Time For A New Universe?
Yesterday was "time travel day" in Luky's mind. It's a BIG subject, so I suppose I should have expected it to extend another 24 hours.
The thing is, time travel used to be a purely fanciful notion. We could create a time travel scenario without worrying about the messiness of whether or not it would really work, and then we could evaluate plot devices based on their inherent contradictions, or support, given our own little time travel universe.
As Luky says, "after all, the grandfather paradox (see yesterday's post - http://philosopherdog.blogspot.com/2005/10/lukys-been-thinking-about-time-travel.html) doesn't represent any threat in a universe where there are no grandfathers." That's his way of making light of any solution which is supposed to solve the problem with rules of metaphysics - as when someone argues that even if time travel were possible it would still be the case that the immutability of history must remain intact, and therefore you couldn't kill your grandfather no matter how much you might want to. (Neither Luky nor I know anyone so misanthropic or familiacidal, but he thinks that the primary laws of physics would still take precedence. In other words, guns would still shoot, knives would still cut, and anyone killable would still die of terminal injuries. Of course, it's all still speculation.)
The solution, however, according to Luky is multiple universes.
It turns out that multiverses are becoming quite respectable in the scientific communities, and downright vogue among some cosmologists (again, Wikipedia offers a decent overview - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse).
Some theories hold that not only are there many universes, but there are literally an infinite number of universes (Luky adds, "that is, if ANYTHING can truly be 'literally infinite'"). Anyway, one interesting implication of an infinite number of universes is that every possible universe would exist . . . that is, every imaginable universe - not to mention innumerable unimaginable ones - exist. You see the point of this when you realize that every microsecond of every minute of every day you are doing, seeing, experiencing . . . things that might have been done, seen, experienced slightly differently - in, that is, some separate imaginable universe.
Well, without permitting Luky to interminably bore everybody with his thorough description of how we might conceptualize infinite universes, readers can avoid having to take our words for it by checking out an article by one of the discipline's "seers," Max Tegmark ("Parallel Universes," featured article, Scientific American, May 2003 - http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=000F1EDD-B48A-1E90-8EA5809EC5880000) and/or, check out the "Universe or Multiverse" symposium website (http://www.templeton.org/humble03/part12.html).
Luky especially digs Max's story (http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/index.html) because he was apparently recently married to Angelica, another astrophysicist-cosmologist (http://www.theophys.kth.se/old/max/wedding.html). Luky thinks this means that smart people sometimes partner up with smart people - which, I think, he takes to imply that there could be hope for smart dogs. (He's forgotten all about that little trip to the vet back when he was about 7 months.)
Okay, anyway, it is apparently Luky's theory that time travel doesn't have to be a trip within one "scape" (as in "timescape," per his favored term) - like making stops at two different and separate moments within one historical timeline. Luky says that time travel can happen, while at the same time the grandfather paradox is avoided, simply by our traveling to another closely-related parallel universe.
"So," I interrupt his all-too-free cogitations, "you're telling me that when you finally decided to invent your time machine you're not expecting to have any serious troubles with grandfathers because you will not actually be visiting YOUR grandfather, but rather the grandfather of another version of you in another universe?"
"Yes."
"Let's just assume for one minute that I even buy two seconds of your millennial logic-leaping and go along with the notion that you could, well, leave this scape at all . . . why would I have a moment's confidence that you can clock into another - any other - and then, why do you think it might be physically and chronologically related enough for you to even recognize the planet, let alone an age of fashion, language, ideas, and much less your own family tree!?!?"
"Because," he looked at me as if he were surprised by my incredulity, "you don't find the food very far from the kitchen."
"Are you hinting that it's time to eat?"
"That too, but I'm saying that related things are close together - even on the scale of the multiverse."
"Luky, now I'm really lost!"
"Yes, I know. I would suggest that you reset your chronometer, but I think you can trust the same instincts I do."
"Yeah, and what's that?"
"You'll find your way home when you get hungry."
The thing is, time travel used to be a purely fanciful notion. We could create a time travel scenario without worrying about the messiness of whether or not it would really work, and then we could evaluate plot devices based on their inherent contradictions, or support, given our own little time travel universe.
As Luky says, "after all, the grandfather paradox (see yesterday's post - http://philosopherdog.blogspot.com/2005/10/lukys-been-thinking-about-time-travel.html) doesn't represent any threat in a universe where there are no grandfathers." That's his way of making light of any solution which is supposed to solve the problem with rules of metaphysics - as when someone argues that even if time travel were possible it would still be the case that the immutability of history must remain intact, and therefore you couldn't kill your grandfather no matter how much you might want to. (Neither Luky nor I know anyone so misanthropic or familiacidal, but he thinks that the primary laws of physics would still take precedence. In other words, guns would still shoot, knives would still cut, and anyone killable would still die of terminal injuries. Of course, it's all still speculation.)
The solution, however, according to Luky is multiple universes.
It turns out that multiverses are becoming quite respectable in the scientific communities, and downright vogue among some cosmologists (again, Wikipedia offers a decent overview - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse).
Some theories hold that not only are there many universes, but there are literally an infinite number of universes (Luky adds, "that is, if ANYTHING can truly be 'literally infinite'"). Anyway, one interesting implication of an infinite number of universes is that every possible universe would exist . . . that is, every imaginable universe - not to mention innumerable unimaginable ones - exist. You see the point of this when you realize that every microsecond of every minute of every day you are doing, seeing, experiencing . . . things that might have been done, seen, experienced slightly differently - in, that is, some separate imaginable universe.
Well, without permitting Luky to interminably bore everybody with his thorough description of how we might conceptualize infinite universes, readers can avoid having to take our words for it by checking out an article by one of the discipline's "seers," Max Tegmark ("Parallel Universes," featured article, Scientific American, May 2003 - http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=000F1EDD-B48A-1E90-8EA5809EC5880000) and/or, check out the "Universe or Multiverse" symposium website (http://www.templeton.org/humble03/part12.html).
Luky especially digs Max's story (http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/index.html) because he was apparently recently married to Angelica, another astrophysicist-cosmologist (http://www.theophys.kth.se/old/max/wedding.html). Luky thinks this means that smart people sometimes partner up with smart people - which, I think, he takes to imply that there could be hope for smart dogs. (He's forgotten all about that little trip to the vet back when he was about 7 months.)
Okay, anyway, it is apparently Luky's theory that time travel doesn't have to be a trip within one "scape" (as in "timescape," per his favored term) - like making stops at two different and separate moments within one historical timeline. Luky says that time travel can happen, while at the same time the grandfather paradox is avoided, simply by our traveling to another closely-related parallel universe.
"So," I interrupt his all-too-free cogitations, "you're telling me that when you finally decided to invent your time machine you're not expecting to have any serious troubles with grandfathers because you will not actually be visiting YOUR grandfather, but rather the grandfather of another version of you in another universe?"
"Yes."
"Let's just assume for one minute that I even buy two seconds of your millennial logic-leaping and go along with the notion that you could, well, leave this scape at all . . . why would I have a moment's confidence that you can clock into another - any other - and then, why do you think it might be physically and chronologically related enough for you to even recognize the planet, let alone an age of fashion, language, ideas, and much less your own family tree!?!?"
"Because," he looked at me as if he were surprised by my incredulity, "you don't find the food very far from the kitchen."
"Are you hinting that it's time to eat?"
"That too, but I'm saying that related things are close together - even on the scale of the multiverse."
"Luky, now I'm really lost!"
"Yes, I know. I would suggest that you reset your chronometer, but I think you can trust the same instincts I do."
"Yeah, and what's that?"
"You'll find your way home when you get hungry."
posted by RAM at 12:39 PM
1 Comments:
I think Luky is very sensible.
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