Tuesday, May 27, 2008

The Terminating Photon Hypothesis

I'm not really that well versed in physics, so what I'm saying may not make sense.

[quote]
Cosmologists predicted that a wrap-around Universe would act like a hall of mirrors, with images from distant objects being repeated multiple times across the sky.
[/quote]

Doughnut-shaped Universe bites back
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080523/full/news.2008.854.html

I came out with this completely crazy hypothesis a long time ago and some people at the time thought it was nuts. I’m not saying it’s true (chances are that it’s not), but I do think it’s something worth considering. The reason I bring it up is because, while this quote does not directly support my crazy hypothesis, at least it doesn’t contradict it (which kinda made me think that my hypothesis might be crazy enough to be true). My crazy hypothesis assumes the First Law of Thermodynamics is true across the entire universe.

The universe is expanding at an increasing rate. This is often referred to as “spacial expansion” and it is assumed that space itself is expanding. The question is, where does all the energy “come from” to cause everything in the universe to move outward at an increasing rate? Well, all these photons are “exiting” the universe, or reaching the “end.” When these photons reach the “end” of the universe, they "terminate" and this energy is lost. That energy is (at least partly) replaced by accelerated spacial expansion. So part of the quantity of energy that is “gained” from “spacial expansion” is lost when photons reach the end of the universe. What we could try and do is see if we can calculate about how much ‘photon energy’ is reaching the end of the universe and terminating and about how much energy is required for everything in the universe to push outward at the acceleration rate that it does and see if they are roughly the same. Again, this crazy hypothesis is probably false, just something to consider. Also, if the universe is donut shaped, it could be the case that the photons that reach the "middle void" section of the universe also terminate and the lost energy is replaced by the energy required for accelerated spacial expansion.

One problem with my above hypothesis is that, if the universe is expanding faster than C, how are photons ever supposed to reach the end?

Friday, May 23, 2008

Multiverse or Multifanatical?

I posted some stuff on uncommondescent about the alleged multiverse and since not all of it got through (at least not yet, it might sometime in the future), I wanted to post it here.

Original: William J. Murray
It might be interesting to note that a subjectively-collapsing wave-function universe might be entirely indistinguishable from a universe inhabited from a personal, omnipotent God; it would also account for miraculous, transcendental phenomena, life after death, and even the actual (in any meaningful sense of the word) existence of God.

Lets apply the multiverse to the criteria required for something to be scientific: falsifiability. The criteria to falsify ID is rather straight forward, so I’m not going to go over that here (since we’ve gone over it several times in the past).

The problem with the multiverse is that, no matter what combination of evidence exists within this universe, no matter how this universe is oriented, no matter what we can and can’t observe, no matter what happens, this just happens to be a universe with this combination of evidence. In other words, no matter what combination of evidence exists within this universe, it does not falsify the multiverse.


If such predictive theories are not useful, then MWI becomes a fun bit of sophistry and nothing more; if such predictive theories are useful, as in quantum computing and other applications, then MWI is much like “a Designer” in I.D.; you might never be able to prove there are in fact other universes, but you can certainly prove that phenomena in this universe behaves as if there are.

The difference here is that we know what design looks like because we ourselves can design. We don’t know how this universe should behave or look like if there are multiple universes since we can never experimentally observe the difference in behavior between one independent universe and one universe within multiple universes. One can only speculate how this universe should behave or look like if it is within many universes. How do we know all of the observable phenomena in this universe aren’t simply a function of this universe?

Many worlds: Maybe easier to make pay than make sense? (Uncommondescent)