On Tuesday, September 24, 2024 at 6:50:18 AM UTC-6 John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 8:46 AM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote: *>> The observational fact that Bell's Inequality is violated. I find that spooky, and as Niels Bohr said "anybody who is not shocked by quantum mechanics does not understand it". * *> Yes, we agree. It's truly spooky and tends to support Bohr's claim that measurement causes the properties being measured;* *Except that Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation couldn't explain exactly, or even approximately, what a "measurement" is, * *Seriously; this is nonsense. Hardly anything can be explained "exactly". More important is the fact that this critique is way overblown IMO. When we measure an observable, name any observable, don't we know what we're measuring? The real measurement problem is the collapse of the wf. AG* *Many Worlds can do that simply by replacing "measurement" with "entanglement". If Bohr performs the two slit experiment and his experimental equipment records which slit the electrons went through, then the equipment becomes entangled with the electrons,* *Maybe the electrons, all of them, and possibly everything else, wase entangled long ago, in the early universe when everything was in close proximity? AG* *and if Bohr looks at those Instruments he becomes entangled with the experimental equipment, and thus he detects no interference pattern. But if the equipment doesn't record which-way information then Bohr will see an interference pattern. A measurement by an intelligent entity can cause entanglement, but so can an infinite number of other things.* *>> If the entire universe became infinite at the same instant the transformation from nothingness to somethingness occurred then the universe wouldn't need to expand at all to remain infinite.* *> **You're positing an instantaneous transition from Nothing to Infinite Something.* *Even an instantaneous transition from nothing to finite something at T=0 already involves infinity, * *That's like claiming changing a particle at rest to some non-zero value is an infinite process, since the nothing is rest, and the something is acceleration. Simpler to assume the entire bubble, which is finite, emerged from some eternal, timeless, substratum. AG* . *and if you add one infinity to another infinity you still end up with the same infinity. But for all we know there might not even be a T= 0, maybe the universe is cyclical, or maybe the big bang was just the start of our little out-of-the-way corner of the multiverse. Nobody knows, someday we might know but it won't be because somebody was sitting in a comfortable chair thinking about philosophy. If you really want to solve the most profound questions you're going to need to get your hands dirty and perform some experiments. * *>> The universe could be temporally finite but spatially infinite, or spatially finite but temporally infinite, or both could be infinite, or neither could be infinite. Nobody knows, not even you. * *> Something cannot become infinite through finite processes,* *Yes.* *>* *I see time evolving as space evolves,* *Maybe but that is far from obvious because we already know that time and space have fundamentally different properties. There is only one dimension of time but three dimensions of space, and time has a direction but space does not, and at least in big bang cosmology, time is infinite in one direction but not in the other. * *The existence of time depends on change, so if space expands or changes in any way, time will continue to flow. AG * *> I didn't claim the universe is infinite. I just asserted that IF is, it had no beginning; that is, it would be UNCREATED.* *If time is infinite not just in one direction but in both directions then obviously the universe would have to have been uncreated. And that would be true regardless of if space is infinite or finite. And you did say "I see time evolving as space evolves".* > *Moreover, IF our bubble is finite, which I tend to believe,* *Everybody believes the observable universe is finite. * *Now suddenly you appeal to "belief". I don't appeal to belief. I appeal to the fact that the visible universe is expanding and I can turn the clock back, to ANY time in the past, and put a finite sphere around it! You seem to have an inclination to put me down. Why is that? AG * *> since it can be enclosed by a sphere of finite radius, I concluded it can't be flat, since that implies infinite in spatial extent.* *NO. **The finite observable universe can be contained in a finite sphere regardless of what the shape of the entire universe is. * * > But if we believe the unobservable part came into existence during Inflation,* *Long before anybody came up with the idea of cosmological inflation, everybody believed there must be parts of the universe, perhaps very big parts perhaps infinitely big parts, that we will never be able to see because light moves at a finite speed and the big bang happened a finite number of years ago, and nobody believed that the Earth really was the center of the universe. * *You can appeal to the Cosmological Principle to assert that unobserved universe is generally the same as the visible part, except for its recessional velocity > c. Anyway, as I earlier stated, I think the unobservable part came into existence during Inflation, a finite process, so it is also finite and the whole bubble is finite. I don't claim I can prove it. AG * John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> qqv -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/422ea4f3-e073-49be-a65e-97b665717d3an%40googlegroups.com.
