From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Oct 27 1999 - 03:19:21 MDT
"Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@www.aeiveos.com> writes:
> On 26 Oct 1999, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> > If there were differences in background energy level, even very small
> > ones, tremendous amounts of energy could be released by redistributing
> > the vacuum - this isn't observed, it ought to be very visible.
> > The background radiation seems to show that the matter in the early big
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > bang was not quite homogenous, but it says little about the vacuum.
> -----------------------------
>
> *OR* that there are locally evolved "pockets" of SIs that radiate
> waste heat at temperatures *slightly* above the background radiation.
>
> Our "scale" for the variation in the CMBR is so "gross" at this point
> it wouldn't take very big SI congregations to make things appear slightly
> warmer in one direction than another direction.
Hmm... If I remember the Cobe data right, the variations are rather
large, several degrees across in the sky. This means that the
congregations have to be very large (otherwise, they have to be close
to us, and we should both see effects of them being inside our galaxy
or local group (= anisotropies in the distribution), and a certain
level of granularity would be expected). If these concentrations are
very large, then we have the same problem of causal connection again -
how could the SIs have become similar over vast distances?
So the SI theory for the background radiation has the problem that
either the SIs are close to us, but then they have to be so many that
they look like a dense mist in the infrared, or more remote and then
they run into the same causality problem of how they could have
coordinated their temperatures given the finite speed of light and the
short age of the universe. Another, perhaps bigger problem, is that if
the anisotropies are due to SIs, the natural background radiation is
going to be even smoother - and astrophysicists already have trouble
with reconciling this level of smoothness with pattern formation.
> Oooppps, sub-SI-Anders falls into the pit of "conventional wisdom"
> and the *assumption* that the *simplest* explanation is that the universe
> has no intelligence or evolution to the limits of physics to explain
> those pesky "observations".
Actually, I would say in this case Occam is on my side ("Ho ho ho, now
I got a razor..." :-), because the theory that the background
radiation is mostly natural is much simpler than assuming SIs with
some form of long-range coordination - that model introduces a
tremendous number of new unknowns (like why some do and others don't
radiate at a low temperature).
> Good thing his last entertainment piece was so delicious otherwise
> I'd suggest a 2-week banishment for penance...
Actually, I'm right now undertaking just a 2 week penance to update my
web pages using my recently acquired Dreamweaver 2 program... of
course, I don't view it as penance but a reward :-)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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