From: Joe E. Dees (jdees0@students.uwf.edu)
Date: Wed Sep 23 1998 - 00:43:52 MDT
Date sent: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 15:49:09 +0000
From: Damien Broderick <damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Interesting Article
To: extropians@extropy.com
Send reply to: extropians@extropy.com
> At 04:57 PM 9/22/98 -0700, Kathryn wrote:
>
> >I was thinking of such theories as Alexei Starobinsky/Alan Guth's 'daughter
> >universe' theory, in which a false vacuum spot creates a wormhole with a
> >bubble wall on the end of it that pops off to create another universe. Or
> >Alexander Vilenkin's 'eternal inflation' theory, which posits repeat 'big
> >bangs' that duplicate our own. Or Andrei Linde's 'self-reproducing' theory
> >that involves additional universes in other dimensions.
>
> The connection with string or M theory strikes me as tenuous. Re-entrant
> wormholes at the particle level, maybe - but that's within a single universe.
>
> As for the budded cosmoses - Smolin's is a nice current version, and David
> Deutsch told me that his QT multiverse theory (the Cat is definitely both
> alive and dead) is not inconsistent with Smolin's, although they seem
> disjunct on an analytical level - both might be true, or one, or neither.
>
> Damien Broderick
Okay, so the definitely dead cat model (and likewise the definitely
alive cat model - one and the same) is out. This leaves the neither-
alive-nor-dead model and the both-alive-and-dead model, and the
strong probability that within the Standard (or any presently feasible
nonstandard) Model and given both practical and theoretical
measuring constraints, which one is correct may be Godelianly
undecideable without involving us in Heisenbergian observer-
participant tainting. This reminds me of the argument whether God
is hermaphroditic or asexual; what difference could it make to
anything else, since we can't use differences in anything else to
decide it? The absence (or presence) of the invisible is difficult to
detect; the location of the omnipresent is difficult to isolate.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:36 MST