From: hal@finney.org
Date: Fri Jun 04 1999 - 09:11:45 MDT
Rob Harris Cen-IT, <Rob.Harris@bournemouth.gov.uk>, writes:
> Does anyone else notice the action of planets etc., viewing them as
> organisms, which succeed (spawn life/something else), or fail (no geological
> activity). Perhaps the same is true for universes. Perhaps this universe is
> not as chaotic as we generally believe? Maybe this universe is an optimised
> ancestor of an ancient life-spawning-by-chance universe, making lifeforms in
> this universe inevitable. What do you think?
Physicist Lee Smolin has a somewhat similar view. Here is a description
of his idea from http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin/smolin_p1.html:
The other idea with which Smolin is associated is "natural selection"
of universes. He's saying that in some sense the universes that
allow complexity and evolution reproduce themselves more efficiently
than other universes. The ensemble itself is thus evolving in some
complicated way. When stars die, they sometimes form black holes. (This
is something which I wear my astrophysical hat to study.) Smolin
speculates-as others, like Alan Guth, have also done-that inside a
black hole it's possible for a small region to, as it were, sprout
into a new universe. We don't see it, but it inflates into some new
dimension. Smolin takes that idea on board, but then introduces
another conjecture, which is that the laws of nature in the new
universe are related to those in the previous universe. This differs
from Andrei Linde's idea of a random ensemble, because Smolin supposes
that the new universe retains physical laws not too different from
its parent universe. What that would mean is that universes big and
complex enough to allow stars to form, evolve, and die, and which
can therefore produce lots of black holes, would have more progeny,
because each black hole can then lead to a new universe; whereas a
universe that didn't allow stars and black holes to form would have
no progeny. Therefore Smolin claims that the ensemble of universes
may evolve not randomly but by some Darwinian selection, in favor of
the potentially complex universes.
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:03:59 MST