On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 8:59 PM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]> wrote:
> > haven't read Carroll's new book (and probably won't because I don't like > his attempt to redefine science as a non-empirical endeavour. I don't think Carroll wants to attempt anything like that, but what do you do when a theory makes lots of testable predictions that have been shown to be right but also makes some untestable predictions, do we just ignore them? More specifically is the Earth at the center of the universe? The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago and so regardless of where we point our telescopes we should never see anything more distant than 13.8 billion light years. And indeed our telescopes have never seen anything more distant than 13.8 billion light years. We also know from observation that we live in a expanding accelerating universe. There are only 2 conclusions that can be drawn from that observation: 1) There are lots of stars more distant than 13.8 billion light years but we'll never be able to see them because light hasn't had enough time to reach us and due to the accelerating universe there will never be enough time for the light to reach us. 2) Nothing exists that is more distant than 13.8 billion light years and the Earth is at the center of the Universe. But maybe you can get around that by proposing our 3D space is the surface of a 4D hypersphere, the surface of a sphere , or a hypersphere , has no center so if you kept moving in a straight line you'd eventually come back to where you started, and if we look at the variation in the microwave background radiation in one part of the sky we'd expect it to match up with the pattern 180 degrees away . B ut we observe no such correlation. That could be explained if the universe is larger t han 13.8 billion light years, the light informing us of such a correlation hasn't had time to reach us and in a expanding accelerating universe it never will. But that's not testable, Popper would say we're not allowed to hypothesize about places we can never observe, therefore things must be the way things seem to be and the Earth is at the center of the universe. So either Popper is right and the Earth is at the center of the universe or Popper is wrong and it's not. I think Popper is wrong and conclude there are parts of the universe I can never see even in theory. In a similar way Everett's Many Worlds Theory does such a good job explaining how the 2 slit experiment works I don't think it's unscientific to conclude other worlds might exist. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
