Thanks Doug.
N From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 11:34 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Presented for FRIAMic Consideration Here it is, Nick. BEFORE THE BIG BANG, OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSE... If the Universe began with the Big Bang, what existed before? And if the Universe has a limit, what is beyond it? Two deceptively simple questions cosmologists have been struggling with for decades. Let's look at the latter first. As far as we can tell, in its first moments of existence, the Universe underwent an enormous and almost instantaneous burst of expansion called inflation. It continued to expand at a more measured pace ever since. Photons from distant galaxies reaching us today have travelled through the space with the speed of light for billions of years, but none of them for longer than 13.8 billion years - our best estimate of the age of the Universe. This tells us that there's a limit to the Universe we can observe. If we take into account that the Universe has been expanding while the photons were on their way, the distance to the farthest visible object (we call it the particle horizon) is now approximately 46 billion light-years. But that doesn't mean that there's nothing beyond the limit of the observable Universe. When we trace the expansion back to the time before inflation, all that we can see today would have fit within a sphere 10⁻²⁷ m across, smaller than any known elementary particle. But it is conceivable that there was something outside that tiny bubble and that inflation expanded that space too. All that space would have ended up outside the particle horizon of our observable Universe. We can't see them since the photons from those objects haven't had time to reach us yet. Depending on how fast the Universe expands, these areas may, with time, find themselves inside the horizon and become observable. (Not, however, if the Universe is dominated by the cosmological constant - the dark energy - which it is expected to become in the distant future.) Now for the more complicated question of what existed before the Big Bang. The conservative answer is that we just cannot know. Our knowledge of the early Universe is based on the laws of physics we've been able to discover thus far, and these laws of physics break down as we get to the very moment of the Universe's beginning. It appears that the concepts of space and time themselves disappear in the initial singularity. We can say that space and time came into existence at that very moment and that there's no point of asking what was before, since the word "before" doesn't make sense. This answer doesn't feel satisfying though, so cosmologists have been looking for hypotheses outside the well established theories, in search of better answers. One such hypothesis proposes that inflation continues to take place even today. It is propelled by an inflaton field which spontaneously decays in random areas. Those areas become "baby universes" with their own big bangs. The inflation never stops and new bubbles continue to be created forever. Our Universe is just one of many such bubbles. After more careful considerations, however, it turns out that such bubbly multiverse would also, alas, need a beginning. Another concept is that of a "cyclic universe". Derived from string theory, the hypothesis postulates that our Universe is a four-dimensional "brane" in a higher-dimensional space. It repetitively collides with another such brane. The collisions result in tremendous release of energy and creation of matter which we'd observe as the Big Bang. Again, it turns out that these periodic collisions of branes also must have a beginning. Another model of an eternal universe assumes that it was initially small, static and existed in such uneventful state forever. Then, suddenly, out of the blue, it inflated and underwent a Big Bang. Not a very attractive model, but it does arise in some versions of string theory. It appears that, conceivably, there was something before the Big Bang. However, all plausible models only push back the question of the ultimate beginning. Considering that we may be living in only one universe in a sea of uncounted other universes and that uncounted generations of earlier universes may have existed before ours, we may never be able to actually understand how it all initially came to be. But that doesn't mean we'll stop trying. - PZ Source: <http://bit.ly/YMLQUA> http://bit.ly/YMLQUA On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]> wrote: Doug, I want to participate in your anti-discussion discussion, but I cannot master the facebook link. Each time I click on it it invites me to create a gmail account (which I already have, but do not use). It won’t let me link to the old account. So, I start another one. And then, somehow, I never get to the link you are offering me. So I do it again, and accumulate another gmail account. I am up to about six, now, and getting weary. So, unless you can use words (rather than links), I will have to watch from afar. God knows, that probably wouldn’t be a bad thing. Nick From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 9:16 AM To: Stephen Guerin; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Presented for FRIAMic Consideration Fuggit, work can wait, the first proposal is in final edit and the second one is under control, so why delay my response. Re: your question of what do I find ridiculous: Not the subject of the referenced paper, certainly. Rather our little group's pronounced tendency to niggle and (dare I say it?) pontificate over the true, deep, and (dare I say it?) philosophical meanings of words. Like, say, just to pick a random sample: "emergence", "complex", "behaviors", "through", "causal", "entropic", and "forces". And now to hijack my own thread: the referenced paper mentions cosmology as one of the topic ares that the above terms are frequently used to describe. Since cosmology is one of my favorite spare time reading focus areas, I wanted to make an observation that the following reference makes very clearly, which is that nobody has even the slightest glimmer of understanding of our true cosmological origins. Even the events after that instant of the big bang, where it is postulated that our universe expanded from sub-atomic dimensions, through inflation (inflation? WTF caused that?) are only sparsely understood. Classical physicists like to duck the subject of "What caused the big bang?" by hiding behind the academic artifice of claiming that the question is meaningless because space-time did not exist before the big bang. But, we do like to pontificate here on FRIAM, don't we? Deeply, and philosophically. But rather than continuing in the usual vein of debating (deeply, but with much pontification) the true meaning, of, say "emergence" again, let's take the discussion in a new direction. Sorry for the Facebook link, but the original article is buried behind a NewScientist paywall. The article nicely addresses my thoughts on that other question you asked me, i.e. where do I think life comes from. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=501821756549668 <https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=501821756549668&set=a.477892902275887.114170.334816523250193&type=1&theater> &set=a.477892902275887.114170.334816523250193&type=1&theater --TrollBoi On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 9:37 PM, Stephen Guerin <[email protected]> wrote: Ok Troll-Boy, I'll bite. Here's the paper referenced in the phys.org post: http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevLett_110-168702.pdf Are these concepts so foreign that you hope to watch a thread thrash on the semantics and meanings of this theoretical worldview? Is there something in Hewitt's paper that strikes you as ridiculous, hogwosh or complexity babble? The ideas in the paper restate what is obvious to many of the practitioners on this list. Namely that structure formation and origin of life may well be best understood as nature's response to imposed non-equilibrium gradients. To many this is a core idea of Complexity. This mechanism has been linked as a causal mechanism for the emergence of autonomous intelligent emergent behavior since (1980, Kugler, Kelso and Turvey <http://web.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0297.pdf> ), (2000 Kauffman <http://www.amazon.com/Investigations-Stuart-A-Kauffman/dp/0195121058/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1366685204&sr=8-2&keywords=investigations> ), (2005 Jun and Hubler <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC545530/> and 2011 Hubler et al <http://icmt.illinois.edu/workshops/fluctuations2011/Talks/Hubler_Alfred_ICMT_May_2011.pdf> ) and (2007 Morowitz and Smith <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cplx.20191/abstract> ) among others. I haven't actually seen the software "entropica" referenced in the paper and the claims may be a little over stated but the core ideas you quote "emergence", "complex", "behaviors", "through", "causal" "entropic", and "forces" are not new and strike me as matter of fact. These same ideas have thrashed on the list almost exactly 10 years ago: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.region.new-mexico.santa-fe.friam/256 Doug, where do you think intelligent behavior (ie life) comes from? Do you have a view? a pet theory? too busy? --- -. . ..-. .. ... .... - .-- --- ..-. .. ... .... [email protected] 1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505 office: (505) 995-0206 <tel:%28505%29%20995-0206> tollfree: (888) 414-3855 <tel:%28888%29%20414-3855> mobile: (505) 577-5828 <tel:%28505%29%20577-5828> fax: (505) 819-5952 <tel:%28505%29%20819-5952> tw: @redfishgroup skype: redfishgroup gvoice: (505) 216-6226 <tel:%28505%29%20216-6226> redfish.com <http://redfish.com/> | simtable.com <http://simtable.com/> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:09 PM, Douglas Roberts <[email protected]> wrote: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-emergence-complex-behaviors-causal-entropic.html It is with much anticipation that we await the detailed discussions that are sure to follow which will cover the meanings of "emergence", "complex", "behaviors", "through", "causal" "entropic", and "forces". --Doug -- Doug Roberts [email protected] <http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins> http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins 505-455-7333 - Office 505-672-8213 - Mobile ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com -- Doug Roberts [email protected] <http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins> http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins 505-455-7333 - Office 505-672-8213 - Mobile ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com -- Doug Roberts [email protected] <http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins> http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins 505-455-7333 - Office 505-672-8213 - Mobile
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