22 replies to this topic

[Beany]

I believe you, on 22 January 2013 - 07:51 PM, said:

Ya, portals would be the only way to travel such vast distances.

I somehow feel aliens and demons and everything else if they exist are from here, not outer space, but here alongside us, very much a party of humanity. No matter what era we are in they are there but if we are woodsman they appear as forest beings, in tune with nature, fairy, but if we are religions then they appear as saints or Mary, they are always better than us at something, they have more skills in the forest, more knowledge about God, and today they are better than us, they have craft that can fly faster and go farther, of course now that we have craft they got upgraded.

So very much this parallel world has always been here. Some cross over, others come back, few choose to live in-between.

Didn't the book A Wrinkle in Time use the concept of folding space? And somewhere in the fuzzy back of my brain I think another sci fi book used the same concept.

[Beany]

Here's Arthur Clarke's 3 Laws, for those who don't know, he wrote 2001 A Space Odyssey, and Childhood's End, and was a pioneer in developing network satellites.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
¶“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
¶“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

[Frank Merton]

The idea of parallel worlds comes from certain quantum mechanical considerations and our efforts as human beings to put it into a context we "understand."  The idea is that every time the universe has to make a "decision," it splits into however many universes are necessary to allow each possibility to be true in one universe.

Actually far more universes are created than even that, since usually the "decision" is not to do anything.  Take, for example, the decay of a given uranium atom.  Given a mass of such atoms, over roughly four billion years half of them will decay.  Each decay is spontaneous and random, but the probability of a given atom decaying is measurable, so we can make predictions when there are large numbers of atoms involved.

Where does this probability come from?  The normal reaction is to say that the decay is not truly random, but "pseudo-random," meaning that we just don't know the causes but they are there nevertheless.  For a variety of reasons this explanation is rejected and instead we are forced to say that the randomness is real.

How can it be that something is truly random and yet over a large mass of such random occurrences a measurable probability can be seen?  One response to this has been the idea of the constant creation of parallel universes.  Each time a given uranium atom has the opportunity to decay, enough universes come into existence to allow the decay to happen in one of the universes and not happen in all the rest.  That way it is random (which new universe it happens in is not predictable) but still probabilistic (based on the number of new universes).

What makes this idea difficult to swallow is the number of universes we are talking about.  How often does a given atom have the chance to decay?  Well, once each "Plank time."  This is a time interval much much shorter than anything in our experience, 10 ^ -43 second (1 with 44 zeros of them happen every second).

So, once every such Plank time for each uranium atom in the universe, the universe splits into a number of new universes, in one of which a given atom of uranium has decayed and in all the rest it has not.  This means that if uranium atoms decayed on average once each second, then for each uranium atom in the universe, the universe would split into 10 ^ 43 new universes 10 ^ 43 times.

But on average uranium atoms last several billion years, so in actuality the number of new universes created each Plank time is the number of seconds the average uranium atom lasts times 10 ^ 43.

Now this is only one of myriads of quantum decisions the universe is constantly making.

[Frank Merton]

Beany, on 24 January 2013 - 03:48 AM, said:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

This is perhaps Clark's best known aphorism.  However, it is not true.

It would have been better for him to have said that the technology seems like magic to the naive, but to those using the technology, they can distinguish the two easily.

(This objection depends on having a definition of "magic," that gives the aphorism meaning, since the common use of the word means anything we don't understand, but as Clark uses it the definition is something outside of physical causation).  The "magic" done by a professional entertainer depends on technology -- on tricks -- and therefore is not "magic" under Clark's definition.  On the other hand a miracle is necessarily a sort of magic or the being performing the miracle is really just a superman, not a divinity.

[Frank Merton]

Beany, on 24 January 2013 - 03:40 AM, said:

Didn't the book A Wrinkle in Time use the concept of folding space? And somewhere in the fuzzy back of my brain I think another sci fi book used the same concept.

Lots of SF uses concepts of this sort to get around the fact that no information can be transmitted within space faster than the speed of light, and no material object can go even that fast.

So, the solution is to travel in something other than space.

The idea of folds in space being arranged in such a way that natural portals exist is to my mind one of the less elegant ways of doing this.  It is unlikely that the curvatures of space needed for such folds would exist without our being aware of them, since they would manifest themselves in our geometry and other ways.

It is easier just to posit the existence of a set of dimensions "next" to ours where physics is different and the rule about light-speed can be disregarded.

[R4z3rsPar4d0x]

Rlyeh, on 22 January 2013 - 05:27 PM, said:

And in science fiction

So you dont believe that there are other dimensions?

[Rlyeh]

R4z3rsPar4d0x, on 25 January 2013 - 11:01 PM, said:

So you dont believe that there are other dimensions?

A dimension isn't a parallel world.

[R4z3rsPar4d0x]

Rlyeh, on 26 January 2013 - 04:12 AM, said:

A dimension isn't a parallel world.

Whoops My fault I meant parallel world