Re: What IS Intelligence
From: Alf P. Steinbach (alfps_at_start.no)
Date: 12/12/03
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Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 22:51:51 GMT
On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 19:16:09 +1200, Corey Murtagh <emonk@slingshot.co.nz.no.uce> wrote:
>Programmer Dude wrote:
>
>> Roedy Green wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Read this Scientific American article on cosmology.
>>>
>>>http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F1EDD-B48A-1E90-8EA5809EC5880000&chanID=sa008
>>>
>>>It will blow your mind a little about just how big the universe is,
>>>and from a probabilistic point of view how damn near everything you
>>>can conceive of has to be in there somewhere.
>>
>> I participated in a discussion about this elsewhere. There seems a
>> flaw in the author's reasoning. If the universe *started* small (as
>> we believe it did), wouldn't it require infinite time and infinite
>> matter to become infinite in size?
>
>Yep.
Nope.
(OK, you can tell I'm bored out of my mind since I'm replying to
cosmology questions on comp.programming!)
For an infinite universe you consider just the size of any particular region
of space, defined wrt. an inertial point. At Biggy Bangy time that region
is zero size, which is not very meaningful, and which is why in that view the
Biggy Bangy is considered a singularity. Conceptually I think it's much more
useful to take the opposite view of shrinking matter; in that view the
region stays fixed size while matter shrinks; looking back in time matter
expands, and at Biggy Bangy time (the singularity, which cannot be achieved)
any little speck of matter is infinite size wrt. the region size. Note: it
doesn't matter for that particular problem whether the universe is infinite
or not. The little speck will be infinite at Biggy Bangy time no matter what.
One reason this viewpoint is, to me, so much more useful is that it's then
easy to visualize a sub-region where the rate of matter shrinking is larger;
corresponding to a bubble universe. Then we can think of such bubbles
colliding. Or what happens when stuff escapes from such a sub-region: is it
then still smaller than stuff in the surrounding space, or not?
Of course there are problems no matter which conceptual view is used...
The main problem being: what is the "measurement rod", what is all this
expansion or shrinking relative to? But that's not a problem of needing
infinite time. It's just a problem of scientists evidently putting off that
little question for later consideration, and using absolutely mindblowingly
silly explanations (it's relative to galaxies!) in popular accounts...
> Which is why a large body of cosmologists refuse to use the word
>'infinite' in relation to the universe. Most of them (a vast majority?)
>seem to agree that the universe is bounded.
I don't believe they can be that ignorant. If you have a bounded universe
then you can put two great circles across it, in parallell, with some relative
speed (all in the abstract). Then you can either ditch special relativity or
you can go back in time as much as you want.
Cheers!
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