "common" sense in the first place.
Commonsense must be tempered by humility and a sense of finitude.
time infinite,
Can an infinite exist in cause and effect if the universe has a discrete starting point? How can something that starts never have a beginning, even if we were to grant that it has no end?
There is a finite, calculable probability that he will be found outside the gates of the prison walls. For large objects like prisoners, you would have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe for this miraculous event to happen.
I've wrestled with the Uncertainty Principle for years now and it still doesn't fully convince me. The issue isn't simply that you don't know the location of the particle. It is also that you've made an imaginary assuption that the container is absolutely solid, static, and impenetrable. If it is in reality none nof those things, if you simply lack the ability to see the holes, then escape is neither surprising nor a grand principle.
cosmology is not an experimental science in the true sense of the word.
Another key concession. Many popular atheist cosmologists want the respect due an experimental science without the methods that give it certainty.
multiverse is eternal,
A faith-based assumption. What ideas inform the faith and makke the conclusion "necessary"?
Eventually, the multiverse becomes dominated by those universes that inflate by a huge amount.
How does this solve even a single age-old philosophical problem? If the mutliverse created the universe from whence came the multiiverse? If events occur in the multiverse, when did they begin to begin? If the universe is contained in the multiiverse where is the multiverse contained? If you're going to blindly posit eternity to support your theory, don't pretend to be providing any new answers.
When we apply the quantum theory to the universe, we are then forced to admit the possibility that the universe exists simultaneously in many states.
Still no convincing reply to why this isn't simply our inability to detect the precise location of an electron. If so, it does not mean that it has no precise location and is, therefore, a magicy wagicy wibbly wobbly particle that exists in many places at once. It just means we lack the ability to see it.
actually be very small.
Completely beside the point. It is equally impossible to get a little or a lot from nothing. Nothing Is nothing and something is something. Any something from nothing is still something, and that is the impossible thing.
free.
Again playing with words. If it costs something it isn't "free" in any sense. If the only way a wholly naturalistic universe could exist is if it is "free", if in fact we have something breaking even with something else (all of which is still something and not nothing at all) then it would fail even if it cost but a single boson.
“which happens from time to time”
Translation: "...and then an acceptable miracle occurs."
Like the P’an Ku mythologies, this is an example of creatio ex nihilo cosmology.
None of this is ex nihilo.
The reason for this is the perfect balance between positive and negative charges. As a result, the net charge of the universe appears to be zero, and gravity dominates the universe, not the electromagnetic force.
But a neutral charge doesn't make a thing "nothing".
Perhaps the universe existed in a perfect phase of “nothingness,” or empty higher-dimensional space.
Gah! If it exists, it isn't "nothing." It seems that grasping the meaning of "nothing" is sort like understanding "infinity"--we just can't do it.
To slip between these worlds is within the laws of physics. But it is extremely unlikely; the probability of it happening is astronomically small.
But the very fact that we are expending so much energy discussing it makes bit appear to be far more likely than it is--especially to someone with no understanding of the actual probabilities.
The quantum theory is the most successful physical theory of all time. The highest formulation of the quantum theory is the Standard Model, which represents the fruit of decades of experiments with particle accelerators. Parts of this theory have been tested to 1 part in 10 billion. If one includes the mass of the neutrino, then the Standard Model is consistent with all experiments on subatomic particles, without exception.
I get that the Standard Model can be tested in terms of practical observation. For example, experience tells is that when an observed waveform is X then the Y should be the case. But how do you test what a wave form IS, in a philosophical sense? How do you prove its nature? It seems we're proving the former and yet asserting the latter.
The third umpire is Bohr, who argued that reality existed only after an observation was made.
Consider researching the historical connections between intelletual naturalistic relativism and the development lf quantum theory. Could bad philosophy have led to inaccurate conclusions about real data that have been accepted so long now that they are maintained by faith annd unchallenged?
might be burnt, fallen, firewood, sawdust, and so on. Once an observation is made, then the tree suddenly springs into a definite state, and we see that it has fallen, for instance.
Does this really answer the question or just push it back a step? What determines what state we will find an observed object in? Experience shows that final states are not random. They can be predicted. Therefore, even if the electron itself is not objective before observation could its final location in fact be determined by a higher objective reality?
According to Linde’s philosophy, dinosaur fossils don’t really exist until you look at them. But when you do look at them, they spring into existence as if they had existed millions of years ago. (Physicists who hold to this point of view are careful to point out that this picture is experimentally consistent with a world in which dinosaur fossils really are millions of years old.)
How anyone who holds this view can criticize another as being "objectively wrong" with a straight face is beyond me. This is virtually indistinguishable from the Young Earth position that the earth was created "with the appearance of age."
However, I subscribe wholeheartedly to those words of Leibniz, ‘This world may be a phantasm and existence may be merely a dream, but this dream or phantasm to me is real enough if using reason well we are never deceived by it.’ ”
Gobbledygook. If the world itself is a phantasm, in the naturalistic sense, then reason itself is part of the hallucination. To use a hallucination to interpret itself is, by definition, to be deceived by it. In fact, only the deception prevents it from being straight insanity.
This means that “it” (matter in the universe) sprang into existence when information (“bit”) of the universe was observed. He calls this the “participatory universe”—the idea that the universe adapts to us in the same way that we adapt to the universe, that our very presence makes the universe possible.
More selfrefuting gobbledygook--if he's working froom naturaltistic assumptions. A wholly natural universe cannot observe itself. There could have been no observer present In the Beginning. Further, given that humans are organic mechanical by products of chance plus time, I see no reason to priviiledge "us" with the unique ability to cause existence instead of a plant, animal, or even camera.
And it very obviously begs the question: information has never been observed to author itself. Somewhere up the chain, intelligence had to insert itself into the process. Also, a cause must be sufficient to explain its effect. An unimaginably intelligent and powerful personal observer would have to be present to inject all this information into the universe at the Big Bang and then to observe it into existence. That sounds a lot like God.
Teleporting a human being may pose other problems. Braunstein observes, “The key thing for now is the sheer amount of information involved. Even with the best communication channels we could conceive of at the moment, transferring all that info would take the age of the universe.”
This also presumes that making a perfect copy of a person would preserve consciousness.
If the entire universe is part of the wave function, then there is no necessity for an observer (who must exist outside the universe).
Why? This seems a sheer leap of faith. It's an updated version of the blindlly posited uncaused cause--or wave function. If all observable wave functions require an observer, then we need a reason to think the universe doesn't other than "but if it does it necessitates God."
This is a variation of the many worlds theory: there is no need to invoke a cosmic observer that can observe the entire universe all at once.
No reason is given. Surely it isn't simplly the size of the universe at creation. How does that matter?
Scientists who seriously proposed the existence of unseen worlds were subject to ridicule.
Philosophical naturalists mock unseen worlds until they "see" one and are forced to accept it (i.e. germs, atoms, dark matter, etc.) at which point they vehmently declare they really knew it was there all along and pretend as if they were the first to find it.
It isn't "science" so much as a rhetorical game weighted so they can't lose.
Because subatomic particles cannot be seen even with our most powerful instruments, physicists have resorted to a brutal but effective way to analyze them, by smashing them together at enormous energies.
How can we be observationally certain we aren't damaging/altering the particles somehow in the process? If we are, how might that affect the results?
The “harmonies” of the string are the laws of physics.
The Ainulindale may have been anchored in reality?
The universe can now be viewed as a vast symphony of strings.
All of this begs for a Composer.
“If you start with perfection, you might be able to explain what you see . . . but you still haven’t answered the question: Why must the universe start out perfect?” Linde says. Steinhardt answers back, “Flat plus flat equals flat.” In other words, you have to assume that the membranes started out in the lowest energy state of being flat.
The deeper question is "Why do the membranes exist at all? How did they form?" It is interesting that this objection is considered laugably fatal to theism, but not to membranes.
In this theory, the universe is actually infinitely old and started out in the distant past as being nearly empty and cold.
If the universe "started" it could never be infinite by definition.
began
How can you use words like this and pretend this is a better explanation than the Uncaused Cause? At best you're offering an alternative that suffers froom exactly the same "flaw" as the theory you want it to replace.
And it is always possible that this analogy is actually a reflection of the real world—that we really exist as holograms.
Holograms? Fascinating that humans will entertain ideas like this and yet arbitrarily dismiss God out of hand.
Other scientists, like Sir Martin Rees of Cambridge University, think that these cosmic accidents give evidence for the existence of the multiverse. Rees believes that the only way to resolve the fact that we live within an incredibly tiny band of hundreds of “coincidences” is to postulate the existence of millions of parallel universes.
The multiverse as an escape from design. An escape only becomes necessay when one is running from something. Otherwise we embrace the simpliest solution, in this case that the appearance of design in fact implies design.
Similarly, the cosmological constant is not perfectly zero but is small, which indicates that our universe is “no more special than our presence requires.”
This is something like arguing that because we have found Ross's 747 in the desert, Boeing plants must be natural phenomena. Of course the cause must be equal to its effect. The issue is that the complex cause itself cannot be explained naturalistically.
Physicist Lee Smolin goes even further than Rees and assumes that an “evolution” of universes took place, analogous to Darwinian evolution, ultimately leading to universes like ours.
There's that word--assumes--again. In effect we imagine something, demonstrate that it is possible in a conceptual universe, and then treat it as priviledged fact.
Although a Darwinian evolution among universes is a strange and novel idea, Smolin believes that it can be tested by simply counting the number of black holes. Our universe should be maximally favorable to the creation of black holes. (However, one still has to prove that universes with the most black holes are the ones that favor life, like ours.)
Gobbledygook. Even if you presume the basic idea for sake of argument, how do you reasonably establish the maximal number of blackholes without studying a broad range of universes to secure a solid frame of reference? In this case, the "maximal number" will probably magically become whatever happens to be observed.
“Other universes can get intoxicating: you can say anything you want about them and never be proven wrong, as long as astronomers never see them.”
Direct verification of these ideas may prove to be exceedingly difficult, but indirect verification may be within reach. We sometimes forget that much of astronomical science is done indirectly. For example, no one has ever visited the Sun or the stars, yet we know what the stars are made of by analyzing the light given off by these luminous objects. By analyzing the spectrum of light within starlight, we know indirectly that the stars are made primarily of hydrogen and some helium. Likewise, no one has ever seen a black hole, and in fact black holes are invisible and cannot be directly seen.
...more
The same principle applies to Miracle. We cannot directly measure the event but we can observe the ripples it causes.
The end of the world is accompanied by great climactic catastrophes, usually a great fire, earthquakes, or a blizzard, followed by the final battle between good and evil. But there is also a message of hope. Out of the ashes comes renewal. Scientists, facing the cold laws of physics, must now confront similar themes.
Once again science is playing catch up to religion and philosophy.
Hard data, rather than mythology whispered around campfires, dictates how scientists view the final end of the universe.
And their philosophy, whispered at bars and around common rooms, determines how they view the data. I suppose it's the white coats that make the difference. 😅
This vicious cycle repeats itself endlessly, until the universe enters a runaway mode and grows exponentially fast.
But this also means time will pass more slowly?
“Mother Nature wasn’t designed to make us happy,” says astronomer Donald Brownlee.
More fundamental is the question as to why Mother Nature allows us to exist at all.
Some physicists have speculated that these “atoms” of electrons and antielectrons might be able to form new building blocks for intelligent life in this dark era. However, the difficulties facing this idea are formidable.
Some people seem unable to fully grasp the implications of entropy. They want so badly it to be otherwise they'll take blind leaps of faith like this.
But the transition from type 0 to type I is also the most perilous, because we still demonstrate the savagery that typified our rise from the forest.
A significant misunderstanding of human nature if we believe the danger stops there.
One might then try an even more difficult path: to create a baby universe.
The ultimate usurpation of God's role. Apparently it isn't "ridiculous" if humans are doing it.
But Darwin was hopelessly divided on the question of the role of humanity in the universe. Although he is credited as the one who dethroned humanity from the center of the biological universe,
Really? Darwin and those who followed him enshrined man as not just the center of existence but the final arbiter of it.
