Politerik

It's been a long time since I've blogged, not for any particular reason. It may be a long time before I blog again, as I tend to only write when a thought kicks around in my noggin long enough that I feel it's worth sharing and I'm pretty confident of what it is I want to say. (end disclaimer)

The title of this post is to my mind, probably the number one reason people believe in a god. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard a believer use this line of reasoning, I'd be drinking latte's with Gates and Buffet discussing how we're going to end poverty and disease with our pocket change. "The universe and life is so amazing that it couldn't possibly be the result of random chance.", or so they say.

The problem here is simply one of perspective. Looking at the state of the universe retrospectively and being so amazed at the extremely unlikely odds of it having formed this way from random chaos and nothing more complicated than the laws of nature is akin to refusing to believe that any one ever wins the lotto because the odds of winning the lotto are so slim.

Here's a little thought experiment to explain what I'm getting at. I'm going to flip a coin 1000 times. I'm no mathematician, so I wouldn't begin to be able to calculate the odds of getting any particular sequence of heads and tails ahead of time, but to the point I'm making it's not important. Let's just say the odds are pretty damned slim that anyone could predict ahead of time what the exact sequence of heads and tails will be for my thousand flips.

We do know however, that I will get some sequence of heads and tails. If I ask you to predict ahead of time what the results will be, it's safe to assume you would need some sort of super natural help to do so reliably. If we both look at the results after we flip the coin a thousand times, should we be then be equally amazed and perplexed by the result? I think not.

The same applies to the universe. Take the natural laws of the universe and set them in motion via the big bang, and just try to calculate the probability that there would eventually form a milky way galaxy with our sun and an earth and finally you and me. Your head would explode. You would have to be a god to predict that, or force it to happen a certain way. Retrospectively however, it's not hard to believe at all, it is simply the result we've arrived at.

It could have been very different. The universe could have formed with out an earth and you and I may have never been born, but we were. The sky could have been green, plants could have been super intelligent and we could be breathing carbon dioxide instead of oxygen. Anything you can think of, if it's possible with in the laws of nature, could have happened, but it didn't. This did...

You can't look at the state of the universe retrospectively and be amazed at the extremely long odds of it being so, any more than you can be dumbfounded by the result of my 1000 coin flips. It's not a pertinent question to ask anymore, as it has already happened.

Cheers to everyone...

Here's to hoping that Mike Huckabee turns into the nominee, then laughing stock of both the republican party and the fundamentalist right wing "family values" movement, and that a democratic congress with a democratic leadership, be it Obama, Clinton or Edwards, will lift our hearts and our minds, give us a new and morally convincing agenda, and put the idolatry of ideology, selfishness and greed out on the back porch to stew for a while.

Bill Clinton was on Larry King Live two nights ago and had some really interesting things to say about the war in Iraq, his wife's campaign and the current administration, but a couple of quotes really caught my attention.

Larry asked Bill about his new book (Giving, How Each of Us Can Change the World) and why every one should give to charity or contribute in some way. Bill responded by saying that in the book he presents reasons to people of every faith (all the big ones anyway) for giving based on their religion, and mentioned that he presents ethical reasons for people who do not believe in God as well.

Here is one of the few leaders (current or past) in our country that is even willing to acknowledge the fact that there is a sizable portion of our populace that does not believe in God. He at least felt it was worth mentioning their existence which is more than I can say about W or his cronies.

He later responded to Larry's question about why there has been a huge upswing in American charitable donations over the past 10 years by saying (among other things) "down deep inside, no matter how angry we are, or alienated we are from some other political party or group or movement, down deep inside, we all know that what the scientists are now telling us is true, that we have more in common than we have dividing us."

This was an obvious and open statement of support for evolutionary thinking. The words could have easily come from Dawkins or Tyson.

Quite honestly, it was a breath of fresh air and made me miss having a thoughtful and intelligent president, one who respects science and the separation of church and state and does not pander to the Christian right.

He wasn't perfect and I have a major problem with some of the things he did while in office, including lessening restrictions on media ownership and NAFTA, but at least America was not under threat of becoming a militant theocracy while he was getting blown, err, I mean running the country.

Oh my gawd, I'm buying one now!

The Shirt

I'm not the first to point this out on Vox, but please take a moment to find out what this guy was all about. His memory deserves as much from everyone on Vox who appreciates science, disdains dogma and loves reality.

To the Skeptical Rogues, your loss is mine, I weep...

Perry wouldn't want us to worry about his soul, as he didn't have one, but he would want to be remembered. I will never forget...

Perry DiAngelis ladies and gentlemen, a skeptic... of some note.

As always, see my blog for reference as this has been a multi part blog.

So if you have this picture in your head, of the invisible 3-brane, the massive cube (<---not really) on to which all matter and energy clings, in the form of tiny vibrating strings, like loops in a carpet, then I can complete my picture for you and answer any questions. I've intentionally been quiet on the responses on the previous posts because I want to consolidate the discussion here.

Now picture another 3-brane, with the same number of strings attached to it, but picture it sitting as close as you can possibly imagine to our 3-brane. It would only be A planck's length away, or a particle's width from us. It's another universe, almost exactly the same as ours. It may only vary from ours in it's similarity by one string vibrating at a slightly different frequency. We can't see it because a) we wouldn't be able to tell it from our own, and b) it's strings are attached to it's own brane, not ours.

Here's where it gets interesting. There isn't just one or two, or a million other 3 brane's sitting in close proximity to our own, there are countless numbers of them. Each varies from our's only slightly, and on every side in every direction, we are surrounded by them, and they stretch in every dimension, each only a planck's length from the next, to infinity.

The further you get from our 3-brane, the more different the brane's look. As you recede, you will see more strings that are vibrating at ever more variant frequencies, until you start seeing universes that look, on a macro scale, to be different than ours.

Relatively near by, you would not be able to tell the difference between your universe and the next, but just a little farther away and you might have a different color carpet in your living room. Further away than that and you have a different job, maybe live in a different city.

Further out, you may not even exist, but your older brother does.

Each universe or brane influences the one closest to it the most, as entropy plays out and reactions happen, causing changes in the vibrational patterns of the strings locally. Because the vibration of one string will force a vibrational change in it's nearest neighbors, strings from different branes will interact with each other.

So by lifting my arm, I'm sending a wake of vibrational changes through the nearest branes. As the wake recedes it is less influenced by my action directly and may start to become more influenced or canceled out by contradicting waves coming from other directions with in the multitude of surrounding branes or universes, so that eventually, the impact of my action fades into or becomes dwarfed by competing actions from other branes.

From a quantum point of view, instead of calculating the probability wave of a particle and observing it to determine where it is, we are really just calculating the probability that we will see it in this universe or in that universe.

Schrodinger's cat is indeed both dead and alive, the question is, in which of the branes, or universes, do we find ourselves, the one in which he is sadly dead, or the one in which he lives?

And the real question, the big one, where does consciousness reside? Permanently attached to the brane of it's birth, riding the crest of the wave of it's choosing, or plowing it's way through the multiverse, aggravating it's local universes and leaving it's own wake to be resolved or dwarfed by the next biggest?

Again, if you're interested in my entire train of thought, you can view my earlier blog posts to get caught up.

I'm picking up here with the multiverse imagined in super string theory. I feel like a brief primer on strings and branes is in order, not only for your information should you need it, but to clarify my understanding of them for you.

Superstring theory is also known as brane theory, or m-theory. The three terms are, for the purposes of this discussion and in most scientific literature, interchangeable. They all encompass the same general idea of a mathematical unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics, the holy grail of modern physics, through higher dimensional, geometric space.

Strings are said to be the tiniest possible constituents of matter and energy, Planck length particles that vibrate at various frequencies to become the different elementary particles of the standard model of quantum mechanics. (Planck's measurements are accepted as the smallest and largest measurable units of anything in physics. To say something exceeds a Planck measurement is to say that it is infinite, according to our best modern math.)

All strings are completely identical, the only thing that varies is the frequency at which they vibrate. A certain vibration will produce what looks to us like an electron, and another frequency produces a quark or boson, and so on and so on.

You can have closed loop strings in which the end points are connected, or you can have open loop strings in which each end moves around freely.

A "brane" is essentially another type of string in which you may have several more dimensions besides length, (or less in the case of a "0 Brane", string theory's answer to the point particle in classical physics.) Because it can be a 2-Brane (like a flat sheet of paper extending infinitely in every direction) or 3 brane (more like a cube doing the same), or even a 10-brane (much harder to imagine of not impossible), branes can be much larger than strings, although there is no fundamental limit on the size of a string either. It is only small strings (planck length) that would have the properties necessary to become particles in the quantum world however. Anything larger has no explanatory power as of yet, even if it works quite well mathematically.

Now, I want to concentrate on the 3-brane. Theorists imagine one possibility in which a 3-brane encompasses all of space and time. We all live on this 3-brane. All of the strings that make up the matter and energy we see around us are anchored in this 3-brane, each end point of the string permanently attached to the brane it's self.

While each end is free to move around the brane and the length of the string is actually existing and moving freely outside of the brane, it is the endpoints of the string that anchor it firmly to the brane and prevent it from becoming part of other branes.

The brane it's self is incredibly "sticky" meaning anything attached to it will continue to do so in perpetuity. Try and form this mental picture in your head, a large 3 dimensional sticky membrane with countless tiny stings attached to it at their endpoints, vibrating at various frequencies.

In the next part I will start to go off the rails a bit, but up to here I've given an extremely brief and incomplete description of what is currently considered to be a very viable and competitive idea in theoretical physics.

When the LHD at Cern goes online sometime this year or next (whenever they can figure out what caused the explosion the last time they turned it on), we may at last have some direct observational evidence in favor of the theory, or not.

Well, if you've forgotten about this series, then refresh your memory or introduce yourself to it here and here. My apologies for the delayed delivery to those who care =)

In any event, when I last left off, I was giving my extremely brief and incomplete justification for even considering a multiverse to be possible. The next question we have to answer before lifting off on this flight of fancy is "Which kind of multiverse?"

There are several different versions to talk about, and while some have interesting implications, most do not.

For instance, several incarnations envision each universe occupying a "bubble" in empty space. Some of them are tiny bubbles. They don't last very long because they did not have enough energy after their "bang" to expand for more than an infinitesimally small fraction of a second. Conversely, some may last for so long they would make our universe and it's entire time line look like the blink of an eye.

Remember that the age and size of a universe are inseparable in their ratio to each other in a big bang universe. If you don't understand why this is true, let me know and I'll talk about it in the thread.

In this version, while every imaginable universe most likely exists at some place, the next closest universe to ours would be so far away that it would literally be impossible for any information to be transfered between ours and theirs. I don't mean impossible in the sense that it's just too difficult for us to grasp, I mean impossible light of the existence of modern mathematics, information theory, quantum mechanics and Einsteins theories of relativity, among other things.

It would be no different then our classical conception of a universe. The other universes are forever out of reach, lost to our view and have no impact on our lives, and can never be proven to exist, period. Therefore, in every sense, they may as well not exist so far as we are concerned.

In the next part I will talk about the multiverse that I am fascinated with, and that is the multiverse arising from super string theory. It turns out to be a much more interesting picture so far as I am concerned.

Why a multiverse, and what the heck is it anyway?

If you are completely unfamiliar with the concept, I can sum it up briefly by saying that there are good reasons to think that our visible universe may be one of many just like it, just as our solar system is one many in our galaxy, and our galaxy is one of many in the universe. This isn't a new concept in cosmology. For a more detailed explanation, the Wikipedia entry does a fairly good job of summing it up.

The important thing to realize though is that the multiverse, or the many worlds theory, is not something that only follows from a single cosmological theory. It arises from almost all of them, and quite naturally.

While the specifics vary from theory to theory, almost every modern explanation for the existence of the universe incorporates some version of the multiverse idea. From inflation and quantum loop gravity to super string theory and quantum mechanics, the multiverse is an inevitable outcome and in some cases, a necessary component.

This isn't to say that cosmologists take it as a given. Quite contrarily, they disagree vehemently amongst themselves about it, and even it's most ardent proponents admit that it's not currently supported by even a shred of empirical evidence.

I heard Paul Davies dismiss it out of hand once, invoking Occam's Razor by claiming that it explained nothing and was far too complicated to be true. Many cosmologists consider the idea to be "messy". They expect and want fundamental theories to be short and sweet. Just like E=MC², the power and elegance of any true theory should be self evident and easily understood. To many, the multiverse does not fit the bill.

I disagree, and side with those that believe it explains a whole host of problems and conundrums encountered by today's physicists and philosophers alike. I can't claim to have any scientific reasons or particular insight as to why this should be true, but it just makes sense.

In all of our explorations, since the dawn of man, we have always found one thing to be true; There is always something new over the next horizon. More uncompromising than death and taxes, the vastness of the cosmos has never let our explorers down. From Marco Polo and Magellan, to the Hubble Space telescope and the WMAP survey, neigh a brick wall, not a dead end to be found.

Whenever we've thought that things can get no smaller, or no bigger, we have been wrong.

Why should the edge of the visible universe be any different? Why should we be so conceited as to believe that this is the only universe? We've grown out of our heliocentricity, and I believe we will grow out of our "universentricity" as well.

I recently finished reading The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Green. While not his best book, or the best book on modern cosmology I've read, it was quite thought provoking, as these sorts of books always are. I end up losing myself in deep thoughts about the possibilities that modern physics allow for the true nature of the universe(s) for days or weeks at a time after reading books like these, my normal life becoming background noise that occasionally pierces the veil of my imagination at work.

My thoughts lately have been quite out there, and though they may be possible within scientific constraints, it would be improper to classify them as a hypothesis or even as something that has the remotest chance of being true. Disclaimer in place, "what if...?" becomes an interesting question, and just may be able to answer some tough questions.

If I tried to lay this out all in one post, it would be long and boring, so I'm going to try and break it down in to several posts that each deal with a particular aspect of this idea. So bear with me and stay tuned, I think for those that find cosmology fascinating there will be some interesting ideas to chew on and consider.

If you are particularly educated on the subject, feel free to correct any errors in my thinking, but try to be nice about it and not laugh too hard! I am after all, just a layman and this is really just for fun. :o)