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The ten weirdest cosmologies?
Here is the list, courtesy of GeekPress. But they are not trying very hard. Here is one candidate:
One of the most outlandish new theories of cosmology is that space-time is actually a superfluid substance, flowing with zero friction. Then if the universe is rotating, superfluid spacetime would be scattered with vortices, according to physicists Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina and George Chapline at Lawrence Livermore lab in California - and those vortices might have seeded structures such as galaxies. Mazur suggests that our universe might have been born in a collapsing star, where the combination of stellar matter and superfluid space could spawn dark energy, the repulsive force that is accelerating the universe.
Duh! That's not weird at all. My favorite weird cosmology is missing from the list: time is an illusion, all possible universes exist, and that includes many universes with false memories and traces of a supposedly distant past.
Then there is always "elephants all the way down..."
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 11, 2006 at 06:55 AM in Science | Permalink
Comments
Or Terry Pratchett’s "turtles all the way down".
Posted by: Tim Worstall at Aug 11, 2006 7:19:35 AM
I would like to see these cosmologies begin to address the most interesting aspect of the universe, that conscious experience exists. Conscious experience is at the center of most of what we care about -- the arts, literature, education, even economics. . .
Until that most profound reality is addressed, the cosmologies are missing the most important aspect of the universe.
And simply "passing the buck" with vague handwaving references to anthropic principles, complex nervous systems, natural selection, and cybernetic computing models doesn't cut it either. Why do qualia exist? Why are we not simply unconscious robots? Why do we assume that bacteria and single-celled organisms with relatively complex behavior are unconscious robots? Is that really any different from Decartes assumption that all animals except people were nothing but insensate clockwork automatons? David Chalmers addresses the importance and relevance of these questions quite effectively and rigorously.
Indeed, what does it mean for a universe to "exist" with no consciousness experiencing it? We have no definitions for existence that ignore consciousness.
Until physical cosmologists begin to address these questions in a rigorous way, they are totally missing what is really going on. . .
Posted by: Matthew Cromer at Aug 11, 2006 10:04:20 AM
I think the turtles thing predates Pratchett. Something to do with Bertie Russell.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Aug 11, 2006 10:33:57 AM
What? Time Cube is not in the list?
Posted by: Alejandro at Aug 11, 2006 10:55:56 AM
Bernard,
May well be. Shows my level of intellectual achievement though. I’ve read all of Pratchett and perhaps three sentences of Russell.
Posted by: Tim Worstall at Aug 11, 2006 10:58:52 AM
My favorite is B. Fraser's "Space and time are both three dimensional, and expanding at the speed of light, which is why waves seem to go everywhere at the same time yet behave like particles at times: they are actually standing still." It also explains cosmic background radiation, and other stuff.
A second favorite is Hotson / Menahem Simhony's "the Universe is a Bose-Einstein condensate of electron-positron pairs at zero energy level. All the electrons and positrons forced to remain at higher energy levels (ground level is actually 1st, not 0th level) combine in little vortices in 6 dimensions to constitute neutrons and protons." This one seems to converge on Mazur / Chaplin's cosmology (BE condensates are superfluids).
Ooooh, lots of capitalised words in this post.
Posted by: Jesrad at Aug 11, 2006 11:59:49 AM
i love the notion that qualia exist, that we're not bilogical robots. i have no evidence that we are not biological robots. that is, i have seen no evidence that there could be a biological robot that acts as i do but would still be missing that magic something, that i am somehow different from what you would expect in a biological machine. the qualia folk assume a problem without proving one exists, and then say our inability to solve the posited problem demonstrates something. silly.
Posted by: dj superflat at Aug 11, 2006 2:14:19 PM
Or time may be experienced in different ways
Posted by: Eric H at Aug 11, 2006 11:05:24 PM
DJ, perhaps you don't have experiences and that's why you don't see the problem. That would make you a zombie. . .
Posted by: Matthew Cromer at Aug 12, 2006 8:03:58 AM
DJ, perhaps you don't have experiences and that's why you don't see the problem. That would make you a zombie. . .
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