74 links have been added on 18 ideas about #cosmology.
  1. DNA as in it’s unique fingerprint, But if you change a little bit the laws of nature, or you change a little bit the constants of nature—like the charge on the electron—then the way the universe develops is so changed, it is very likely that intelligent life would not have been able to develop.

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  2. I recommend you read this – not being rude but there seems to be more to it. I didn’t understand everything the author claimed but there is plenty of evidence that there is some fine-tuned DNA-like evolution going on somewhere up there.

  3. I guess the parameters are the fixed constants of nature. But there lies the problem. The Anthropic Principle is an unfalsifiable statement (aka. a tautology) that results from the “selection effect” of our own existence. Meanwhile, the fine-tuning argument is a surprising fact about the laws of nature as we know them.

  4. Already exists. Potentially infinite bunk theories to wade through the chatterverse!

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  5. Urr, nope, but thinking about this can help find the truth. From this teaching: “You could say that the history of the book of Genesis is kind of like the opposite of our belief in a 14 billion years ago Big Bang, considered to be out of date and foolish, but perhaps with more wisdom than we thought. Perhaps even Genesis is set for its own type of revolutionary rereading.”

  6. Or we sprouted from a hole in another universe… read this https://medium.com/the-infinite-universe/the-big-bang-may-be-a-black-hole-inside-another-universe-79ce12613c60

  7. lol pls read: “This is kind of a mess. The question originally didn’t specify that the Big Bang was excluded. John Rennie and I both answered on the assumption that the Big Bang was the only logical place to look for a boundary. Our answers contradict one another. The new version of the question excludes the Big Bang. However, the OP has never explained why anyone would expect a boundary anywhere else”.

  8. Ahh, so if there is only one God, then it’s the God of nothing, rather than the many Gods for each thing.

  9. It’s happening already, read this: “A theory of everything, a grand unified theory of physics and nature, has been elusive for the world of Physics. While unifying various forces and interactions in nature, starting from the unification of electricity and magnetism in James Clerk Maxwell’s seminal work A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism [8] to the electroweak unification by Weinberg-Salam-Glashow [9-11] and research in the direction of establishing the Standard Model including the QCD sector by Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman [12,13], has seen developments in a slow but surefooted manner, we now have a few candidate theories of everything, primary among which is String Theory [14]. Unfortunately, we are still some way off from establishing various areas of the theory in an empirical manner. Chief among this is the concept of supersymmetry [15], which is an important part of String Theory. There were no evidences found for supersymmetry in the first run of the Large Hadron Collider [16]. When the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs Boson in 2011-12 [17-19], there were results that were problematic for the Minimum Supersymmetric Model (MSSM), since the value of the mass of the Higgs Boson at 125 GeV is relatively large for the model and could only be attained with large radiative loop corrections from top squarks that many theoreticians considered to be `unnatural’ [20]. In the absence of experiments that can test certain frontiers of Physics, particularly due to energy constraints particularly at the smallest of scales, the importance of simulations and computational research cannot be underplayed.”

  10. Steven Weinberg, called it “a troubling thought” that humans might not be smart enough to understand the final Theory of Everything. “But I suspect in that case,” he wrote in an email, “we will also not be smart enough to design a computer that can find a final theory.” — MORE HERE https://mindmatters.ai/2020/12/can-a-powerful-enough-computer-work-out-a-theory-of-everything/

  11. No doubt DeepMind is working on it. It seems to have cracked the structure of the protein and other complex relationships, the whole shebang is likely next on the cards.

    https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphafold-reveals-the-structure-of-the-protein-universe

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  12. I’m linking to this. its a good place to start with regards to how Artificial Intelligence will solve our problems for us, probably by removing us alongside our problems.

  13. One of the reasons A.I. has been so successful at solving games,” Dr. Thaler said, “is that games have a very well-defined notion of success.” He added, “If we could define what success means for physical laws, that would be an incredible breakthrough.

  14. “In the recent past, neural networks have also helped in determining heavy quarks as well as identifying electrons [76]. We can use deep learning to solve Schrodinger’s equation, to find the ground state energy [77]. There is a growing need to turn noisy and large data sets into meaningful information as we try to increase our ability to prepare and control increasingly complex quantum systems experimentally. It is in this area that we can utilize machine learning, such as the use of algorithmic learning and Bayesian methods for Hamiltonian learning [78], to classify quantum states [79] and to characterize unknown unitary transformations [80]. Reconstruction of the Hamiltonian to identify an accurate model for quantum system dynamics, extracting information on unknown quantum states and engineering quantum gates with pairwise interactions, using both time-independent and time-dependent hamiltonians, are all better done using artificial intelligence.”

  15. read ‘Cosmological natural selection’

  16. The most full proposal for the mechanism of cosmological natural selection comes from physicist Lee Smolin. Here is the mind-blowing hypothesis that he first outlined in 1992 in his book The Life of the Cosmos.

  17. No evidence but good arguments. We do still need evidence right? What if that is a quantum factor too, Probably not testable.

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  18. It could be right that we are only here due to this imbalance early on in the Universe. But, things get trickier all the time, antimatter may be just about to blow apart https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01955-3

  19. I saw this quote on a great video and have found it again. It’s at https://youtu.be/dIJXGQ4H0GQ

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  20. Got to say it’s sickening that people think time is just another dimension. IT does lots more than space could ever do. Just thank goodness we have both. Read this…

  21. Interesting…”As if the connection between entropy and the arrow of time is just a case of a starry eyed fanboy falling for a fashionable trend, as opposed to an undeniable and widely accepted fact about physics.”

  22. An international team of researchers has conducted an experiment that shows that the arrow of time is a relative concept, not an absolute one.

  23. Our brains certainly are! You have got to read this to get the bigger picture https://www.sciencealert.com/human-consciousness-could-be-a-result-of-entropy-study-science

  24. “Time is related to the space coordinates, but they are not equivalent. Pythagoras’s theorem treats all coordinates on an equal footing (see Euclidean space for more details). We can exchange two space coordinates without changing the length, but we can not simply exchange a space coordinate with time: they are fundamentally different.

    It is an entirely different thing for two events to be separated in space and to be separated in time. Minkowski proposed that the formula for distance needed a change. He found that the correct formula was actually quite simple, differing only by a sign from Pythagoras’s theorem:

    Where c is a constant and t is the time coordinate.[Note 2] Multiplication by c, which has the dimensions L T −1, converts the time to units of length and this constant has the same value as the speed of light.”

    My question is: where does the negative sign come from ?”

  25. There are 2 currently, and they don’t mix but so what? Who says they should fit each other. I get you. In one situation one set of laws wins, in another the other does. Just like jurisdiction in criminal laws and rules in languages. Scientists are intent on reductionalism at all costs but the Universe may not be that simple. And it evidently isn’t.

  26. Good point. Or any laws at all. “The good news is that string theory has no free parameters. It has no dials that can be turned. It doesn’t make sense to ask which string theory describes our universe, because there is only one.”

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  27. Hmm, I like this idea but I wonder what it means inside a black hole, if time becomes space. I mean. if time really does become space then there is no “when” right? and therefor this is a region where the Universe doesn’t have events, interactions and possibly any meaning. Confused.com doesn’t help here 🙂

  28. More from Rovelli in his lecture. Very hard to disagree with and nice to see someone pushing the boundaries in a way that makes people look at things in a slightly different way. It’s still physics, but not as we know it Jim.

  29. Rovelli really is your guy for this – I highly recommend his book where he convinced me that yep, events and not objects are the fundamental reality. Objects are so one dimensional after you have read this, I will never go back to my old way of thinking – he is a great explainer. Buy it and say goodbye to the silly old world of objects.

  30. Gravity isn’t a force, and Einstein was wrong – just still the best explanation we have at the moment.

  31. Scientific American, making it sound like Carroll is the only guy to belive quantum mechanics is real and not just an idea: “Aim an instrument at the electron to determine where it is, and you’ll find it in just one place. You might reasonably assume that the wave function is just a statistical approximation of the electron’s behavior, which can’t be more precise because electrons are tiny and our instruments crude. But you would be wrong, according to Carroll. The electron exists as a kind of probabilistic blur until you observe it, when it “collapses,” in physics lingo, into a single position.”

  32. It is true that our particular form of life would have been impossible without “fine tuning” of the universe’s structure, but we do not know if there could have been equally fine-tuned, yet fantastically different universes supporting biological life. Anthropic principles fail to explain why our universe is in one such fine-tuned state, when “all things being equal”, it was much more likely to develop into chaos.

  33. People use the anthropic principle to argue that the Universe must be exactly as it is because we exist the way we do. And that’s not only untrue, it’s not even what the anthropic principle says.

  34. Miss Entropic

    Entropictastic! “Dark energy could be merely mimicking the cosmological constant, a scalar field changing so slowly that we have not yet been able to detect it. Or (whisper it quietly) perhaps dark energy does not even exist.”

  35. I think Sean is doing us all a major favour by pushing this idea in order to help us start asking the right questions again. Bless him if he doesn’t even fully ‘believe’ in many worlds, but is championing it at risk of being a fall-guy for the benefit of future generations of physicists. For this, he needs a stack of medals. And yes, giving credit to Everrett makes him seem respectful for ousted thinkers of the past – but he has a difficult task in explaining many worlds to layman, like me, without confusing us by adding the maths. (Btw America, unlike the universal wave function there is more than just one math).

    Why hasn’t he convinced my confused but open mind yet? Well, after watching and listening to everything I can find that he works tirelessly to put out (including the BBCs infinite monkey cage that just added more woo) and especially his fab great courses plus series on time (actually it was about entropy, but hey…) I talked to a bunch of people and many get “stuck” on the same handful of points he raises. None of us could find answers to a few things he states time and again, without actually explaining them in a way that resolves our questions – for example:

    1 – Maybe entangled electrons are just like a pair of socks. You know, one is a righty so you can infer the other is a lefty – without any information travelling spookily. If this isn’t the case, I need to know which experiment actually shows they are undecided wave functions before they collapse into left or right (or spin up and down)?

    2 – Different worlds that “don’t talk to each other” is a phrase he uses a lot but that is just a phrase, he doesn’t describe what this really means, like the Copenhagen interpretation it glosses over without giving a satisfactory explanation, just a soundbite, no? and if the world splits rather than makes new worlds, wouldn’t it already be thinner than the equivalent of a ‘many worlds’ plank length already. How far can this actually go without sharing out all the universe’s energy?

    3 – He explains how the observation problem is totally misunderstood because people think it involves humans observing things, which will cause the wave function to collapse, ie decoherence. He explains that any particle of light or matter, or whatever, that can ‘sense’ where a particle is (or which way it is spinning for example), is enough to count as an observation. However, I have problems understanding when it is that light or matter DOESN’T sense another particle’s spin or position. Ie when is it where a wave function doesn’t collapse? Maybe he means only light that has never landed on something? (yet).

    I would love him to take 5 minutes out to answer these as I am “in” if he can explain what he means properly without going into Hawking mode and just clicking the same phrases out again and again. However, I don’t think a couple of tweets would do the job.

    Too shy to ask but if anyone can shed any ‘light’, on this ‘matter’ let me know. I will keep following his every word to see if he goes into more detail without adding maths. If you ever get to talk to him, thank him for all the hard work and inspiration. PS that blasted cat is surely an x cat now – stop flogging it in universities, just admit you don’t know the answers, thats what everyone else does, surely a university would be the first to express this, its what inspires new minds to come up with new ideas.

  36. Many worlds has many problems, not quite debunked but not understood either.

  37. Just doesn’t cut it for me, I mean inventing more universes just to solve a small problem in our own seems like a cop out… and this is exactly the type of false solution we should avoid falling into, maybe just admit we don’t know the answer yet?