Why Does The Universe Exist?
- Thread starter Dryson
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There's nothing to see with at the Planck scale -- photons would have such high energy that all sorts of particle-antiparticle pairs would be being created and annihilated. Before you get down to that level, you might well get access to those tiny, rolled up extra dimensions (Calabi-Yau manifolds) that string theorists favour.
Only if you were really tiny. I'm not sure why three spatial dimensions got blown up but the other seven, or however many, were seemingly unaffected during the inflation period of the Big Bang. It would be nice to have some experimental evidence that they actually exist.
Hmm.. so even on a universal scale there are duds then..
As for evidence.. eh.. how would one even be able to try and figure out?
I should mention that other theories posit large-scale dimensions that we can't see -- much like the denizens of 2-D Flatland who couldn't perceive up nor down.
One way to look for additional dimensions is to trawl through the results of LHC particle collisions looking for the decay signatures of microscopic black holes thst some theories predict would be formed if hidden dimensions exist. Admittedly, it is quite tangential evidence.
https://atlas.cern/updates/physics-briefing/continuing-search-extra-dimensions
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I think extra dimensions are like death, impossible to imagine.
Hey LOL hey funny here but if the universe is made up of blocks but they are so tiny we can't perceive them does that mean it's all made of pixels?
Pixels - everything is made of pixels... Yep...
I thought it was turtles all the way down.
There is no guarantee that the universe is explainable at every level by mathematics or maybe we need to invent some new form of mathematics.
There is no guarantee that the universe is explainable at every level by mathematics or maybe we need to invent some new form of mathematics.
Pixels - everything is made of pixels... Yep...
I'll find you a link this is wacky stuff.
Old link from 2014
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme...egins-to-see-if-the-universe-is-a-2d-hologram
In 2015 the Holometer experiment reported no evidence for holographic noise at the scale being measured with a confidence of 4.6 sigma.
http://news.fnal.gov/2015/12/holometer-rules-out-first-theory-of-space-time-correlations/
(Came into the thread to see just how much of it would fly right over my head, was not dissapointed) lol
For all each of us knows, nothing exists but our conscience and even that is disputable as it's likely that our conscience itself is but an illusion, we'd be in fact made of an indeterminate number (but very high) of independent processes that we think are all controlled by ourselves.
It's like you're watching a movie where you see yourself act, the movie is already written and unchangeable before you even start watching but something keeps telling you that you are making the decisions of what is happening! That theory isn't new. Baruch Spinoza said something very similar in his "Ethics"
It's like you're watching a movie where you see yourself act, the movie is already written and unchangeable before you even start watching but something keeps telling you that you are making the decisions of what is happening! That theory isn't new. Baruch Spinoza said something very similar in his "Ethics"
"Turtles all the way down" I've read that somewhere. Is that one, Stephen Hawking's book? I am not sure because it was about a conference he was giving and I can't picture Hawking doing that. Anyway, the anecdote was that an old woman in the audience said that to the lecturer as a response to how the universe was.
Ah - of course! It all makes perfect sense now... Wait - no it doesn't!
"My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought; careening through a cosmic vapor of invention!" Hedy (that's Hedley) Lamarr - Blazing Saddles.
Hedy Lamarr was not only a stunningly beautiful actress but she was a genius inventor.
I think I might have found what Dryson is getting at... this thread would have been shorter if he had just posted the article.. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
Yeah, I prefer the weak form, involving selection bias.
The weak form of what?
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