Re: the universe


Posted by Pasti on Feb 09, 2004 at 21:10
(67.69.236.124)

Re: the universe (DA Morgan)

"You are correct that they are the two "accepted" possibilities: I think both simplistic and incorrect."

Well, we can talk more about incorrect.Maybe incomplete,yes,but incorrect,that is another story entirely.

The accepted astrophysical picture is that of a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker inflationary universe, with a cosmological constant (I believe it is a positivie cosmological constant, but I am not entirely sure).That means a Universe that is homogeneous and isotropic, and that expands at a more or less constant rate, with ocasional inflationary bursts.Moreover,this universe is considered of having a single-valued time (no parallel universes), and obeys causality.
It is indeed the simplest model,according to Occam's razor,but it is supported by the observational evidence, at least for the time being.

The multifingered character of time, although a very nice and "cool" idea is just that, an idea.It is theoretically possible, but this doesn't mean too much, since it is inaccessible experimentally, at least for the time being, and I might add for a long time to come.

Moreover,odd spatial topologies (dodecahedral, or anything similar,like Klein bottle with several handles, not necessarily dodecahedral), or higher dimensional cosmologies like your favorite Kalabi-Yau with compactifications,are just theory, without any evidence to support them, in spite of the plethora of articles written on the subject.Take the last venture for example, the dodecahedral structure that was alleged to be encoded in the WMAP data.It has remained just a nice assumption, in spite of the media coverage at the time, if you recall.Nothing came out of it,yet.
And my personal feeling is that nothing will come out of it in the near future either, since lately the astro guys have been quite quiet.

So these models, at least the FRW might be simplistic,naturally, but not exactly incorrect.The multifingered nature of time is a theoretically correct ideea, but experimentally unsupported.

"My suspicions is that given a bit of time, if that dimension is meaningful in this context, it all keeps going."

No offense Dan, but for the time being everything keeps going, it is the natural way.

"One must always keep in mind that every single thought human's have come up with that is anthropomorphic, start and stop, beginning and end, has proven incorrect."

Well, in almost all cases,maybe least the antropomorphic one in a certain context,the views were bult on the observational data at the time,and by default this view is incomplete, and will be so for quite some time in the future.
I might venture to say that at least based on the experimental data, what is known to be incorrect in the present has been ruled out, and future data will rule out other concepts.But that is natural, science is an evolving body of knowledge.

"A bit of bravery is called for. Not enough to be a bunch of lunatics ... but a bit more than the conventional."

Dan, the bravery is there, you just don't know about it.Unfortunately, today there is more bravery than observations,which accounts largely for the odd ideas that surface in the media every now and then.




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