Re: Science has destroyed the Universe!
- From: Rumpelstiltskin <PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2007 06:26:22 GMT
On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 15:34:01 -0800 (PST), chatnoir
<wolfbat359a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://tinyurl.com/3x45g9
headline:
Has observing the universe hastened its end?
22 November 2007
Marcus Chown
Magazine issue 2631
Have we hastened the demise of the universe by looking at it? That's
the startling question posed by a pair of physicists, who suggest that
we may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by
observing dark energy, which is thought to be speeding up cosmic
expansion.
Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio,
and colleague James Dent suggest that by making this observation in
1998 we may have caused the universe to revert to a state similar to
early in its history, when it was more likely to end. "Incredible as
it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-
expectancy of the universe," says Krauss.
The researchers came to their conclusion by calculating how the energy
state of our universe might have evolved. Until recently, cosmologists
thought that the big bang 13.7 billion years ago occurred after a
bubble of ...
I have my own take on this, derived from many worlds,
though it's pretty far out and I haven't heard anyone else
suggest it.
It's known in QM that observing a wave event, or even
just "knowing" about it, causes its wave nature to change
to a particle. That's where the idea that observing "dark
matter", or more accurately "dark waves" since they're
unobserved and therefore not yet collapsed, causes the
matter to have mass. Even before I start, I'd note that
energy has mass, and the mass of any collapsed
particles would equal the mass of the waves they came
from, so there'd be no net change in that respect.
However, it does seem crazy, to everybody, that just
"knowing" about something can change the nature of
reality. My take on it is that we don't actually collapse the
wave, we collapse ourselves, and split into two or more
people who head off in different paths and can no longer
see each other. No new person has been "created"
because the one person before the split was a superposition
of possible states, so the splits just break the superposition
apart. In our newly split selves, there's no interference in
the wave we observed anymore, because each of our
split selves only sees one possible resolution of the wave,
so it's now a "particle" rather than an interference pattern
of superposed particles.
I don't know what professor Dent was getting at with
"caused the universe to revert to a state similar to
early in its history", because I don't see that at all, though
of course I've only seen the snippet that was reproduced
above. The universe when it was formed would be all
wave, since there were no observers to draw any
distinctions by observing the waves, so it wouldn't make
any sense to say that something was in one "universe"
but not in another, or that there were two universes at
all, any more than it would make sense to say that
something was red or gray before it had been observed
and noted by a colourblind or not-colourblind person.
.
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- From: chatnoir
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