From: Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Wed Dec 25 1996 - 07:13:15 MST
Thanks a lot for your story, Anders. It resembles the new direction of
Moravec's thinking more than a bit: he speaks of an transformation wave
(phase transition, to the next vacuum) flooding back from the outer
layers of the expanding noosphere light cone, overwhelming the "mindless
depths" of the nucleation. He actually argues that it is has happened
already, that, unawares, we have been transformed, way in the past.
I do not see how this can be a scientific theory. It has chilled me
slightly to find out that vacuum decay is not just a concept occuring in
cellular automata runs (and in science fiction), but an actual physical
event (according to hyperspace theory, currently sole TOE candidate,
primeval symmetry breaking, causing most of spatial dimensions to
collapse to the Planck scale and created our universe (as we know it) was
such a phase transition). It would be _extremely_ interesting to find
out, whether our current vacuum is truly the ground state, and not yet
another local minimum. I now understand why the quest of calculating the
true vacuum (Michio Kaku, "Strings, Conformal Fields, and Topology")
might be more than a confirmation/knockout criterion of the theory.
We're living in truly interesting times.
ciao,
'gene
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