Scott Adams wrote:Try to figure out what's wrong with the simplest explanations.
That sounds like a fine way to begin the discussion, anyway.
We'll see where it goes from there.
Well, what's wrong with his explanation of probability is that it's wrong.
Random does not mean that anything at all can happen. The electron cannot jump just anywhere. The whole point of quantum theory is that the universe can be explained using discrete values, and this is actually a limitation on the continuous functions of classical mechanics.
Besides, randomness apparently is not random, even within the applicable probability mass function. There are underlying equations that seem to govern even the sequence of points within a pmf. We just observe the distribution after it is complete, e.g. in the leaves of a tree or the height of people or the momentary position of an electron, and because we could not have predicted the value of that particular point but only it's probability of assuming a particular value we call it random. This is a limitation imposed by our way of being in the world (a la Heisenberg) that we cannot observe an event until after it has happened.
Jn, I'm not sure how to answer the question about the mathematical approach. To me, the book exploits the impossibility of nailing down what words really mean, and has fun with that. I don't know that I'd even say it had a mathematical approach of any kind.
Ang, to me the story, such as it is, is also important, because it's not just the old man's ideas that may be discussed, but also the way he bends around the delivery boy's thoughts by exploiting the elusive nature of words.
Anyway, I'm going to start with a passage from page 20-21 and respond to it.
For example, some physicists describe gravity in terms of ten dimensions all curled up.
Naughty physicists! I know nothing about this. I'll assume it's true, though, for the purposes of this post.
But those aren’t real words—just placeholders, used to refer to parts of abstract equations.
I'm guessing there is a reason the word "dimension" was chosen rather than any other word. These placeholders act in a way similar to the regular three dimensions, in some way. Getting a hold of the concept of dimension is rather tricky. One way to attempt define how many dimensions is to use distances and areas and logarithms.
Even if the equations someday prove useful, it would say nothing about the existence of other dimensions.
I would guess that if these "extra dimensions" were only used for the gravity equation, then this would be fairly accurate. But if these extra dimensions pop up in other equations, then I think there would be some reality to them. However, "dimension" might not be the right word for them, in the end, since they don't behave enough like the three regular dimensions.
Words such as dimension and field and infinity are nothing more than conveniences for mathematicians and scientists.
In every axiomatic system there exist both unprovable propositions ( the axioms ) and undefined terms. To people looking for an explanation for everything, both axioms and undefined terms feel like giving up. Euclid recognized the need for axioms, but not for undefined terms. He attempted to define terms like "line", "point" and so on, which really can't be defined without resorting to circular definitions. A triangle, on the other hand, can be defined in terms of lines and points and some other things ( I think ).
All words strive to be conveniences, I guess. What makes a word convenient and useful is if everyone associates the same idea with that word.
They are not descriptions of reality, yet we accept them as such because everyone is sure someone else knows what the words mean.
No, no. We accept them because we can use them to communicate, because other people know what we mean when we use them! Communication doesn't require perfect understanding, a mystical knowing of what the word "really means".
edit: Communication requires a compatibility of perspectives on reality. Words should never be understood as descriptions of reality, but as descriptions of a perspective on reality. And then, to make things managable, we often will say that a certain "perspective on reality" is close enough to just be called reality, as a convenient shorthand. But we should never forget that it's still just a perspective, lest we become idealogues.
One more thing:
Let me ask you all, what is Gravity?
The most common answers is that Gravity is an attractive force based on mass, or that it's a distortion of space from a non-Euclidean geometry.
My answer is that Gravity is the profound realization that the motion of the moon around the earth and the motion of an apple falling can be described by the same equation. Gravity brings the heavens to the earth, and takes the earth out into the heavens. I don't think enough people realize what a revolution of thought this was, to link the large and the small, the remote and the ordinary like this. Galileo studied the motion of objects on earth, and Keppler studied the motion of bodies in the heavens, and Newton brought them together, which was the true stroke of genius.
I don't know that I'd even say it had a mathematical approach of any kind
All of the 'alternate' explanations he offers are from quantum theory.
No, no. We accept them because we can use them to communicate, because other people know what we mean when we use them! Communication doesn't require perfect understanding, a mystical knowing of what the word "really means".
edit: Communication requires a compatibility of perspectives on reality. Words should never be understood as descriptions of reality, but as descriptions of a perspective on reality. And then, to make things managable, we often will say that a certain "perspective on reality" is close enough to just be called reality, as a convenient shorthand. But we should never forget that it's still just a perspective, lest we become idealogues.
Yes, yes and yes! But I already knew from TORC that you and I agree about what words are.
But your answer to this also answers the point you raised at the beginning:
the way he bends around the delivery boy's thoughts by exploiting the elusive nature of words.
What it exploits is the fact that most people live their lives within a fairly mundane perspective and only use specialized language within their specialization.
If you take an average person off the street and start throwing quantum physics at them of course they are going to feel as if they stepped into an alternate universe, not because the universe is truly alternate but because it is described using a language they've never heard. My garage mechanic can achieve the same effect with me by describing how my car engine works, but I don't revise my theory of life, the universe and everything just because my mechanic can describe the inside of my car and I cannot. What is different is not our reality but our language. I could acquire his perspective with study (maybe) and then our realities would be reconciled.
My answer is that Gravity is the profound realization ...
This answers what Gravity means, not what it is. (Btw, I share your awe at the achievement and agree that this is what it means.)
What Gravity is ... Einstein's thought experiment suggests that we cannot distinguish, mathematically or experientially, between the attraction of mass and the acceleration of time.
My personal feeling is that some kind of unified field theory is more likely to come from an alternate modeling of 'time' than from an alternate modeling of 'space' but I'm not sure that avant garde physics would even make such a distinction.
Jn
Last edited by Jnyusa on Thu Apr 20, 2006 6:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
Faramond: The central premise, the reason for the title of the story, I find absurd.
You mean the god's debris bit? As a long time Manweista, almost everything in the book was old hat to me. I've had and re-had almost all those discussions/ideas. The god's debris bit was the only thing in the book that felt genuinely original (though I'm sure Jn's right that someone else came up with it first). Though it didn't seem like some grandly important revelation worth deep consideration, it did (does) make me smile.
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
The god's debris bit was the only thing in the book that felt genuinely original (though I'm sure Jn's right that someone else came up with it first).
What's original about it is the idea that god is what blew up in the Big Bang. The idea that the universe is god constructing him/herself is not new.
The original contribution provides the clever title, but nothing more. Saying that god is what blew up in the big bang does not say anything that would require other theories about god to be revised. You're still left with the question of what he/she was before he/she exploded and the question of what it is we are in the process of constructing here, i.e. what is the nature of god. That's why I called it a cost-free theory. You can believe or disbelieve in it without consequence.
Speaking of God, pretty much everything Adams says about God is wrong. Why? Because he assumes that God is temporal.
Einstein tells us that time is just another dimension, exactly like length, heighth or width. It just happens that our universe (or at least all of it of which we are aware) is three dimensional. And just as a non-dimensional point can travel along the length a one-dimensional line, our three-dimensional space travels along the fourth dimension of a four-dimensional construct. And this fourth dimension is time. That's why all those science fiction characters talk about "space-time", as in "the space-time continuum" or "the fabric of space-time". Because looking at our universe from the outside, space and time are ultimately the same thing. It just doesn't look that way to us because we're here inside it, living a temporal existence. But in the big picture, time is just another physical property of the universe.
So if we assume an omnipotent creator, a God who created the entirety of the universe, then this God also created time. And God must be outside of and unaffected by time, just as He is unaffected by gravity or thermodynamics or the US Tax Code. God must be atemporal. Now I realize that it's difficult to imagine an atemporal existence, and it's not easy to discuss either. Tenses can get confusing. But that's God for you. It's easy to imagine God sitting outside of the space of the universe, seeing every physical point and watching history as it unfolds. But it's more difficult (but also more accurate) to imagine God sitting outside of the time of the universe, observing every moment of the universe's existence at once. Well, not "at once", because that's a temporal term, but you know what I mean. And while we tend to imagine God creating the physical space of the universe as it existed in the beginning and setting it in motion, an atemporal God would create every moment of the universe's existence all at once. Okay, not "at once", but at the same ti... uh, simultaneouuuuh... as a part of the same event.
So from our limited temporal persective, we have free will. We make decisions, we take action, those actions have consequences. Different decisions and different actions lead to different consequences. To us, the future hasn't happened yet. But to God, the future, the present and the past all simply are. Which changes everything.
This whole free will versus predestination thing really boils down to whether or not we control/affect the future. They're temporal concepts and, as such, don't apply to God.
I'll admit that I don't really have a clear picture of what an atemporal God would be like. My imagination just isn't that limber. But I'm reasonably sure that if the universe was created by some entity, that entity would have to be atemporal.
Angbasdil wrote:So if we assume an omnipotent creator ...
But is that what he is assuming?
It seems to me that he is not saying that god created the universe, but rather that god is the universe ... in pieces, sort of. So if time is an attribute of the universe then time is an attribute of god as well. The space-time continuum is god's discovery that he/she is both spatial and temporal.
(The problem of course is that these are human terms.)
But you're absolutely right about Einstein!
Einstein also believed that time is reversible. So I guess that in Dilbert-World god would also be reversible ... kind of like a London Fog raincoat. You just have to figure out where the zipper is.
I think it was Stephen Hawking who theorized that we perceive time as flowing in the direction of increasing entropy, whatever that direction may be. So an expanding universe with increasing entropy, and a collapsing universe with decreasing entropy, would look just the same to us; both would appear to be expanding. That in a way makes time reversible.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
I may well be mistaken as to whose theory it is. But, of course, it doesn't mean that time is reversible—only that our perception of time is reversible.
That seems merciful to me. Imagine living in a universe collapsing inevitably toward a Big Crunch and the end of everything! With violet shifts instead of red shifts, and so on. What would that do to the psychology of intelligent beings alive and aware of it?
Instead, if perception moves with increasing entropy, they would perceive an expanding universe, with red shifts and a boundless future.
Just as we do.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Yes, the heat death is depressing, which is why the oscillating universe is appealing—all this gets recycled! Though I don't think physicists are favoring that idea now.
It's not such a waste, though, considering that according to some theories, there are infinite numbers of universes constantly being created and ending.
I read an article in Scientific American a few years back that included rough calculations as to how far away you would have to go in an infinite universe to encounter, say, the actual life of an actual Luke Skywalker—or your own life, except you didn't buy that one car, you bought a different one.
The idea being that, in a universe that is infinite in both space and time, everything that can happen necessarily has. Including Lizzy refusing Mr. Darcy's first proposal, and Quint being eaten by a shark. Or a world exactly like ours, except that a man in New Delhi ordered a different entree on April 12, 1933.
For me, this is in itself an argument against the idea of a universe that is infinite in both space and time.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Primula_Baggins wrote:Yes, the heat death is depressing, which is why the oscillating universe is appealing—all this gets recycled! Though I don't think physicists are favoring that idea now.
Is it worrying that I read this as "the Osgiliating universe"?
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Ang: But it's more difficult (but also more accurate) to imagine God sitting outside of the time of the universe, observing every moment of the universe's existence at once. Well, not "at once", because that's a temporal term, but you know what I mean. ... But to God, the future, the present and the past all simply are.
This idea of God as atemporal is used in many theologies as a way of getting out of difficulties with free will and things.
C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:
Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments following one another.
...
All days are "Now" for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them: because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not "foresee" you doing things tomorrow; he simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him.
Nearly all of the laws of physics are independent of the flow of time. Certainly all of Classical Mechanics is. Anything we see happening could also happen in reverse, though it may not seem like it could.
I have a book called "Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point" by Huw Price that talks about a lot of this stuff.
I haven't got enough physics under my belt to explain this coherently. Reversibility has to do with the form of the equation. Linear equations are all reversible. Non-linear equations that emerge from recursions are not all reversible, meaning that you cannot start from any point and back-calculate to an earlier point. Markov chains, for example, are not reversible, and I believe he was the first to argue for the irreversibility of time. If time is, as Einstein described, merely bent space, it would be reversible (providing you knew exactly how space is bent.)
I believe that most stochastic equations are not reversible, so a quantum description of time ought not be reversible.
What it means as a practical matter is that time is of a form that if you plugged today's event into the inverse of the time equation it would not take you to yesterday's event. It would take you to some other event, which, if you then tried to calculate forward again you would end up with something other than today's event. Everytime you 'reverse' the equation you create a different reality.
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov is one of my favorite short stories, and I think it has something to do with many of the ideas being talked about here, including the eventual fate of the universe.
Since human life can't exist in the conditions just prior to a "big crunch" or the conditions present when the "heat death" gets too far along I think it's hard for us to really imagine what would seem merciful to whatever entities might be able to live in such conditions. Or maybe I'm wrong and humans can live in such conditions.
Jn, I need to get that book I mentioned about the flow of time in front of me before I can say much more about this reversibility stuff.
However, I do seem to recall that almost every interaction involving subatomic particles is time reversible, in other words, if you watched a "film" of it then you couldn't tell if the film had been run backward or not. There are a very few interactions that do appear to be time specific, however.
(Btw, I share your awe at the achievement and agree that this is what it means.)
