Comments on: World Science Festivities

By: Manufacturing universes in a fractal multiverse « Not Even Wrong

Manufacturing universes in a fractal multiverse « Not Even Wrong — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:00:28 +0000

[...] Carroll reports here on some other parts of the festival, including the panel on Time Since Einstein, where he [...]

By: Oded

Oded — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:17:58 +0000

Carl –
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=551&Itemid=568&lecture_id=6649

It’s a great lecture, very fun! I just told someone about this lecture today as we passed a liquid nitrogen tank…

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:40:19 +0000

If he does, it had been a while; he was looking fairly gray.

By: Phillip Helbig

Phillip Helbig — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:59:31 +0000

I’m probably not getting Peter’s joke. Maybe there is another universe in the multiverse in which I do get it, and certainly one in which Penrose dyes his hair and one in which he doesn’t.

By: Peter Coles

Peter Coles — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:48:00 +0000

Sean

I have an important question. Do you think Roger Penrose dyes his hair?

Peter

By: Lab Lemming

Lab Lemming — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:16:22 +0000

How are “inspiring” and “informative” antithetical? Haven’t you ever been to a planetarium?

By: Phillip Helbig

Phillip Helbig — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:34:40 +0000

I suspect that the multiverse is a bit like the anthropic principle: most statements concerning it are correct but trivial or completely wrong, but there is a small subset which are really interesting.

Could one explain ANYTHING, however improbable but with a finite probability, via the multiverse? That does sound a bit like the “devil created the fossils” argument. Of course, in both cases this is not a proof that they are wrong, but if one goes this route, then conventional science has little to say. I think that’s what Nick Herbert was getting at.

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:53:18 +0000

If you forget that God is an ill-defined supernatural construct, while the multiverse is simply a prediction of certain proposed laws of physics, then I could see how they might seem similar. But really they’re not at all. Just because something is “gigantic and awesome” doesn’t mean it has anything to do with God.

By: nick herbert

nick herbert — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:41:23 +0000

“I argue that, just as the existence of a low-entropy egg is ultimately explained by recourse to a larger system involving chickens and so forth, the existence of a low-entropy early universe can ultimately be explained by recourse to a larger multiverse of which we are a very small part. For more see here, or you could of course wait for the book.”

Sean, your argument that the improbably low entropy of the early universe implies that our universe is part of a larger (multi-universe) sounds suspiciously like the theological Argument from Design. Eggs is too improbable to have happened by chance; hence God exists. But since part of the science game consists of seeing how much we can explain without invoking the God hypothesis, your tack seems to be to invoke–as explanation for eggs–the existence of an entity almost humanly inconceivably gigantic and awesome. But not Divine.

By: Pamela

Pamela — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:56:36 +0000

I also attended “Time Since Einstein,” and agree there were too many panelists. I thought the moderator did a great job of tying everyone together, given the difficulty posed by the varying specialties, but I was left wanting to hear more from each. It was torture being in a room with Roger Penrose for that long and only hearing him speak a precious few times!

Anyway, I am a regular reader and didn’t know that you were on the panel, Sean, until I got there. Nice to finally see you in person, even though you did not see me!