Still wading through my "to read" files... --- The Fool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F1EDD-B48A-1E90-8EA5809EC5880000
Short version: somewhere or when or how, invisible pink (euww!) unicorns DO exist...(IIRC, Dan M. said something to this effect last year, although I think in jest - mostly) Long version: "...One of the many implications of recent cosmological observations is that the concept of parallel universes is no mere metaphor. Space appears to be infinite in size. If so, then somewhere out there, everything that is possible becomes real, no matter how improbable it is. Beyond the range of our telescopes are other regions of space that are identical to ours. Those regions are a type of parallel universe. Scientists can even calculate how distant these universes are, on average. And that is fairly solid physics. When cosmologists consider theories that are less well established, they conclude that other universes can have entirely different properties and laws of physics. The presence of those universes would explain various strange aspects of our own. It could even answer fundamental questions about the nature of time and the comprehensibility of the physical world..." "...QUANTUM MECHANICS predicts a vast number of parallel universes by broadening the concept of "elsewhere." These universes are located elsewhere, not in ordinary space but in an abstract realm of all possible states. Every conceivable way that the world could be (within the scope of quantum mechanics) corresponds to a different universe. The parallel universes make their presence felt in laboratory experiments, such as wave interference and quantum computation..." "...Like some of those alternatives, the cyclic model is based on the idea that our universe is a three-dimensional brane that bounds a four-dimensional space. Another brane--a parallel universe--resides a subsubatomic distance away. That universe is closer to you than your own skin, yet you can never see or touch it. "These two branes act as if connected by a spring, which pulls the branes together when they are far apart and pushes them apart when they are close. Thus, they oscillate to and fro. Periodically the branes hit and rebound like cymbals. To those of us stuck inside one of the branes, the collision looks exactly like a big bang. The hot primordial soup was the energy dumped into the branes when they hit. The density fluctuations that seeded galaxies began as wrinkles in the branes..." [Vision of neurones of the brain's neocortex, which is wrinkled into sulci and gyri, as galaxies...] "...Everett's many-worlds interpretation has been boggling minds inside and outside physics for more than four decades. But the theory becomes easier to grasp when one distinguishes between two ways of viewing a physical theory: the outside view of a physicist studying its mathematical equations, like a bird surveying a landscape from high above it, and the inside view of an observer living in the world described by the equations, like a frog living in the landscape surveyed by the bird. "From the bird perspective, the Level III multiverse is simple. There is only one wave function. It evolves smoothly and deterministically over time without any kind of splitting or parallelism. The abstract quantum world described by this evolving wave function contains within it a vast number of parallel classical story lines, continuously splitting and merging, as well as a number of quantum phenomena that lack a classical description. From their frog perspective, observers perceive only a tiny fraction of this full reality. They can view their own Level I universe, but a process called decoherence--which mimics wave function collapse while preserving unitarity--prevents them from seeing Level III parallel copies of themselves..." "...So should you believe in parallel universes? The principal arguments against them are that they are wasteful and that they are weird. The first argument is that multiverse theories are vulnerable to Occam's razor because they postulate the existence of other worlds that we can never observe. Why should nature be so wasteful and indulge in such opulence as an infinity of different worlds? Yet this argument can be turned around to argue for a multiverse. What precisely would nature be wasting? Certainly not space, mass or atoms--the uncontroversial Level I multiverse already contains an infinite amount of all three, so who cares if nature wastes some more? The real issue here is the apparent reduction in simplicity. A skeptic worries about all the information necessary to specify all those unseen worlds... ...In this sense, the higher-level multiverses are simpler. Going from our universe to the Level I multiverse eliminates the need to specify initial conditions, upgrading to Level II eliminates the need to specify physical constants, and the Level IV multiverse eliminates the need to specify anything at all. The opulence of complexity is all in the subjective perceptions of observers--the frog perspective. From the bird perspective, the multiverse could hardly be any simpler... "...A common feature of all four multiverse levels is that the simplest and arguably most elegant theory involves parallel universes by default. To deny the existence of those universes, one needs to complicate the theory by adding experimentally unsupported processes and ad hoc postulates: finite space, wave function collapse and ontological asymmetry. Our judgment therefore comes down to which we find more wasteful and inelegant: many worlds or many words. Perhaps we will gradually get used to the weird ways of our cosmos and find its strangeness to be part of its charm." Do such multiverses potentially explain 'deja vu,' 'reincarnation,' or the notion of 'kindred souls?' I haven't read this linked article yet, but I like the blurb: >>Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Principle Author: Andrei Linde Comments: 35 pages, 2 figs., to appear in "Science and Ultimate Reality: From Quantum to Cosmos", honoring John Wheeler's 90th birthday. J. D. Barrow, P.C.W. Davies, & C.L. Harper eds. Cambridge University Press (2003) Subj-class: High Energy Physics - Theory; Popular Physics; Space Physics Anthropic principle can help us to understand many properties of our world. However, for a long time this principle seemed too metaphysical and many scientists were ashamed to use it in their research. I describe here a justification of the weak anthropic principle in the context of inflationary cosmology and suggest a possible way to justify the strong anthropic principle using the concept of the multiverse.<< http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0211048 Unitary Fluctuations Of Decoherence Ergodicity Maru (I thought I'd just toss together some terms from this article :} -> what a lovely word-salad!) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
