Finite versus infinite universe

[CraigS]

Thanks for that Bert. Summary of the doco follows:

So what we have here follows on from Alan Turing’s, (see post 30), previous theories leading to his publication of his work called ‘The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis’. Morphogenesis is the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape.

This leads to the observation that shapes in nature are irregular and unpredicatable. But how can this be if Newtonian Physics is all about predicting nature’s behaviour with certainty?

The tiniest difference in initial conditions can dramatically alter the outcomes of a system defined by simple, deterministic, mathematical equations and result in indeterminate behaviours. (The Butterfly Effect).

Its all dependent on feedback. In nature, the environment provides the feedback mechanism.

Pattern formation: enter Mandlebrot and fractal geometry .. self-similarity .. complex systems following simple rules can spontaneously generate complex patterns or organisms (like humans).

The culmination of this documentary is summed up as:

Unthinking simple rules have the power to create amazing complex systems without any conscious thought.

Spontaneous pattern creation is inherently unpredictable and we have no idea of what the future holds.

The combination of Evolution + Complexity + Timescale results in extremely complex systems .. like human beings and all the way up to the complexity we see looking through our telescopes.

It all has mathematical foundations (and proofs) all originating from Georg Cantor's original deliberations on the concept of Infinity.

I am left with a deep concern for those who pass judgement on theoretical mathematics and physics on the basis of superficial queries such as:
"Whatever happened to the simplest solution is best ?"

Cheers

[avandonk]

Yes no organizing principle or being is needed. If you invoke an organising being then where did he/she come from? As a solution it is therefore a complete cop out!

Is this the final bit of the puzzle? Or is reality even stranger?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7FV9...eature=related


Only time will tell with some definitive experiments. The LHC may give a glimpse. The gravity wave detectors being planned now may give more insight. There is a long baseline interferometer that will be built in WA Australia or South Africa.

Astronomy with the analysis of rotating binary black holes or black holes/neutron stars may give us more data.

Closer to home if Eta Carina goes SN the gravity wave signal should be detectable.

I started studying Applied Physics in 1968 at RMIT. All through my working life in science I have kept up with these developments as they happened in journals such as Nature, Science etc. as a sort of hobby apart from my 'real' work that paid for the bills. It makes you realize how smart all these people are when their discoveries are difficult to understand let alone originate them.

Bert

[CraigS]

Yep. String Theory leading onto M-Theory … unproven and with even more data, it may still be unprovable .. but this may not mean that it is 'untrue'.

The point to be made here is that (Godel's incompleteness theorem about Logic):

"No matter how large you make your axioms (logic bases), there'll always be statements that are true but cannot be proven to be true .. no matter how much data you have."

This may or may not be the case for String and M-Theory

Astronomy provides the data. Without the theoretical context however, it is simply data. Humans need a context to make sense of the universe. 'Tis a symbiotic relationship .. one can never be real without the other. Intuition, or dare I say it .. 'faith' often bridges the gap.

Judicious forethought and caution is paramount in this approach, however.



Cheers

[avandonk]

A leap of faith may lead to insight but by itself it is meaningless. It leads to such deep truths as the tooth fairy, easter bunny and witches!

All Godel did was to shake the mathematicians out of their smugness and complacency. It was also another nail in the coffin of the clockwork or totally predictable Universe already put there by Quantum Mechanics and Relativity.

Chaos theory and fractals have forever in our understanding ruled out fate or predeterminism.

Ever heard of the three or more body problem? Differential equations can describe a mass and spring interaction but falls in a heap with more masses and springs without strict boundary conditions.

Physics can exactly predict the spectral lines of a single Hydrogen atom (Proton) and Electron. It fails for a Hydrogen molecule!

Bert

[CraigS]

I agree with all your statements there, Bert. I 'get' it. (I'm not sure Quantum Mechanics describes predictability, though .. perhaps 'probabilities' which isn't exactly predicatability ..)

So we live in the midst of unbounded complexity .. so that is what we see around us.

We're trying to work it out from the midst of that perspective.

And yet at the largest and smallest scales, things may ultimately be described quite simply. Who knows ?

Andrei Linde's ideas are to do with bubble universes. Guth has wrangled with him about flatness so he now seems to speak of 'expanding infinite sheets' rather than 'finite spherical surfaces' the difference is purely because our brains aren't fully capable of dealing with the dimensions separating the two analogies.

I'd prefer to keep with the directions outlined in this thread:
Finite/Infinite (Cantor, Godel) => BBT/Inflation => Chaos/Fractal/Complexity => String/M-Theory.

It seems that skipping the steps of thinking through all of these concepts can lead to a premature perspective on it all. Does this ever stop ? I don't think so.

I'm intrigued with the concept of our brains being entangled with something else out there … sounds like fun to ponder that one !! (Especially considering the difference between the sexes !!)



Cheers

[Karls48 (Karl)]

Yet the stone in my shoe really hurts.
Bert

This statement, in the context with rest of this discussion summarise our ability to comprehend concepts such as infinity at this time and age, for most of people. Yes there are exceptions, but again as Bert pointed out, those exceptional individuals seem to be either Autistic or Manic depressive. Great observation, as the deficiency in some human abilities is compensated by increase in other abilities in those individuals It seems that our understanding of “reality” is tied up to where we are in the time line. From historic point of view, we as the humans come long way from the stone hand axe, lets say 100 000 years ago to the hydrogen bomb in our present. The scale of our development seems to be logarithmic. Most significant development occurred in last five hundred years. The speed of development seems to accelerate during the times of great stress (such as war). That seems to be demonstration of ours survival instinct. After all, all of our pondering about the Universe, Infinity and Reality is the result of our survival instinct at work. Thousand years in the future it is most likely that our we are going to have quite different view of the infinity (and other things) that we have now.
Bert’s comments about intuition deserve separate tread.

[avandonk]

Originally Posted by CraigS

So Bert, your point has always been that the human mind can take us way beyond anything which may be real in nature, right ?

And we are only just at the beginnings of understanding the universe because we've only just begun to develop the tools to do so.

Did you see in the General Chat section the thread about the headset that is capable of reading one's brainwaves and taking actions based on that.

Does this mean we are beginning to tap into how the brain really works ? Or is this just some from of trick ?

The universe may be a hologram, and us the projection of that hologram. (I haven't even begun to work this one out yet .. so don't ask me about it !!)
I think you've mentioned that a good smack will sort this one out !!

Cheers

I have said this before but I will say it again in the interests of clarity.

Quantum entanglement is real. Look it up. If at the instant of the BB all we know today was in the same place and time then we are forever all linked in some way we do not yet understand to all of the Universe(s) and obviously to each other.

What if the feed back is even more subtle than we already think. Mere existence reinforces further time dependant existence. Sheldrakes hypothesis comes to mind.

The devil dodgers could be correct but they have so many beliefs without proof, some of them must be correct if only by betting on every horse in the race.

Bert

[Steffen]

Originally Posted by CraigS

I'll have to snoop that one out !
Add it to a list that could end up putting me into an asylum !

Definitely get Gödel-Escher-Bach. Hofstadter does an excellent job at demystifying the incompleteness theorem while at the same time illustrating the brilliance of Gödel's proof. The theorem is surrounded by an aura of hocus-pokus and frequently gets sensationalised by pop-science media (btw, it's not claiming that formal systems are always incomplete, but that they're either incomplete or self-contradictory, the latter actually being the more interesting case). Hofstadter shows how it can be found in every-day life and that the power of self-contradiction is in fact what makes the human mind possible.

Get it, read it and witness your mind becoming cleansed. No other book has ever given me a rush like this one

Cheers
Steffen.

[avandonk]

Does this mean we are beginning to tap into how the brain really works ? Or is this just some from of trick ?

I will try to answer this question seperately.

It is a bit like looking at the heat distribution or production in a computer and then glibly saying 'we know how it works!'. The hot bits is where all the action is!

Neural connections and their firings measured as electrical waves have as much meaning as measuring the amplitude of waves on a beach to describe a storm hundreds of miles away! All you can say is when the waves are bigger there is a storm or a prevailing wind.

I have seen programs that can 'evolve' electronic circuits to perform better. The resulting circuits work superbly but no known theory can explain how.

We have been 'designed' the same way by blind random evolution and hence we are an embodyment of the Universe we find ourselves in.

Bert

[CraigS]

Originally Posted by Steffen

Definitely get Gödel-Escher-Bach. Hofstadter does an excellent job at demystifying the incompleteness theorem while at the same time illustrating the brilliance of Gödel's proof. The theorem is surrounded by an aura of hocus-pokus and frequently gets sensationalised by pop-science media (btw, it's not claiming that formal systems are always incomplete, but that they're either incomplete or self-contradictory, the latter actually being the more interesting case). Hofstadter shows how it can be found in every-day life and that the power of self-contradiction is in fact what makes the human mind possible.

Get it, read it and witness your mind becoming cleansed. No other book has ever given me a rush like this one

Cheers
Steffen.

Thanks Steffen .. I'll have a snoop around for it.
You've got me interested .. (again) ..

Cheers

[Archy (George)]

Originally Posted by snas

I've been reading about various possible universes. One question that seems to come up frequently is, is the Universe finite or infinite? As I am not an astrophysicist, I may be missing something here. But, it seems to me that if the BB occurred when a "singularity" containing all of what now makes up the Universe suddenly underwent a period of massive, rapid expansion, then surely the original singularity had an edge,a boundary. If so, it was finite. So how would a growing universe get from a finite singularity on day one of the new Universe, to an infinite state. Surely a finite thing cannot become infinite.
Stuart

I agree, a finite thing cannot become infinite.

[avandonk]

Get it, read it and witness your mind becoming cleansed. No other book has ever given me a rush like this one

Cheers
Steffen.



Yes Steffen it made me get out of a very simplistic 'groove' where my education had firmly put me.

Bert

[CraigS]

Breaking news … I actually sat in a bookshop and had a skim thru of it today.

There's a lot of text.

And a lot of philosophy …

Cheers

[avandonk]

Did you notice the whole chapter written in palindromes?

Philosophy is fine as long as it is based on testable ideas.

Arguing about the number of angels that can dance on a pin comes to mind!

Bert

[CraigS]

Nope .. I didn't have much time .. but a WHOLE chapter ??

Going to have to get me a copy ..

[avandonk]

Craig I do not have all the answers. I just thought that I would make your quest for them shorter by pointing you at the many people that were trying way before us.

Bert

[CraigS]

And I thank you for the 'heads-up' .. great stuff.

Was thinking today about the fractal nature of the Universe.

Self-similarity may cause me to mellow my stance about exo-planet life possibilities .. so far, I've been pretty sceptical .. also considering entanglement .. well, there's another spanner in my scepticism ..!….

Hmmm ...


Cheers

[avandonk]

That is the point of fractals even with self similarity there is an infinite number of variations!

Bert