NA8
Flashlight Enthusiast
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2007
- Messages
- 1,565
I suspect the real question is whether it's true that "the universe isn't stranger than you imagine, it's stranger than you can imagine".
Guesses of such things as "the universe looks like it's a giant computer simlulation" fall into the trap of trying to envision the universe from outside the universe (if indeed there is such a thing as outside the universe).
All we can know of the universe is defined from within the universe. Anything conceivably beyond such boundaries can not be viewed as anything more than imaginative characteristics; not even the progression of time.
I suspect the real question is whether it's true that "the universe isn't stranger than you imagine, it's stranger than you can imagine".
There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet when it eventually switches on some time later this year. Right?
Err, yep. And yet a few niggling doubts are persuading some scientists to run through their figures again. And the new calculations are throwing up some surprises.
One potential method of destruction is that the LHC will create tiny black holes that could swallow everything in their path including the planet. In 2002, Roberto Casadio at the Universita di Bologna in Italy and a few pals reassured the world that this was not possible because the black holes would decay before they got the chance to do any damage.
Now they're not so sure. The question is not simply how quickly a mini-black hole decays but whether this decay always outpaces any growth.
Casadio have reworked the figures and now say that: " the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible."
Does not seem possible? That's not the unequivocal reassurance that particle physicists have been giving us up till now...
So, to a lay person, who never even got the chance to get past basic Math, what does it do for me? Does it affect me or my world? Does it help put food on my table, or a better paycheck? Not hardly.
Why not spend all those millions and millions of dollars, and use all those precious minds working on things like how to stop the destruction of the earth we live on within the next 50 years, before we don't have a sustainable atmosphere any more. Or does the Hologram idea suggest that this isn't really here so we don't have to worry about it?
Fourth paragraph up from the bottom, in that article Link basically sums it up. What good does all this do, it it's really there? Well it gets some guys some great awards and notoriety, plus it gets us more money to do more cool things. (my lay translation).
Apologies, I'm a very grumpy old man, but wouldn't it be better if we saved and control the world we live in first, before we decide to try to control the space-time continuum?
Then again ... don't you want to know? Aren't you curious? Those questions are so absolutely deep and far reaching ... I think humans just want to know. It is philosophical. It is the craving for the final answers to the world, the universe, to life. To God for some.
We must know I say.
bernie
Why not spend all those millions and millions of dollars, and use all those precious minds working on things like how to stop the destruction of the earth we live on within the next 50 years, before we don't have a sustainable atmosphere any more.
Many things you enjoy and take for granted have been invented by people who were allowed to "play" while others plowed the fields so to speak. A great many things have been discovered and invented more or less by accident. If humans, like animals, had always only perused the goals with immediate rewards, you would indeed be living a miserable life. I don't think any one of us can even begin to imagine how utterly tormented a life humans had in the stone age for example. Broken leg? You're done, but only after weeks of unimaginable suffering. A simple tooth ache could cause you a horrible and painful death.I guess that for many of you, it's if we came from God or from accident. The diefinitive absolute proof of why we are here. For me, no I don't care. I only care about this world and the shape it's in. I only care about the fact that we are here and what we are going to do to protect what we have real time, in the present.
I just think the money is better off spent for the things we need in the here and now. All the people dead already over time, didn't know the answer, we won't either. We can wonder, but we won't know. It's pointless to me and it wastes time & money needed elswhere.
Science is the pursuit of knowledge, not truth (my quote). The later is for religion. Conceptually I have little problem with these theories, but the fact remains the universe is what it is, and the past 50 years have seen a depressing migration of science away from applied theory to models that appease mathematicians more than humanity in general. 10 years from now the 'Matrix' theory will be ancient, and it's inventors seen as quacks while we are told to embrace the 'Olsen Twin Theory' (all matter has a bulimic pair) or something.