Earth at the center of the Universe?

How does science work? And what's all this about quantum mechanics?

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Obvious Leo
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Obvious Leo »

Maybe god's just taking the piss, you reckon?
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Hobbes' Choice
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Hobbes' Choice »

Obvious Leo wrote:Maybe god's just taking the piss, you reckon?
No I think you are.

You are stuck in an anthropo-scopic fantasy.

We get this type verses stade problem in archaeology too. Usually no one gives a fuck and just blithely choses one over the other.
If it suits their narrative they see the typology as an evolution, if not they chose revolution. Adaptation or change Who ives a fuck really?
uwot
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by uwot »

Obvious Leo wrote:The convention in science is that when two possible explanations for observed phenomena are on offer then the simpler of the two must always be preferred.
Tell that to a string theorist. As a philosopher of science for 40 years you must know that Thomas Kuhn conclusively demonstrated that this isn't so.
Obvious Leo wrote:If the cosmos has ontological extension in time alone then not only does this explain the red-shift it also explains the perceived acceleration.
The Doppler effect explains it perfectly well.
Obvious Leo wrote:Who says that these centrifugal forces are being overcome?
I can't think of a single cosmologist who denies it. Can you?
Obvious Leo wrote:This is a prediction demanded by the theory but the evidence says otherwise.
I think you'll find that it is a conclusion based on the observed spectra of stars in our and other galaxies. What evidence do you have to the contrary? Can you cite a paper that supports any such claim?
Obvious Leo wrote:The constituents of galaxies are not becoming more disordered. Galaxies have steadily been evolving more and more complex subsystems within themselves ever since they first started to form and they are still doing so. The fact that you and I are here discussing this is the proof. The entropy within galaxies is decreasing and not increasing and this is why they're flying apart. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
If you think of the primeval universe as a cosmic egg, which is how George Lemaitre originally described it, then the fact that it is breaking up into smaller parts is a symptom of entropy. That these parts form complicated structures does nothing to decrease entropy.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Obvious Leo »

uwot wrote: Obvious Leo wrote:
The convention in science is that when two possible explanations for observed phenomena are on offer then the simpler of the two must always be preferred.


Tell that to a string theorist. As a philosopher of science for 40 years you must know that Thomas Kuhn conclusively demonstrated that this isn't so.
I didn't know there still was such a thing. Certainly there don't seem to be many willing to admit to the fact any more.
uwot wrote: Obvious Leo wrote:
If the cosmos has ontological extension in time alone then not only does this explain the red-shift it also explains the perceived acceleration.


The Doppler effect explains it perfectly well.
Of course it does. The point at issue is not the model used to describe the redshift but whether the journey of the light from the distant galaxy is one through time or one through space. It can't be both. The spatial explanation cannot explain the perceived acceleration whereas the temporal one can. Don't forget that light travels more quickly between galaxies than it does within them for the simple reason that time passes more quickly in these regions and obviously light cannot travel faster than time.
uwot wrote: Obvious Leo wrote:
Who says that these centrifugal forces are being overcome?


I can't think of a single cosmologist who denies it. Can you?
Not a one. To my knowledge there are no theorists who are actively pursuing an alternative to spacetime physics, although I could name a considerable number who have come to the view that no unification model will be achievable within the spacetime paradigm. That the galaxies must be gravitationally bound is a conclusion mandated by the theory but not one which is consistent with the evidence unless we invent undetectable matter to account for it. It's just Ptolemy's epicycles all over again. Don't forget that dark matter was first invented over 80 years ago and still not a shred of evidence exists to support its existence.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Obvious Leo »

uwot wrote: Obvious Leo wrote:
The constituents of galaxies are not becoming more disordered. Galaxies have steadily been evolving more and more complex subsystems within themselves ever since they first started to form and they are still doing so. The fact that you and I are here discussing this is the proof. The entropy within galaxies is decreasing and not increasing and this is why they're flying apart. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

If you think of the primeval universe as a cosmic egg, which is how George Lemaitre originally described it, then the fact that it is breaking up into smaller parts is a symptom of entropy. That these parts form complicated structures does nothing to decrease entropy.
Bollocks. If the cosmic egg was HOT and DISORDERED, as all the evidence suggests, then it should have become even more HOT and DISORDERED in a universe where entropy increases. Exactly the opposite has occurred.
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Hobbes' Choice »

Obvious Leo wrote:
uwot wrote: Obvious Leo wrote:
The constituents of galaxies are not becoming more disordered. Galaxies have steadily been evolving more and more complex subsystems within themselves ever since they first started to form and they are still doing so. The fact that you and I are here discussing this is the proof. The entropy within galaxies is decreasing and not increasing and this is why they're flying apart. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

If you think of the primeval universe as a cosmic egg, which is how George Lemaitre originally described it, then the fact that it is breaking up into smaller parts is a symptom of entropy. That these parts form complicated structures does nothing to decrease entropy.
Bollocks. If the cosmic egg was HOT and DISORDERED, as all the evidence suggests, then it should have become even more HOT and DISORDERED in a universe where entropy increases. Exactly the opposite has occurred.
But it is.
uwot
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by uwot »

Obvious Leo wrote:Bollocks. If the cosmic egg was HOT and DISORDERED, as all the evidence suggests, then it should have become even more HOT and DISORDERED in a universe where entropy increases. Exactly the opposite has occurred.
Are we talking about the same entropy? By my understanding it is the tendency towards thermal equilibrium rather than any heating up.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Obvious Leo »

uwot wrote:
Obvious Leo wrote:Bollocks. If the cosmic egg was HOT and DISORDERED, as all the evidence suggests, then it should have become even more HOT and DISORDERED in a universe where entropy increases. Exactly the opposite has occurred.
Are we talking about the same entropy? By my understanding it is the tendency towards thermal equilibrium rather than any heating up.
Even physics has managed to poke its obsolete Newtonian nose far enough into the 20th century to know that the entropy of a system is an expression of the complexity of its information content. The more disordered (hotter) the informational quanta are the higher the entropy. In the Shannon informational modelling which is used in all the sciences except physics the natural tendency of a self-causal system towards greater informational complexity (cooling) is often called negentropy or syntropy.


Complexity theory is a very broad-ranging and mature science with a rigorous methodology but the basic principles of it are quite accessible to the educated layman. It is used to model every naturally occurring system in nature except the universe itself, which is no trivial omission but which I am seeking to redress.
uwot
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by uwot »

Obvious Leo wrote:Even physics has managed to poke its obsolete Newtonian nose far enough into the 20th century to know that the entropy of a system is an expression of the complexity of its information content. The more disordered (hotter) the informational quanta are the higher the entropy. In the Shannon informational modelling which is used in all the sciences except physics the natural tendency of a self-causal system towards greater informational complexity (cooling) is often called negentropy or syntropy.
My emphasis. Sorry to be shouty, but bold by itself wasn't appreciably different. Anyway, aren't you contradicting yourself?
Obvious Leo wrote:Complexity theory is a very broad-ranging and mature science with a rigorous methodology but the basic principles of it are quite accessible to the educated layman. It is used to model every naturally occurring system in nature except the universe itself, which is no trivial omission but which I am seeking to redress.
Go for it; but we are talking about different entropies. It gets confusing when you invoke thermodynamics when in fact you are talking about information theory. If you are not bored of me saying it, then you haven't been paying attention, but it is my belief that the most plausible explanation for all the phenomena that give the impression that there is a universe made of some stuff, is some stuff the universe is made of. I have no trouble equating the history of the universe with the evolution (the 'event' as I understand you) of this stuff. The evidence that I am aware of suggests that the universe started out very small and very hot. It is now very large and very cold, at least compared to us, and is becoming more so. In accordance with my understanding of entropy, the total energy remains constant, but as the universe expands and cools, there may come a point when there is no useful concentration of energy anywhere. Heat death was, and still is, taken very seriously, but the discovery of 'dark energy' (to be clear, just the fact that the red shift of distant galaxies implies accelerating expansion) has complicated things.
On your model in general, 'time', to my mind, is just the counting of some cyclical process that happens to be the case in this evolving universe: planetary orbits or rotations, swinging pendulums or vibrating atoms etc, and it boggles my mind that you insist that time is elemental and extension a construct, given that if there were no spatial change, time would not be measurable and, frankly, meaningless.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Obvious Leo »

uwot wrote: It gets confusing when you invoke thermodynamics when in fact you are talking about information theory.
You'll have to get with the programme, uwot. Statistical thermodynamics IS an information theory. It's all about about how energy is dissipated in a system which is out of equilibrium and how this leads to lower entropy through means of EMERGENT informational complexity. Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel prize for this and the fact that physics ignores the principle of emergence in thermodynamics is a very serious oversight in the light of Einstein's mass/energy equivalence principle. INFORMATION IS PHYSICAL and is encoded in matter.
uwot wrote:it is my belief that the most plausible explanation for all the phenomena that give the impression that there is a universe made of some stuff, is some stuff the universe is made of.
I agree with you but what is the nature of this stuff? Einstein showed us that stuff is just an emergent property of quanta of energy which have configured themselves in a particular way and Planck showed us that these energy quanta are not infinitely divisible. If statistical thermodynamics is properly regarded as an information theory, which is by no means a controversial proposition in the modern information age, then these indivisible Planck quanta can be equated with informational "bits" which ENCODE for subatomic particles at an emergent level of informational complexity. It is in this way that I define reality at the Planck scale as a PROCESS and I use Conway's "Game of Life" model as an illustration of how this works. Conway's model is merely a simplified version of von Neuman's and Shannon's work in the same field but it's not too hard to visualise his gliders in terms of particulate matter as information or energy sinks.

This is where the ontology of space and time come into the story because quanta of energy can only move at the speed of light. Where is it then that the quanta of energy which encode for subatomic particles are moving to? Subatomic particles cannot be modelled in any other way than as zero-volume point-like entities so clearly these quanta of energy are not moving through space at the speed of light. They are moving through TIME at the speed of light and this allows us to define the speed of light as the processing speed of reality at the Planck scale. REALITY IS THAT WHICH IS CONTINUOUSLY BEING MADE AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT.

This where the elephant in the room of physics comes into the story. This perspective equates the speed of light with the speed at which time passes, or more precisely the rate of change in a physical system, and GR shows us that time does not pass at a constant speed because of its inversely logarithmic relationship with gravity. Clearly this inverse relationship must apply all the way down to the Planck scale so time and gravity can be understood as two different expressions of the same phenomenon, which means they can be quantised equivalently. This is a very significant unification of concepts because it means that time, gravity, and the speed of light are interwoven into a causal continuum which defines the universe as a reality MAKER. This is quantum gravity and this model is one with no background whatsoever. Where SR is background-independent and GR is background-dependent, quantum gravity is actually a model where the background is completely illusory, being merely a property of the consciousness of the observer of it. When the observer "collapses a wave function" what he is actually doing is applying a fictitious spatio-temporal extension to what is purely a temporal phenomenon. Since this perspective immediately makes all the quantum "weirdness" vanish it simply can't be wrong. It also resolves the considerable suite of paradoxes thrown up by both SR and GR.
uwot wrote:The evidence that I am aware of suggests that the universe started out very small and very hot.
Substitute the word "young" for "small" and we're saying the same thing. However my model only works for a cyclical universe paradigm so when we say that the universe "started" at the big bang what we mean is that this cycle of the universe started out at the last big bang. This was caused by the total gravitational collapse of the previous cycle of reality which was itself caused by the fact that the evolution of the universe towards informational complexity could proceed no further, an inevitable outcome for any finite and informationally closed system.
uwot wrote:I am aware of suggests that the universe started out very small and very hot. It is now very large and very cold, at least compared to us, and is becoming more so. In accordance with my understanding of entropy, the total energy remains constant, but as the universe expands and cools, there may come a point when there is no useful concentration of energy anywhere. Heat death was, and still is, taken very seriously, but the discovery of 'dark energy' (to be clear, just the fact that the red shift of distant galaxies implies accelerating expansion) has complicated things.
This is not wrong but in a spaceless model it's a cockamamie way of looking at things. It also ignores the fact that not all of the galaxies are moving away from each other. As they merge and become more massive they will exert an ever greater gravitational influence over their neighbouring galaxies which will further accelerate the merger process. Over vast reaches of time gravity is ALWAYS attractive so the universe MUST eventually self-organise back to a single informational entity beyond which gravitational collapse becomes inevitable. You should be able to see that this model is essentially an inverse of the Guth inflationary model and more akin to Hawking's notion of the black hole which "leaks" information. In the absence of a singularity time cannot stand still so the gravitational collapse of the universe cannot spell the end of time. It might take a gazillion of our years for the rebirth of the universe to occur but in an eternal reality time is meaningless in such a context. That this rebirth is more of a puny whimper than a spectacular bang obviously accords perfectly with both evolutionary and complexity theory, although it would make for a boring movie.
uwot wrote:On your model in general, 'time', to my mind, is just the counting of some cyclical process that happens to be the case in this evolving universe:
Exactly. People twist their minds into pretzels for no good reason when it comes to the ontology of time. Time is simply a convenient metric which we use to define the rate of change in a physical system. That's why time is the same thing as gravity and the speed of light because the rate of change in a physical system is totally determined by these things.
uwot wrote:it boggles my mind that you insist that time is elemental and extension a construct, given that if there were no spatial change, time would not be measurable and, frankly, meaningless.
Try to stop overthinking it and it makes perfect sense. It is CHANGE which is elemental and time is just the way we perceive change. At the Planck scale change occurs at the speed of light so the speed of light can simply be thought of as the speed at which time passes. That's all there is to it.

"It should be possible to explain the universe to a barmaid".....Albert Einstein.

"The universe will ultimately reveal itself to be an entity of the most sublime austerity"....John Archibald Wheeler.

You may be aware of the fact that Wheeler was acknowledged as the first physicist to explicitly define the universe as an information entity when he spoke of his "it from bit" paradigm. Personally I reckon Leibniz beat him to it by several centuries because he said the same thing whilst also emphatically rejecting the notion of the physicality of space. Von Neumann is also a forgotten player in this fascinating story because he laid much of the mathematical groundwork which Benoit Mandelbrot was later able to formulate into his notion of a fractal dimension, which is what time/gravity actually is.
uwot
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by uwot »

Obvious Leo wrote:Einstein showed us that stuff is just an emergent property of quanta of energy which have configured themselves in a particular way.
You'll have to give a specific reference, as far as my knowledge of Einstein extends, his 1905 paper on the photo-electric effect notwithstanding, Einstein argued that the fields he recognised, EM and spacetime, were effectively plenums. Quanta were just specific configurations of these malleable fields.
Obvious Leo wrote:and Planck showed us that these energy quanta are not infinitely divisible.
What he showed is that there is a minimal measurable scale. It doesn't follow that there isn't structure beyond this scale, just that it is in practise impossible to see it. It's another case of what is visible (if only in theory) being confused with what is real.
Obvious Leo wrote:This is where the ontology of space and time come into the story because quanta of energy can only move at the speed of light. Where is it then that the quanta of energy which encode for subatomic particles are moving to? Subatomic particles cannot be modelled in any other way than as zero-volume point-like entities
Says who? No, subatomic particles happen to be modelled as zero-volume point-like entities for mathematical convenience, but for the purposes of physics, so are stars and planets.
Obvious Leo wrote:...so clearly these quanta of energy are not moving through space at the speed of light. They are moving through TIME at the speed of light.
I'm stuck. How do you measure time in your model?
The Inglorious One
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by The Inglorious One »

Everywhere is the center of the universe.
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by SpheresOfBalance »

No! It's only obvious!

When one asks where the center of the universe is, it can only ever be assumed, by the truly intellectual mind, that they are referring to the origin of the universe. If it be true, The BIG BANG's origin. Of course, it would be relative to all the matter that currently exists. So it's more accurate that the center, (big bangs origin) can probably never be ascertained, as there's not enough life "time," manpower, or computer power to extrapolate all universal bodies trajectories, over 13 billion years, considering all probable collisions, of ever varying trajectory deviations, so as to come to that exact relative point of origin. Not to mention possible celestial events, never witnessed or considered by man, that may further complicate zeroing in on that exact relative big bang position.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Obvious Leo »

SpheresOfBalance wrote: When one asks where the center of the universe is, it can only ever be assumed, by the truly intellectual mind, that they are referring to the origin of the universe.
In which case they're not referring to a location in space but a location in time, which makes this statement true.
The Inglorious One wrote:Everywhere is the center of the universe.
No matter whereabouts in the universe we place our trillions of observers they are ALL equidistant from the big bang. However to give this event in time a location in space is a metaphysical absurdity because such a location would be different for each observer of it. Relativity 101.
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by SpheresOfBalance »

Obvious Leo wrote:
SpheresOfBalance wrote: When one asks where the center of the universe is, it can only ever be assumed, by the truly intellectual mind, that they are referring to the origin of the universe.
In which case they're not referring to a location in space but a location in time, which makes this statement true.
No, both! At the moment of the big bang supposedly space and time were created, thus relative to all space there is in fact a center. Because explosions radiate outward omnidirectionally from their center.
The Inglorious One wrote:Everywhere is the center of the universe.
No matter whereabouts in the universe we place our trillions of observers they are ALL equidistant from the big bang. However to give this event in time a location in space is a metaphysical absurdity because such a location would be different for each observer of it. Relativity 101.
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