From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Tue May 06 2003 - 10:41:13 MDT
D.B. opined:
<<What? What? Why should something have `set the peculiar initial conditions'
of *our* Universe? On this Poincare recurrence argument (well, it looks
awfully familiar to me, anyway), ours might well be the remixed result of
many earlier *non*-us-like universes, surely? It's *not* special pleading
for me to note that I hold the views I do and speak English because by
happenstance I was born in Australia last century, rather than two thousand
years ago. The Copernican default assumption can be taken too far,
especially when we're juggling universes.
Damien Broderick>>
To understand one system, we need to compare it to another. If there
factually is no other system (universe) then we are playing with our own
imaginations, with due respect to Professor Tegmark and Co. Are we viewing
the universe as massively eternal (like Bondi) with domains separated by mere
distance? Can humans or their successors, potentially alter the constants of
the cosmos (ignoring that the constants may change) via particle accelerators
or other gizmos, thus demonstrating and thereby falsifying or conforming the
Copernican hypothesis (Principle)?
Other scientists seem to, independently, have come to a similar conclusion
S.M. Farber, UCO/Lick Observatory, University of California, Santa Cruz
The conundrum of it all is that we monkey-things may, at last, be
Long may we run!
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: Tue May 06 2003 - 10:54:21 MDT
that Lenny Suskind and friends were attempting to make in the aforementioned
paper. For example:
<A HREF="http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0302/0302495.pdf">http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0302/0302495.pdf>
Feb 24, 2003
<<I close this summary by comming out of the closet as a believer in
anthropic cosmology. Much has been written on this topic, both pro and con,
some of it needlessly complicated, and I'd like this opportunity to state my
view, since I envision anthropic reasoning to play a greater role in
cosmological discussions in the future. Anthropic arguments are a kind of
data, though not the conventional kind.>>
intellectually incapable of deciphering the many universes versus one
universe question. But we ought to take some confort in the notion that
great-grandson, Optical Chip, will almost certainly.