Best cosmology books according to redditors
We found 321 Reddit comments discussing the best cosmology books. We ranked the 120 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 321 Reddit comments discussing the best cosmology books. We ranked the 120 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
Yes, I do find it disturbing. Anyone who cares about the truth should be.
Carl Sagan wrote a spectacular book on the human tendency to jump to bad conclusions.
My basic approach is summarized here: Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things About Philosophy. http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/23/physicists-should-stop-saying-silly-things-about-philosophy/
But yes, there's also my awesome new book! I talk about philosophy a lot there, but I don't dive explicitly into the "here is why philosophy is useful" debates. If its usefulness isn't obvious by the time you've finished reading the book, I've failed.
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/dp/0525954821/smcarroll-20
> "Hidden Dimensions" by Lisa Randall.
Just for clarity, I think you mean:
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, by Lisa Randall.
https://amzn.com/0060531096
Puno je knjiga za preporučiti, ali evo jedne koja me nedavno oduševila: https://www.amazon.fr/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/dp/0525954821
Not many answers, but here's a book I'm working through now that focuses on the question.
Not OP, just helping out with some formatting (and links!) because I like these suggestions.
> 1) The Magic Of Reality - Richard Dawkins
>
> 2) The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
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> 3)A Brief History Of Time - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking
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> 4)Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari (Any Book By Daniel Dennet)
>
> 5)Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
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> 6)From Eternity Till Here - Sean Caroll (Highly Recommended)
>
> 7)The Fabric Of Cosmos - Brian Greene (If you have good mathematical understanding try Road To Reality By Roger Penrose)
>
> 8)Just Six Numbers - Martin Reese (Highly Recommended)
Physicists take the idea of additional unknown dimensions seriously. I think the implication is that some unusual phenomena share a common physical mechanism that isn't very well understood but that science is at least aware of. It's interesting to consider that some religious or spiritual phenomena might have an actual physical basis. I think we're culturally conditioned to believe that some supernatural phenomena are non-physical but increasing evidence points in the opposite direction.
http://www.amazon.com/Warped-Passages-Unraveling-Mysteries-Dimensions/dp/0060531096/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1375151231&sr=8-4&keywords=Lisa+Randall
To build on doc_daneeka's answer, I'll try to recollect an explanation I read about 4D objects in 3D space.
An object existing in n dimensions may be represented in n-1 dimensions. This representation may be called a shadow.
So, a 2D representation of an object existing in 3 dimensions is called a shadow (and is a shadow as we know it). Looking at a 2D representation alone, one might be able to reconstruct what the original object looks like in 3D.
Say, you see the shadow of a clear glass vase. If you know where the light source is placed, you might be able to ascertain what the vase looks like based solely on its shadow. Spin the vase, and the shadow will show some movement as well.
What we're looking at is a 3D representation of an object that exists in 4 dimensions. For a moving object in 3 dimensions, its shadow would also show movement albeit only in two axis. Similarly, objects in 4 dimensions would show movement along three axis.
From what I gather, we haven't yet developed a sophisticated way to think or even explain (to the layman at least) what an object might look like in 4D. Most of our brains aren't wired to think that way. Kinda like the characters in Flatland - really nice read, BTW.
You know...I may have come across this explanation while attempting (and failing miserably) to read and understand Lisa Randall's Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions.
>Time surely existed before the big bang
Though I tend to agree that time did not 'begin' with the big bang, we definitely cannot say that it surely existed before the big bang. We cannot even say with certainty that time surely exists at all. It is feasible that the so-called dimension of time is nothing more than a byproduct of our perception of motion, and some physicists (Julian Barbour comes to mind most readily) have proposed models in favor of this view.
As for what came before the big bang, the only legitimate scientific theory to turn to would be the inflationary model. It says that our universe decayed from a false vacuum state that expands at an exponential rate. The false vacuum is unstable and decays at an exponential rate as well, but in most formulations of the theory its rate of expansion is greater than its rate of decay. This implies that the false vacuum state will never decay entirely.
Our universe, in the modern inflationary theory, is a single expanding bubble of true vacuum within a much larger false vacuum state. The transition from a false vacuum to a true vacuum state is the event we term the 'big bang.' Pockets of true vacuum such as our universe are continually forming within it, sometimes collapsing again and sometimes expanding eternally at the own much more mundane rates, but overall the expanding false vacuum should approach a steady-state condition in a manner similar to the steady-state model of our own expanding universe that Fred Hoyle favored over the big bang hypothesis.
(This is paraphrased from a passage in Alan Guth's book on the subject that really stuck with me. I hope I did it justice.)
EDIT: Though that inflationary model opens the door for what Guth called an "eternally inflating" false vacuum with neither beginning nor end, and definitely implies that the false vacuum should continue to expand infinitely, there are still mathematical arguments that have been made suggesting it still must have had a definite 'beginning' at some point.
There are similarities with Stephen Wolfram's "new kind of science", even though it's not exactly the same thing. What Wolfram did is more akin to philosophy of science (and it's quite controversial with scientists), whereas this article refers to actual cutting-edge research in fundamental physics.
There are many thinkers nowadays converging on vaguely similar ideas. E.g. Max Tegmark is asking whether the Universe, at the very bottom, is perhaps just pure math - read his book "Our mathematical Universe", it's engaging, well written, and he's careful to separate scientific fact versus scientific hypothesis versus scientific imagination (you do get all 3 kinds in the book, he just makes a note at the beginning, explaining where each category begins and ends, which is nice).
Some general searches through the Phil Sci archives might turn up papers related to your interests here. In particular, there might be something under the general topics of cosmology, quantum gravity, or relativity theory.
Within that archive, some that stand out to me in relation to your question are: this paper on anthropic reasoning about many worlds, this paper summarizing unification arguments for string theory, this paper on the ethical implications of many worlds, this paper on general trends in philosophy of physics (one of which is the cosmological many worlds), this paper on whether or not string theory posits mereological simples that are extended, and this paper on what is involved in deriving GR from some string theories.
Some theoretical physicists who work on string theory or quantum gravity in general and who come to my mind as conscious of history & philosophy of science as well as metaphysics are: Lee Smolin, especially his books The Trouble with Physics and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity; Sean Carroll, perhaps even his lectures on time and his book The Big Picture; and Carlo Rovelli, especially his books Reality is Not What it Seems and Quantum Gravity. Again, I don't mention them to point to philosophical work on those topics but only to mention some physicists who work on those topics and who have a more philosophical bent.
I know Alexander Blum has looked into the history of quantum gravity but I don't know what he's written on the philosophy of quantum gravity or specifically on string theory. Tim Maudlin and Craig Callender do quite a lot of work on philosophy of space-time but I don't know that they have specifically discussed string theory. In general, you might find some interesting papers in the philpapers browser for the philosophy of string theory or of cosmology.
Also, Jeffrey Barrett has done quite a lot of work on quantum interpretations and Everettian many-worlds, which is not to be confused with the string-theoretic landscape of many worlds but you might find some of his work interesting.
Hope that helps!
This is definitely not a stupid question, but very quickly gets to the heart of the matter.
But, to put it this way, Feyerabend's epistemic anarchism is a form of dis-unity of method, but dis-unity of method does not reduce to epistemic anarchism.
Kuhnian Paradigms, Lakatosian research programs, Dennett's Stances, Rorty's interpretative communities, Davidson's radical interpretation, Wittgenstein's modes of life, Heidegger's readiness-to-hand (with some modification), Hegelian Geists', Quinean evolutionary epistemology & jettisoning of analytic/synthetic divide, Derrida's no outside-the-text, Habermas' spheres of communication, Luhmann's systems, Putnam's later work & so on (and forgive me for some jostling, as obviously the analogies here are not perfectly apt) are all in their own way subsets of or presuppose epistemic disunity.
Furthermore, epistemic diversity & disunity is also, in many ways,
'just a fact' to the extent such things exist, in a literal & mundane way: particle physics uses different methods than paleontology which uses different methods than astronomy which uses different methods than sociology which uses different methods than ecology which uses different methods than anthropology which uses different methods than biochemistry & so on. They use different methods, different theories, different models, different discourses, different equipment and, no less important, in my opinion, they use different career tracks, different political worldviews, different funding methods, different prestige evaluation, different funding sources, different pragmatic applications & attract different personality types.
This is basically indisputable--what the disagreement it is, several-fold.
First, to get it out of the way, most philosophers of science & scientists dismiss my second group of differences as important whatsoever, relegating these to the "sociology of science" at best & triviality at worst.
Second, and related to the first point, many dismiss the relationship between context of discovery & context of justification--most of the above, they say, applies in one camp or another, but the two are not unified. Scientific method, they assert, is the province of discovery, not justification. Whether or not a 'discovery' is justified successfully & believed, they grant is empirical, but its truth, they assert, must inhere in its discovery.
Third, we have several divides disciplinarily, in that the philosophy of science itself divides into analytic & continental camps, with the former massively having priority within science itself, even as these two camps share analogies & implications.
But, even within analytic's dominance, a time issue remains, as it is early analytic philosophy like positivism & Popperianism which holds sway within science generally as a sort of folk theory of their own work & middle-to-later analytic work--Wittgenstein's turn, Putnam's strong externalism, Davidson's radical interpretations--and so on is much less pronounced.
Some later work, like Searle & Kitcher makes odes to my points above & is read by scientists & such, though is much more mundane. That said, I've some distance with the world of analytic philosophy now, but from what I gather, cool perspectives stemming from Getier cases, Modal realism, performativity in language, presentism in metaphysics & even far afield like feminist epistemology are getting more of their due--and some of this work, I know for a fact, scientists appreciate, such as Modal realism (which I think many see, somewhat inappropriately, as an empirical proposition describing their work, but hey you can't win 'em all).
But this divide then splits outward too, as the philosophy of science has remained opposed to, though in silent dialogue with, Science & Technology Studies, which as a discipline comprises sociological, anthropological, political scientific, literary, historical, archival, rhetorical, media studies of science, with some work on the economics, cognition & 'science' of science as well. STS' assertions will often be orthogonal to much analytic philosophy (though less so today as implied above) but especially to scientists sort of spontaneous worldview, for lack of a better word.
Hence, we have the 'Science Wars' & 'Sokal Affair' of the 90s, where respectively, an arrogant straw-man of STS was used as a cudgel & an act of bad faith used to mock (and not to play point counter, but the Bogdanov's got far more over on physicists than one physicist did on STS). The word 'social construction' became fatuous or an object of scorn & mockery, a short hand for postmodern lunacy. Trotted out were accusations that 'post-modernism & STS' were relativistic Trojan horses attempting to legitimate everything from religion, to fascism to folk medicine.
Of course, the irony is that STS, was actually more scientific than the philosophy of science or the naive auto-anthropology of scientists & was, in the last instance, there to improve science, not destroy it. B. Latour's book was loved by Salk whose lab he worked in. R. Lewontin & S.J. Gould came around to the STS camp. Pinker even inadvertently cites Steven Shapin & NdGT cites Naomi Oreskes' both of whom are firmly in the STS camp--not realizing they're using ostensibly relativistic, constructivist accounts (or at the very least ones which do not distinguish between justification/discovery, epistemology/sociology).
And here's my bugbear: had the acrimony & snark been stripped away in the early 90s on both sides & STS was listened to I think a lot would be different intellectually today. STS warned scientists: do not be arrogant, do not impose, do not be so self-assured, do not use loose terms & undefined words, do not force analogy or outcome, do not worship evidence or method for its own sake, do not denigrate other epistemologies, do not denigrate other disciplines, do not assure yourself of your unity, objectivity, skepticism, freedom from bias & politics & asociality. Remember, they said, science is definitionally social & institutional, involves rhetoric from step one, involves a diversity of disciplines, methods, theories, equipment, styles & personalities, is not free from the issues plaguing the fact/value, analytic/synthetic, genesis/structure & nature/culture divides and is not assured a permanent place in the world as the queen of policy, morality, culture, media, technology & esteem.
(On the other hand, had STS not been so keen to snarkily dismiss scientists & their own accounts, things may have also been different. As Paul Churchland points out, the naive & spontaneous epistemology of scientists may be 'wrong'--inasmuch as a worldview can be wrong--but an anthropologist can't dismiss the natives, they have to understand them and precisely take their own interpretations into account. An anthro or soc who mocked an Amazonian tribe or Inner city Gang would be ruthlessly untethered from the discipline--but this was acceptable, for a long time, in STS, though not as much (Edit) now. Clearly, tacit/local/folk theories of any 'natives' have to be understood: What is the content & form of their belief? Why is that their belief, both historically & practically? What effect does that belief have on their work? Can we see the world through their eyes, as members of their tribe? Etc.).
Now, this is not to say that had they accepted these issues climate denial & creationism wouldn't exist--that would be absurd & a vast over-estimation of the importance of a. abstract concepts within disciplinary practice and b. the power of academia outside generally.
BUT, to say the least, people like Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye & even Stehen Hawking, Malcolm Gladwell, E.O. Wilson, Noam Chomsky or even further afield Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchen, Sam Harris & Stefan Molyneux have done substantially more damage to the credibility of science than they have spread its belief.
Oreskes' 97% meme has been very influential in the climate debates (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686).
Latour foresaw the sort of 'revisionism before the fact' that would plague modern discussions of everything from climate to fascism (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf).
Acknowledgement that observer-dependence & not-integrability may 'go all the way down', so to speak, in physics was a well trodden STS point (it's your discipline but I love this account of performativity in physics: https://www.dukeupress.edu/meeting-the-universe-halfway , this account of the phil of physics: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Measure-Physics-Philosophy-Meaning/dp/0198525362 & this awesome joint work on physics & philosophy: https://www.amazon.com/Singular-Universe-Reality-Time-Philosophy/dp/1107074061 & finally this book: https://www.amazon.com/Interpreting-Quantum-Theories-Laura-Ruetsche/dp/0199681066/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504813902&sr=8-1&keywords=interpreting+quantum+theories ).
Furthermore, my STS advisor is doing computational STS, where he is using big data batches of ancillary discussion & discursive movement in an attempt to 'quantify' bias in scientific experimentations & then is partnering with scientists in those fields to re-run the experiments accounting for this bias metric. This may turn out to be science fiction rather than science, but if it works, it'd be extremely useful to things like medicine & tech. Another professor, from Undergrad, operationalized a Darwinian model of theory formation which automated pharmaceutical discovery. He couldn't develop it because the IP costs were too steep, so they left it at only one major confirmation & publication, but the idea is still very cool.
Anyway, I hope that helps!
I want to start out by saying I'm not supporting multiverse theory... I want no part of the crazy downvotes on either side of this argument.
But from my understanding (I could be wrong here), multiverse theory (of a few different kinds of "multiverse") are predicted and wholly supported by math and physics as we understand them today. However, no methods are available to test the existence scientifically since the other universes are either moving away from us too fast for light to ever reach us or are located in a different dimension of spacetime. This is all my recollection from listening to an audiobook of Our Mathematical Universe so it may not be quite right, but the point is math and physics support multiverse theory but the existence cannot be proven. I think I'll stop here before anyone on either side yells at me too much.
If this interests you, you might enjoy warped passages by Lisa Randall. It’s a few years old now, so I’d bet the science has evolved, but she does a great job of explaining these kinds of concepts in lay-terms.
As others have said, of course we can't know with 100% certainty that there is no God. But to paraphrase the apocryphal words of Laplace, I have no need for that hypothesis. The idea of God does nothing to explain the universe beyond what we already can explain with physics alone, and in fact adding God to the explanation introduces more questions than answers (beginning with the question of why there are so many incompatible interpretations of who/what god is).
There are lots of great atheist thinkers who have filled the void you describe; I recommend familiarizing yourself with some of that work. I'm finishing up Sean Carroll's excellent book The Big Picture, and I can heartily recommend it as a great place to start building a worldview compatible with reality.
ETA: I just read a relevant paragraph from Carroll's book that might help with your void:
>Say you love somebody genuinely and fiercely, and lets say you also believe in a higher spiritual power, and think of your love as a manifestation of that greater spiritual force. But you're also an honest Bayesian, willing to update your credences in light of the evidence. Somehow, over the course of time, you accumulate a decisive amount of new information that shifts your planet of belief from spiritual to naturalist. You've lost what you thought was the source of your love. Do you lose the love itself? Are you now obligated to think that the love you felt is now somehow illegitimate? No. Your love is still there, as pure and true as ever. How you would explain your feelings in terms of an underlying ontological vocabulary has changed, but you're still in love. Water doesn't stop being wet when you learn it's a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. The same goes for purpose, meaning, and our sense of right and wrong. If you are moved to help those less fortunate than you, it doesn't matter whether you're motivated by a belief that it's God's will or by a personal conviction that it's the right thing to do. Your values are no less "real" either way.
Max Tegmark believes a view along these lines:
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality/dp/0307599809
Personally, I don't think the view makes much sense. In fact, I don't really know what it means. For example, suppose one takes the view that mathematical objects are abstract, non-spatiotemporal objects. On this view, if the world is made of nothing but mathematical objects, does that entail that space and time don't exist? (Because mathematical objects are neither spatial nor temporal, and everything is made of math.) Or does it mean that space and time do exist, but not in the way we think they do? What way might that be? I just don't have a grip on what the view entails.
>First, in my feeble understanding, math is simply a language.
It sounds like you might be sympathetic to a kind of formalist philosophy of math.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/formalism-mathematics/
However, these views are very problematic.
This book might explain it somehow. I'm still reading it but of the part I've covered, it says that interaction within what is so-called dreamscape between two entities (case in point: human) is real as have been shown by their repeated excursions.
Simply put, what you both experienced is as real as what could have possibly happened if you were not sleeping. It's just that you both had the opportunity to generate the same brain waves to be able to speak through a higher channel of communication.
Edit: Oh the downvote. I can't really understand how people can be so close-minded without evidence to the contrary.
> 1. World either exists since ever or was brought to existence.
If you were to assume the latter, then this argument doesn’t really make sense. There is a real danger of arguing in a circle and finishing up where we started. If, for example, I begin with the assumption (hypothesis) that ‘a God exists who created all things’, I cannot subsequently use the existence of the universe as an argument for the existence of God. In other words, reasoning that goes as follows is invalid:
In a valid syllogism the statements (1) and (2) would lead to a conclusion (3) that is not contained in either (1) and (2), but in this example we simply end up by deducing what we assumed in the first place.
If you believe in the former however, that the universe has always existed, that starts to make sense. Think about this;
"The Big Bang does not state that the cosmos somehow “leapt into being” out of a preexisting state of nothingness. To see why, lets’ play a tape of the universe's history backward. With the expansion reversed, we see the contents of the universe compressing together, growing more and more compressed. Ultimately, at the very beginning of cosmic history -- which, for convenience, we’ll label t=0 -- everything is in a state of infinite compression, shrunk to a point: the “singularity.” Now, Einstein’s general theory of relativity tells us that shape of space-time itself is determined by the way energy and matter are distributed. And when energy and matter are infinitely compressed, so too is space time. It simply disappears. It is tempting to imagine the Big bang to be like the beginning of a concert. You’re seated for a while fiddling with your program, and then suddenly at t=0 the music starts. But the analogy is mistaken. Unlike the beginning of a concert, the singularity at the beginning of the universe is not an event IN time. Rather, it is a temporal boundary or edge. There are no moments of time “before” t=0. So there was never a time when nothingness prevailed. And there was no “coming into being” - at least not a temporal one. Even though the universe is finite in age, it has always existed, if by “always” you mean at all instants of time. If there was never a transition from Nothing to Something, there is no need to look for a cause, divine or otherwise, that brought the universe into existence. Nor is there any need to worry about where all the matter and energy in the universe came from. There was no “sudden and fantastic” violation of the law of conservation of mass-energy at the Big Bang, as many theists claim. The universe has always had the same mass-energy content, from t=0 right up to the present."
(Taken from; Why Does The World Exist, by Jim Holt)
>rigid (biological) materialism
What is rigid about considering life a material phenomenon? We have no indication of any kind of reality other than material.
>what is Time?
That's a physics question. Here is a book by Sean Carroll that covers science's best (and always tentative) models on the subject.
>If you're measuring a pulse or taking an MRI scan, it's pretty silly to conveniently forget that you're sitting on a 4 billion year old rock, dealing with the nuclear dust of stars long passed.
Yes, Carl Sagan pointed out that we are stardust. It's well known, and I don't think anyone has forgotten about it.
>Does "Love" exist?
Yes, as an emotion.
>Does the number "7" exist?
Yes, as an abstraction. The symbol stands for a mathematical quantity. And the Prince song.
>The literal idea of love.
Yes, but love literally exists as an emotion. It has no existence independent of emotions, no more than patriotism or optimism exist independently of the minds of conscious agents.
> We consider love as an eternal idea.
But few mean that literally. Humans have always had love, and probably other animals feel something analogous to love, but life has not always existed here. If you believe that the universe has always existed and that there have always been worlds populated by life complex to have emotions, then possibly you can argue that love is actually eternal. I can't speak on that.
>We say, there is such a thing as "absolute morality."
Which seems to mean just that we're really really sure. We're expressing the intensity of our conviction. Then there are theists, some of whom call their version of what they think God said objective and inerrant. But that's another issue. There is always someone claiming to speak for God.
> but it seems silly to think a "better physics" or "better biology" could in principle shed any light at all on "the nature of the soul" (that is, psyche)
Soul, mind, spirit, seem to be metaphors for consciousness, awareness, mind, whatever. If you think that science has nothing to say about the mind, about cognition, learning, memory, or perception, I would argue that you aren't really trying.
>back then they would have readily acknowledged the reality of angels and gods
Believing in something isn't "acknowledging the reality" of that something. That phrasing begs the question. They also "acknowledged the reality" of gods or spirits causing lightning, disease, earthquakes, etc.
>why are we continually hard-pressed to justify ourselves before the faithful?
What am I justifying, exactly? That I don't see any reason to believe in God? Science is, so far as I can tell, the only way we have of learning about the world out there. Religion and faith were basically failed sciences. When there was a plague, they prayed and built churches. Science actually works. It's not perfect, and will never make us omniscient (so far as I can tell) but the alternative is... what? Believing that Zeus made the lightning? You actually consider that an improvement over science?
A couple resources come to mind:
Get him a raspberry Pi. He'll love it.
If that doesn't work then get him a shit ton of bowling balls. You can never have enough bowling balls. Between pendulums, waves, and giant Newton's cradle. You can usually get free bowling balls from bowling alleys if you say that you're a teacher and you need them for class. Or to blow stuff up.
Not cool enough - how about some Lego key chains. Always fun.
He's a physics guy so how about "A Brief History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. Great, quick read. Want a similar book that is a bit more academic - then go with "The Scientists" by John Gibbin. Want a similar book but from the perspective of uncredited discoveries - try "Lost Discoveries" by Dick Teresi. All great books about the history of science.
Got a load of money - sign him up for the AAPT. Amazing journal.
Any of the Feynman books are good reads as well. Or any Oliver Sacks but they tend to run on the chem side.
Get him a copy of The new world of Mr. Tompkins
goes to quantum land(or something like that - I'm on my phone and I'll edit the comment when I can).I tried to watch the documentary on YouTube and it was so shallow I stopped it about 1/4 way through.
I found this far more informative although the production value seems rather high for a fringe group of theoretical physicists.
Two great books by Carlo Rovelli that aren't holofractel at all but explore quantum gravity are:
Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity
&
The Order of Time^
This one's audiobook is read by Benedict Cumberbatch :)
I don't see how it's bunk? It explains the double slit experiment perfectly well and doesn't go deeper than that. Matter can be both a particle and a wave. It begins as a 'wave function' of probability. The particles location within the wave just isn't destined until it is measured/observed through an experiment. The measuring of such a wave forces it to collapse into a single location of matter. I will say that this is not an "Observation" in the traditional sense that it needs a living being to observe it (the giant eye in the video is misrepresented). It's all about the measuring of the wave through Mathematics.
It's still unknown why this occurs and is coined the 'Measurement problem'. The best explanation is that it supports the many world's theory of reality, in which all outcomes occur and we are but one of an infinite amount of outcomes.
I am no expert but it's insanely interesting stuff, I encourage people to look up the Quantum Wave Function on YouTube or grab a decent book outlining Quantum Mechanics.
Edit a few good options:
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/dp/1101984252
https://www.amazon.com/What-Real-Unfinished-Meaning-Quantum/dp/0465096050
https://youtu.be/OFwskHrtYQ4
https://youtu.be/p7bzE1E5PMY
A physicist named Lawrence Krauss wrote a book on this. Its called a universe from nothing. Good read. Also, if youre interested another good book that adresses different attempts to answer the question 'why is there something rather than nothing?' is called "Why does the world exist?" by Jim Holt.
Heres some links:
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-World-Exist-Existential/dp/0871403595/ref=la_B001IGFJ92_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367993510&sr=1-1
edit: I just noticed that someone else mentioned Krauss in an above comment. Sorry for redundancy.
Great question! Here's a wikipedia article on the subject, here's a book I read a while back that I enjoyed(does not require prior experience with philosophy), and here's a summary of the debate for the more philosophically inclined.
>By pairing translations of Gorgias and Rhetoric, along with an outstanding introductory essay, Joe Sachs demonstrates Aristotle's response to Plato. If in the Gorgias Plato probes the question of what is problematic in rhetoric, in Rhetoric, Aristotle continues the thread by looking at what makes rhetoric useful. By juxtaposing the two texts, an interesting conversation is illuminated one which students of philosophy and rhetoric will find key in their analytical pursuits.
>Joe Sachs taught for thirty years at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. He has translated Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics and On the Soul and, for the Focus Philosophical Library, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Poetics as well as Plato's Theaetetus.
Joe Sachs has arguably done more to reinvigorate and make accessible the works of Aristotle than anyone else in the last decade. He has done this by eliminating a lot of the 'kruft' that has accumulated through the Latin -> Christian -> English tradition that has enveloped many of Aristotle's surviving works.
I have read his version of the 'Metaphysics' and Sach's elimination of many of the latinate words helps to both clarify, and possibly confuse, the texts because he uses unidiomatic english equivalents such as "coming-into-being-staying-itself" to try and catch the broad range of the original Greek. This can be formidable, but I think the effort is worthwhile because it forces you to think through the text, and also because his translations make Aristotle far more lively and engaging than most other common translations (e.g. the Library of Liberal Arts edition of the Nicomachean Ethics is impenetrable in its tedium and terse prose - I want to consult Sach's edition and actually try to get through it).
If you are unfamiliar both with Joe Sachs and Focus Philosophical Library they appear to the best source for classical Greek texts. The Focus editions, along with the Agora Series from Cornell University Press (a 'Straussian project', but certainly an admirable one), are the two best translation imprints I am currently aware of.
I am Greekless, but I have it on several authorities who have mastered Greek and used Sach's translations for many of their courses.
Honourable mention should also go to Green Lion Press which has a lot of cool titles from the history of science - Apollonious, Euclid, Faraday - along with two of Sach's translations of Aristotle.
> People seem to tell me to just stop asking these questions because it's impossible to ever know...
It's definitely not that you should stop asking the questions, it's that the only people who are genuinely qualified to answer them are cosmologists. So while it's fun to speculate, the only way to make real progress on these questions ourselves would be to get a PhD in physics. Which I'm pretty sure I'm not going to do at this point in my life. :-)
It's interesting to read what people who actually do have a PhD in physics have to say about these questions, though. That's why I linked you to a few articles/debates in my other reply. And there are plenty of books out there that look at the origins of the universe and how it could have arisen (for example The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll or A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss).
One thing to keep in mind is that quantum physics is not just counterintuitive but wildly counterintuitive. So even though we may have beliefs like "everything needs a cause", and even though that principle is reasonable in everyday life, it doesn't necessarily apply in quantum physics, where the very notion of causality is debatable. That's why non-physicists (definitely including philosophers and theologians) are just not qualified to answer these questions -- because our intuition leads us astray, and the rules that work for us within the universe fall apart when we're looking at the origin of the universe.
I'll recommend some books that I'm reading right now
Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman
Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan
Broca's Brain by Carl Sagan
Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman by Richard Feynman
Why Nations Fail by Robinson and Acemoglu
In Afghanistan's Shadow: Baluch Nationalism and Soviet Temptations
The Terrorist Prince: The Life and Death of Murtaza Bhutto
The arrow of time problem is a pretty deep one, and it veers into a few weird places at times. I highly recommend Sean Carroll's book From Eternity to Here which gives time a very thorough look, unlike what we could ever do in a reddit comment.
This is reddit, so start with Carl Sagan!
If you do read both of these books, I imagine you'll have a pretty good idea what you want to read about next.
You can also read my post at /r/UAP about Carl Sagan for more discussion and context.
EDIT
May as well throw out one more scientific source becuase it is more recent:
I've been exploring this recently. I'm not an expert, but I'll do my best to explain it.
The shape or object represented in the gif you posted is called a tesseract or a hypercube. You can search for these terms for more information.
To explain this, some basics about 2D and 3D must first be established to understand how to continue the explanation to 4D.
A super-brief explanation of the gif above as the four dimension object (spatially) is that it is a representation or projection of viewing a 4D object/shape in a 2D view. (That gif as displayed on our computer screens is 2D because our screens are 2D and it's not encoded as 3D to be viewed with 3D glasses) and a 4-D object or shape actually appears to us to be 3D objects inside of 3D objects, just as if we look at a 2D object - say a square drawn on a piece of paper - we are able to see inside of the 2D object and see additional objects drawn inside of it and just as we are only able to draw a 3D object on a piece of paper if it is drawn as a transparent outline, this gif shows the 4D object drawn as a transparent outline in which we only see the many sides folding in and outside of itself. A being that is capable of seeing four spatial dimensions would be able to look at you and see inside of you. The following demonstrates this concept pretty well:
Fourth Spatial Dimension 101 (video, 6:27)
To better understand the concept of the fourth dimension, read on. I also included more videos below, including an excellent one by Carl Sagan.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
First, some facts / definitions:
--------------------------------------------------------------
Conceptualizing the limitations and advantages of dimensional perception:
We are able to perceive objects spatially in 3 dimensions (3D). By spatially, we mean that we're interpreting the environment or world's space, and not considering the fourth dimension as something other than space, such as time. (The gif linked above is of a four-dimensional object of which the fourth dimension is also space.) When we look at a drawing of a square on a piece of paper, we are able to see not only its length and width, but also inside of it because we are viewing it from above - from height. If we look down at it and draw a triangle inside of it, we can see both at the same time. We are able to see inside of 2D objects. A 3D object is comprised of several layers of 2D objects stacked upon one another. So imagine the 2D drawing, and stacking many papers on top of each other until it's several inches or centimeters tall. That's a 3D object now. Then, shape it into a square at each sheet of paper (so cut through all sheets) and you will end up with a cube of paper. Shape it into a triangle and it will be a triangular, pie-like shape. Angle it more narrow on the way up and it will be a pyramid-like shape. With any of these shapes, we cannot see inside of it. But now imagine this: just as we in the 3rd dimension looking at a shape in the 2nd dimension can see inside of it, a being in the 4th dimension looking at a shape in the 3rd dimension can see inside of the 3D object. That is because just like there is only length and width in the 2nd dimension, but no height; in the third dimension we have length width and height, but no __. I'm unaware of whether there is a name for the additional direction that would exist in the fourth dimension.
I also don't know whether a 4th spatial dimension actually exists or is just an abstract concept, nor do I know whether it is possible or known to be possible to detect. As far as I am aware, the fourth spacial dimension is only known of abstractly, meaning that there is no evidence for it actually existing.
------------------------------------
These videos explain how to understand what the 4th dimension would look like:
Dr. Quantum explains the 4th dimension (video, 5:09)
An oversimplified explanation from the movie "What the bleep do we know: down the rabbit hole" in which the character, Dr.Quantum, first explains what an (imagined) 2D world (flatland) would look like to us - who are able to see the 3D world, as a way of understanding (or extrapolating) how a being that could see in the 4D world would be able to see through and inside of 3D objects. (note: I've been warned that this is part of a video that goes on to some cult-like recruiting, so please be forewarned about the video's conclusion and entirety.)
Cosmos - Carl Sagan - 4th Dimension (video, 7:24)
Carl Sagan explains how to imagine what the 4th dimension looks if we were able to see it and how it would allow us to see inside 3D objects. An important part of this video is explaining and showing exactly how and why we can only see a distorted version of 4D objects since we only see in 3D
4th Dimension Explained By A High-School Student (video, 9:05)
An excellent description of the first through fourth dimension and how we can perceive them.
Unwrapping a tesseract (4d cube aka hypercube) (video, 1:39)
Hypercube (video, 3:18)
Watch the above two videos to see how we can conceptualize a 4D object in 3D space.
Videos mentioned elsewhere in this comment:
Fourth Spatial Dimension 101 (video, 6:27)
Flatland (video, 1:39:56)
--------------------------------------
Videos, Books and Links mentioned by other redditors:
Flatland: a romance of many dimensions (Illustrated) by Edwin Abbott Abbott (book, free, ~230kb)
Amazon description & reviews
hat-tip to /u/X3TIT
"Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions" by Lisa Randall (Amazon book page)"
Looks interesting.
hat-tip to /u/karoyamaro
-----------------------------------
(Edited: 1- to add video lengths; 2- added book links, 3 - readability more videos, 4 - a warning about the Dr. Quantum video.)
Nah. Lawrence Krauss' book has been unfavourably reviewed by theologans and atheist philosophers alike.
If you haven't read Jim Holt, give it a try. I really liked it
You'd probably like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DXKJ2DA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect
I mostly read non-fiction, and am interested in politics, morality and how smart people can come to construct completely different versions of reality... soooo if any of that kind of stuff is your bag, I can recommend:
​
One Nation, Two Realities
The Myth of the Rational Voter
Stop Being Reasonable
Mistakes were made by not by me
The Big Picture
​
The first two are are semi-academic texts, so there is some experiments/data in there that you can skip over. The second two are meant for popular consumption about how people come to form and change opinions, and the big picture is a really approachable summary about everything from epistemology, quantum physics and consciousness. It's broken into lots of very short chapters so great to read before and after going to sleep.
I posted some video ideas earlier but I see that you also asked for any docs recommendations. A good place to read up on what some leading physicists have to say is The Nature of Time contest winning essays and prizes sponsored by the Foundational Questions Instiute (FQXi). There's a wealth of good info in those essays.
If you want to get into it even further, FQXi hosted a conference on Time (again with leading researchers in the field) and they posted the videos and slides from that conference here
If you want a popular-level book recommendation, mine would be From Eternity to Here
Lee Smolin is awesome for explaining stuff to the layman. This is by far the best book I read from him. Enjoy.
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Quantum-Gravity-Science-Masters/dp/0465078362
> That was one of the best wall of texts I've read since I joined this site.
I'm glad you think so!
> One being the simplest question, what is a fallibilists take on life (how we got here, why we are here, etc.)?
Fallibilism shows us that life is the survival of genetic knowledge. The only requirements for life are energy, matter, and evidence. These three things let it encode information, so life can occur anywhere and in any form as long as these three things are present.
As far as the purpose of life goes, fallibilism shows that purpose, like value, is entirely subjective. If you find meaning in having a purpose, you can easily give yourself one.
> My second question is who are some philosophers I could read up on regarding fallibilism?
I suggest reading up on Karl Popper (free PDF). and David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity.
> My final question is almost unrelated, but I just began teaching myself piano, do you have any tips that will further my skill?
Haha, just follow the problem-solving method... Be your own worst critic, be picky when identifying problems with your skills, practice only when you're energized to try new things (instead of a strict schedule), and have fun! Play what you want to play.
I'm working on a theory of music (for any instrument, not just piano) that can help explain how I understand music, and it's still somewhat difficult for me to explain it in clear terms, but I'll give it a shot. To summarize, I break down music into its "harmonic", "rhythmic", and "dynamic" aspects. The harmonic aspect has to do with relative pitch, or "intervals" that sound good. The rhythmic aspect has to do with the relative timing of sounds that sound good. The dynamic aspect has to do with the relative "weight", or "emphasis" between sounds that sound good.
Fallibilism shows us that there is an objective truth, even in aesthetics. Since it would take us an infinite amount of time and resources to discover absolute truth, we must settle for discovering objective truths through the indefinite growth of knowledge instead.
Gravity as we know it completely breaks down at microscopic length scales. EIther those scales aren't important and can be repressed or we don't really have a "rule" of gravity yet. Highly encouraged you read more. I recommend Lee Smolin's book.
Thanks! I buy it the first chance I get. I recommend these two. https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-God-Ford/dp/0615149626 and https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0972509461/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491092254&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=my+big+t.o.e. I came across these two books on my journey. The first is a fairly easy book to read, and I would consider it an introductory to the way I feel things are. Many of you could probably read it in a night or two. It was here that I learned about the double slit experiment. The second book is a larger book written by a scientist, Tom Campbell. It is much more exhaustive. This will take more time to read, but it's also a very good book in my opinion.
An even bigger stretch is Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark.
I recently gave it a read, and it was very interesting. Max basically lays out how everything is math, using several layers of "multiverses" starting with the simplest one that is a side-effect of inflation.
That's a simplistic way of putting it, but he goes in painstaking detail, and eventually ends up at everything is math.
Please note thet even in this radical text, Max is never able to draw a connection between his thesis and anything theistic whatsoever...
Many physicists subscribe to the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics in which this randomness isn't random at all. Instead it states the each outcome of the wave function exists and is realized but they overlap for a while and produce some interesting effects but it's intimately unstable and we find ourselves with only one of the outcomes via a phenomenon called decoherence (as opposed to wave function collapse).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
Max Tegmark does a great job explaining about all the different types of parallel universes: http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.html
The type we're talking about now is a level 3 universe. There's a few good links on his MIT page, I do highly recommend his book which is written for the average person to understand: Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307744256/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awd_9rrBwbFHTHFAS
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity is a book on this subject for the layperson, by Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute. Smolin has written further on the subject, and is considered a strong critic of string theory particularly after the publication of The Trouble With Physics, and in turn has come in for considerable criticism himself. Many string theorists seem to consider his views unworthy or ill-founded, but then, they would.
Another critique of string theory is Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit
I found all of the above interesting, but then I find practically all well-written scientist-authored physics books interesting (not that large a sample size really). All a layperson can hope to do in a situation where experts disagree is to consider as many educated opinions as possible and keep an open mind. So I do recommend the above as interesting but can't speak to their merit as an expert would.
I see what you mean because I've experienced it too - walking around my house, where everything was pretty much the same, except for the kitchen which was completely different, or a table that wasn't supposed to be there, etc. It is real, in its own context. One might consider it as being "not real" if you think that things are supposed to be as objective as the physical world is, but that might not be the case (most likely it isn't the case).
One good example of this is Thomas Campbell's research and book (The Monroe Institute) - he has some talks on YouTube about this subject and how he came to study consciousness with Bob Monroe, their experiments, etc.
At first he also thought it was "just in your head", until one day they did an experiment where two humans, in a lab setting but different rooms, without direct physical communication between them, were to "astral project" and meet, then go about experiencing stuff - talking to beings, going places, etc together, then they should come back and record the things they experienced (before talking to each other). Turned out that they did in fact experienced together the same events and their stories matched.
So I think the subject has a lot more to it than just "real" and "not real", or objective vs. subjective.
No. Things do not "need a reason" to exist. As you have pointed out, the assumption that "everything must have a reason/cause" leads to an infinite regression -- a state of affairs that (to my knowledge) is always rejected by logic.
The solution then comes in two flavors. 1) The universe "just happened" -- the creation of the universe was entirely arbitrary. 2) The universe was caused to come into existence by some entity whose existence is a necessary fact -- this entity couldn't not exist. This necessary entity is what Aristotle called the "uncaused causer". Catholic theologians say that that thing is God.
This is all examined in Aristotle's Metaphysics. I highly recommend you check it out. If you do decide to read it, I suggest you get this translation.
Also, because this is really bothering me, you say that a truly logical universe would be empty. So if you were to have your "empty universe", then in what way would that universe be empty? Is it empty of physical entities? If so, would the universe contain the fact that there are no physical entities? Would it still be the case, within that universe, that 2+2=4?
The trouble with this thinking is that logic has nothing to do with physical entities. Logic deals only with ideas. If you think we get logic from the physical world, then tell me where you last saw a wild √2 running around.
You say that a logical world would be empty "so that there isn't anything to prove" -- why do you think that? Logic doesn't have preferences. Logic is simply a set of rules for attaching ideas together. (To the best of my knowledge) Logic operates entirely on hypotheticals. It says "If you have p, and you have q or r, then you have p and q or r."
Einstein: His Life and Universe
The Black Hole War
The Trouble With Physics
Parallel Worlds
The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe
Warped Passages
The Singularity is Near
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Suggested reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Brocas-Brain-Reflections-Romance-Science/dp/0345336895
Max Tegmark likes to engage in these slightly fringy topics. As I understand he does standard work in physics and occasionally go into areas like this. It's highly speculative, but, as far as I can tell, his reasoning is generally pretty solid.
In terms of additional evidence for (or against) such a universe, I think your best bet is to look at the anthropic principle. Sean Carroll in his book From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time discusses an alternative theory that Boltzmann had and I think his objections might apply here. In the most extreme sense of Tegmark's argument every cubic meter of space is in a random state and by simple chance of an infinite universe one of those cubic meters are going to contain "you". This is similar to Boltzmann's view where our universe was a low entropy fluctuation of an infinite universe in thermal equilibrium (of course, now we know of the big bang and our view of the history of the universe is very different). The counterargument to such a universe is that of so-called Boltzmann brains.
If, indeed, the universe contains an infinite number of cubic meters and an infinite number of "you"s, the question you might ask yourself is what universe you should see around you? The vast majority of "you"s would see nothing. There is so much structure around you, other humans, planets, stars, galaxies, etc that the idea that you're a result a random state in the universe is extremely problematic.
The Big Picture by Sean Carroll
https://www.amazon.com/Astral-Voyages-Bruce-Goldberg-ebook/dp/B00A29FX4C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524332923&sr=8-1&keywords=astral+voyages+bruce+goldberg
I just finished reading "astral voyages" by Bruce Goldberg and i thought it was really good.
https://www.amazon.com/My-Big-TOE-Complete-Trilogy/dp/0972509461/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524332950&sr=8-1&keywords=my+big+toe
planning on reading this one next. Thomas Campbell worked with Robert Monroe and the Monroe institute and proved astral projection to be real.
Schad's quote pretty much takes this guy's argument out at the knees, but I don't like Dawson, Pinker, or Krauss either, and Sam Harris is an idiot. Tyson is adorable, but there was that problematic claim in his Cosmos series about the seeds of life coming to Earth on asteroids. These guys overreach like the egomaniacs that they are and the Skeptics should disavow them.
I've been reading a book for a couple of months called, Why Does the World Exist?. The author, Jim Holt, consults with physicists, philosophers, and cosmologists, among others, but none of the aforementioned individuals. It's a joy to read.
Wow I LOVE this!! Thanks for posting it.
I've been a fan of Tom Campbell for a few years now and I find his ideas quite compelling. His book trilogy, My Big TOE goes into great detail about these ideas. I've only been able to get through about 1/2 the first book and that was years ago. The ideas were just too "out there" for me at the time. Hmm.....maybe I should try again because it was all quite compelling.
There's a great book series that is like the "ELI5" version of this idea, written by a NASA rocket scientist:
My Big TOE
If you like that book, read this one (non-fiction).
>If 99% of all possible observers are in worlds without property X, then being in a world with property X is fairly strong evidence that modal realism is false.
Yes, assuming omniscience, but this presumption cannot ever be justified. Setting aside the objection that 1% is not altogether unlikely on the scale of cosmological fine tunings, the modal realist can always say:
"Though you may think that property X should only appear in the universe to 10^-10^10 % of conscious observers, much more likely is that you are simply mistaken as to what demands must be met in order for physical laws to be compatible with conscious observers in any particular universe."
>So either there's something special about consciousness that only allows it to arise in universes which have lots of structure everywhere, we need some less naive way to quantify over possible worlds that massively increases the density of worlds with sensible physical laws, or modal realism is almost certainly false.
It seems like you've slipped in a commitment to non-haeccitism about personal identity. If you are capable of experiencing multiple worlds at once, the existence of Boltzmann brains should pose no problem for you. While the majority of "worlds" containing mathematical substructures isomorphic to particular brain states corresponding to the course of your own life will not be stable, what you experience must be (says the modal realist) an emergent quasi-classical universe, for whatever reason to do with how the large scale structure of the mathematical universe tracks personal identity over isomorphic substructures.
This is a greatly underserved area of philosophy, but there is some work broaching the edge. Here are some good resources.
Am văzut The Terror, o mini serie excelentă care prezintă o versiune ficționalizată a poveștii navelor Erebus și Terror, care în mijlocul secolului 19 au plecat să descopere Pasajul Nord-Vestic dintre Atlantic și Pacific și... spoiler de 150 de ani, nu s-au mai întors. CGI-ul și green-screen-ul cam băteau la ochi dar altfel a avut o atmosferă faină, și pentru că era o versiune ficționalizată, am fost plăcut surprins de sfârșit. 8/10
Am revăzut The Truman Show, după ce l-au postat ăștia pe /r/MovieDetails. Are el atmosfera filmelor din anii 90 și e puțin cam cheesy, dar este foarte bine realizat și e în continuare relevant. Sunt o grămadă de detalii în fundal și în scenariu după care poți să te uiți, dacă ești ca mine la a treia vizionare... 10/10
Acum mă uit la Westworld, sezonul 2, și Wild Wild Country, o mini-serie documentar despre cultul criminal al lui Osho, liderul spiritual care futea ca mașina de cusut și avea 100 de Rolls Royce-uri.
***
Nu știu dacă am mai menționat dar am citit Nocturnes, a lui Kazuo Ishiguro, și n-am fost prea impresionat. Niște povești drăguțele dar nu m-au dat pe spate, mă așteptam la ceva mai demn de premiul Nobel. Mai am câteva cărți de-ale lui, poate alea sunt mai bune. 3/5
Carlo Rovelli e un fizician italian foarte simpatic care a făcut valuri în ultima lună cu cartea lui despre timp. Cât am așteptat să iasă ebookul acela, am citit Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, o carte scurtă cu șapte povești importante din fizică. Mi s-a părut foarte bună, dar probabil ar impresiona mult mai mult oameni care nu au studiat deja astfel de chestii în facultate. O recomand oricum, e accesibilă, scurtă și bine scrisă. 3/5
Am mai citit și Thank You for Coming to Hattiesburg, a comediantului Todd Barry. Ăsta e un tip extrem de haios dar unii îl consideră plictisitor pentru că e molcom, vorbește încet și puțin și are subiecte cotidiene. Dar mie tocmai de-asta îmi place, pentru că face amuzante niște chestii absolut banale. Cartea asta are însemnări de călătorie din tot felul de orășele prin care a avut show-uri. Nici eu n-aș fi crezut că pot să citesc 200 și ceva de pagini cu anecdote despre restaurante și aeroporturi dar chiar m-au făcut să râd. 4/5
Ne vedem săptămâna viitoare cu cartea lui James Comey plus niște David Foster Wallace.
I don't 'believe' anything that can't be proven
you're prying at irrelevant details
My Big TOE - The Complete Trilogy [Paperback]
read this book, the dude who wrote it is a physicist, and he promotes skepticism
i see your perspective, but i can tell you don't understand mine, which is why i recommended that book, written by someone who actually dedicated their whole life to this shit, so i can totally understand why it is probably difficult to understand people like me
so the problem isn't you not understanding, but me being unable to explain, the book kind of challenges your thoughts and sort of poses questions that can lead you to contemplating this on your own
that's really all i can say, do what you want with your life, but until you've tried to understand don't go attacking everyone lol.
For light reading and to build intuition, get "Mr. Tompkins in Paperback" -- link is to the newer edition, there are older ones too. Mr. Tompkins is George Gamow's attempt to bring intuition about modern physics, through little parables involving a fat British banker who (through a variety of transparent plot devices) finds himself in a series of alternate worlds where the physical constants are closer to the human scale, so that he can (e.g.) observe the weird effects of relativity happening in a world where c is 15 mph, or observe the effects of cosmic expansion first-hand.
The combination of Mr. Tompkins and Feynman is hard to beat for "light" reading by an enthusiast.
Am reading Henrietta Lacks ATM and really liking it.
I also recommend ...
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
The Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan
God Is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens
Risk - Dan Gardner
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre
Why People Believe Weird Things - Michael Shermer
How We Know What isn't So - Thomas Gilovich
EDIT : MOAR
Quirkology - Prof. Richard Wiseman
Tricks Of The Mind - Derren Brown
59 Seconds: Think a little, change a lot - Prof. Richard Wiseman
How to Lie With Statistics - Donald Huff
I love this question, and "to where?" is definitely one of those things where people a lot smarter than me say "I have no idea."
I read a book about it once that covered this at one point, Warped Passages if you wanted to know the name.
Anyway, she presented a few options for what the universe might be "shaped" like, in terms of curvature. Since we're talking about multiple dimensions here, i'm going to use a more understandable 3d version first.
In a shape that's (uniformly) positively curved, you get a sphere. At every point on the sphere, no matter which way you look, the surface always bends down (or up, if you're on the inside of it.) More importantly, if you travel in a straight line along its surface, you'll end up exactly back where you started, travelling all the way around the sphere. Another interesting property of being on a sphere is that there are no parallel lines, any straight line will have to intersect at two points. with any other straight line you can draw along the surface of the sphere. In this picture, the red line isn't straight, that's a circle. The green and black lines are straight. So if we're on the surface of a higher-dimensional universe that is a hypersphere, then if we travel in a straight line for long enough, we'd end up back right where we started. The "no parallel lines" thing ends up being "no parallel planes" they'd intersect at two. . . Lines? At opposite ends of the 4-sphere? This is where I get lost.
If the curvature of the surface were 0, then we'd have a large, flat, plane. It wouldn't curve. This is the realm of geometry that we all know and love. We have exactly one line that passes through a point and is parallel to another line. It doesn't matter how big a shape you draw, the sum of the angles of their sides will always add up to the same number, and the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle is constant. Lines don't roll back to themselves, they just go off to infinity. It's also boring.
The third option is negative curvature. And you end up with. . . Hyperbolic surfaces. As you'd expect, this is pretty much the exact opposite of positive curvature. There are two lines that pass through a given point and are parallel to each other, and an infinity of them that don't remain a constant distance away, but still never intersect (these have the fancy status of being "ultraparallel"). For example all of these lines are straight if you were to draw them on a hyperbolic plane, and none of the black ones would intersect the blue one. Bring this up to 3d, and you have an infinite number of planes that (pass through a given point and are) parallel to a given plane. And way more that are ultraparallel.
So. . . Yeah, these are the simpler ways that the universe might be configured, and i'm already in way over my head. Most of this information was from that book, some googles and some guesses. Randall Munroe recently gave a nice overview of dimensions, too.
>But we also know at the most fundamental level of quantum mechanics the world works in terms of probabilities that collapse into a single reality.
​
That's the Copenhagen Interpretation, not the Many Worlds Interpretation.
This post from Sean Carroll on Quantum Mechanics (it's ch. 11 in his book From Eternity To Here) is very clarifying and demystifying even though it doesn't answer all your questions.
A descent selection so far from the other comments. I'll throw in a few, as well:
​
​
Some of the above is specifically related to atheism, while others I've used to help shape and inform my understanding and my worldview. Out of the entire list, the Carl Sagan book and the Sean Carroll book rank highest, for me, in level of importance. Those books didn't just change what I think, they changed how I think, and I am forever indebted to them.
I guess this one?
However, as someone in the review states that:
> I wish I had read the original book instead of this one, or at least read it first.
I'm wondering: did you read the first book and can you maybe explain me which one would be a better read?
EDIT: Also, which book does the person in the review refer to?Im sorry, I'm stupid. Amazon itself states that:
> hugely successful Mr Tompkins in Paperback (by George Gamow) in 1965.
Anyway, my question still stands: have you read both and can you recommend me one?
My Big TOE weaves everything together in a coherent big-picture framework that eventually makes a whole lot of sense, but you have to be willing to re-examine much of what you think you know. Kindle edition is also available.
Thanks for the reference, ordering now.
Also the book Our Mathematical Universe, by the cosmologist Max Tegmark, is a non-religious proposal for the Explanation for Everything, with a lot more substance and plausibility to it than the religious ideas.
I can't help you with this book, but if you are looking for a good book about scientific concepts and physics in general i would suggest The God Particle. It's a bit outdated now as the original edition was written before the Super Conducting Supercollider fiasco, but it basically hits all the important beats leading up to a more or less modern understanding of particle physics.
I came to the same conclusion, but I am most assuredly not a neuroscientist, just an avid fan of it! I work for a tech hosting company that's heavily cloud based, and happen to be someone who teaches our employees how to manage and troubleshoot the technology behind "the cloud", as well as the servers in the cloud, etc. To teach more efficiently, I eventually stumbled upon brain science books and TED talks (back when they were amazing, like Jeff Hawkins-amazing) and blogs, and tDCS, and learning theory and the list goes on. Somewhere along the line, someone ended up suggesting I try out some mindfulness meditation, and recommended Get Some Headspace, which helped me tremendously.
I eventually got to the point of where you are describing; you really do just observe, and sometimes it can provide great clarity. I then started thinking a lot about who I am, where am I when I am dreaming, or when I am not dreaming, where I am when I'm observing myself and my thoughts, even when I was driving. Someone also really dug me deeper into a mental hole when they showed me some podcast discussing consciousness, which mentioned that when driving your car, your conscious sense of "self" extends to your entire vehicle. So I applied the claim as theory, and tested it, and understood exactly what they were saying at that moment. I had always taken it for granted, lol. So, jump to about 6 months ago.
I, similarly, had already started noting synchronicity between the seperation of brain and mind and the end-result of a cloud-based virtual server operation (groupings of hypervisors, which run vms, are waiting to be used, but the communication/action happens due to what's happening within the hyp, etc). It's ironic, too, because I had just been introduced to the concept of Docker containerization concepts, and then the next day, someone i had just met ended up serendipitously suggesting I read this book after he and I had discussed a lot of the same books we've read. I'm very skeptical when anyone mentions any consciousness theories, so it really only was the reason that he and I had been talking about books like Mindsight, Mindset, A Whole New Mind, Start with Why, Talent Code, and the list goes on; I had deduced this person was not a crackpot. So I said, "I'll just see what this is about." I highly suggest being very skeptical about it, treat it like historical "what if" fiction, and enjoy the theory. There are parts with which I do not agree, but as someone who works in technology and also takes an active interest in learning theory, neuroscience, and AI, it makes A LOT of sense. I used to write stories a lot back in college, so I'm used to taking a fictional "what if" on a stroll down mental lane. I decided to make it to the end and then judge for myself. I'm not finished yet, but I'm in the final stretch. I have to say, I'm intrigued enough to suggest it to others if they show the same awareness. I hope you have the open-enough mind to ponder it and reserve judgement until full grokking/understanding has been achieved.
As for meditation, I practice daily now. I'm very happy I stumbled across the suggestion of de-stressing by mindfulness meditation. It's led to nothing but more reality and context being shaped around me, and it's allowed me to understand myself very well.
Edit: format
Alex (I hope I can call you that, I mean it in the best way possible), I really like your replies! You get an upvote from me.
I guess I should have said, states are not the only players in IR, and IR cant be described only by state based Realism! I tried to sum it up in just a few words, not a good summation you could say!
As for your views, well we agree, and disagree! That tends to be usually the case when we talk about the real word! If we are talking about abstract concepts like mathematics, or simplified ones (which is what every science deals with) than we can be absolute, but the real world just has so many parameters.
Therein lies the need to simplify, in order to produce a theory (a mechanism) to better understand the interactions that occur in the world. I will not disagree with you that the world is not totally described by realism. But I believe all the other "actors" you mention above contribute a lot when looked at the human perspective, but quite less compared to states. Less enough so to be considered negligible.
The inclusion of them would mean that it would be very much harder to formulate a theory to be able to explain world affairs. Now, I do believe a time will come with enough computing power, that will allow better theories to be formed. They will be more like simulation models. I have written about simulations in my thesis (so I researched into the amply) and have come to truly believe they will hold a greater place with every decade.
Now, in relation to the world of the past, the world of today could seem totally different. The one difference in my mind is the Nuclear one. NGOs non state actors, TNC's and all the rest you refer might seem the thing of the present. But look at the Dutch East India Company, look at the The British East India Company with its two opium wars. These wars were fought on behalf of private companies, but where so vital and intertwined with the State they originated from that it became a national issue.
Trade has always gone along, from ancient times. And the more trade a state can command, the more powerful it is. Even in [roman times] (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Europe_180ad_roman_trade_map.png) trade was going on all around the Mediterranean.
So things have not changed since then, in my book. We have only become nuclear, but that has other implications, more on the military side (which still are big though, and influence IR). 10.000 years are not enough to change human nature. Humans are the same, the world is the same. Technology has improved, but has not altered those conditions, only made the easier. The laws of the game are the same
A little note here on laws being the same. Great book by Lee Smolin. You can also listen to him here to see if you might want to purchase it. It takes about how the physical laws might actually evolve
So, to sum it up, I believe realism is the best we've got for now!
ADDITION: As to why states want to survive, I have some theories which I can lay out, once I properly formulate them.
When I first got interested in physics and before I developed the mathematical framework, someone directed me towards this book. It's great because it assumes (as far as I can remember) no real mathematical background, yet delves into the concepts very intuitively. It still sits on my shelf next to my more "serious" books. Love that book.
Side note: You should give a little bit of your background (read: mathematics) so we can better help you out.
My recommendation
I think that it's firstly important to make a couple of distinctions regarding what we are seeking to answer.
When Christians talk about God, there are many attributes given to God that cannot be proven, but are revealed through the Bible and the tradition of Judaism and Christianity. God's existence here is also considered revealed. Whether it is reasonable to believe in what is considered revealed knowledge, i.e., knowledge that is not gained from verifiable empirical proof, is a separate discussion.
But, Christian philosophers argue, since the early Middle Ages, that that the existence of a being from which all of reality springs can be known by the use of our reason.
So, the next question is then, is there a being who is the highest in the order of all beings in reality and who created everything. Framed differently: Where does reality come from? Or, how is it that reality came to be? This leaves out any discussion of what is God like, such as is he good or is he an evil tyrant. We are simply concerned with is there a being which accounts for all of reality.
Many materialists will simply say the existence of the universe -- whether this is simply it, or this universe is part of a multi-verse -- is a brute fact. Scientists such as Sean Carrol make this claim. There's an excellent debate between Frederick Copleston and Bertrand Russell, who are both philosophers, where at some point Russell declares that the beginning of the universe simply is, no further explanation is needed.
When we try to prove the existence of God, or what we could call God, by the use of our reason, we are doing so by logical proof. This type of logical proof is inductive, rather than deductive. Science relies on inductive reasoning. For instance, Newton’s laws of motion are a product of inductive reason. When we see that a billiard ball at rest moves after being hit by a moving billiard ball, we infer that this happens every time a moving ball strikes a still ball. We can then make predictions about how balls will move under certain conditions, thus making the game of pool possible, challenging, and fun. If we could not predict such action based on inductive reasoning, then the game would be absurd, and we would walk away frustrated and then disinterested. The same reasoning applies to the design and construction of bridges, buildings, cars, and all the technology we use as the material basis for our society. Without inductive reasoning, our reality would simply be absurd and chaotic.
The reliabilty of how the universe works can also be projected backwards in time and logically backwards (i.e., independent of time, e.g., the design of a ladder which requires a first rung; the first rung exists at the same time the last rung does, but is logically prior to the last rung when we consider how ladders work). So, through observation, we see that something cannot come from nothing. You came from your parents, and your parents came from their parents and so on. Some scientists claim that when sub-atomic particles pop into and out of existence, they are coming from nothing. But that has more to do with the definition of nothing and what causes this sudden appearance of particles.
It might be helpful to learn about the [5 logical proofs for the existence of God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_(Aquinas) as put forth by Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher/theologian from the 13th century. The proofs are more comprehensive than what is in the linked Wikipedia article, but it gives a good gist of what these proofs are.
When a philosopher then argues for the existence of God, he is only arguing for a very basic idea of God, that there is a being who accounts for the existence of the rest of reality. Again, this is a logical conclusion, not one that is found through empiricism alone.
I’m not a big fan of proving “pink unicorns” or “the Flying Spagetti Monster,” because they serve to mock more than promote sincere discourse.
The first step in sincerely discussing these issues is coming to a mutual understanding of your starting point, and then being open to listening to all evidence and logical argument.
Edit: Cleaned up spelling and grammar.
How many times have pictures of these books made a showing in /atheism. We get it, they're a pretty good read. We all hypocritically revere and jerk off to them like theists do to the bible. How about reading a textbook on mathematical principles, Principles of Physics, or Astronomy. You want your mind blown? Read anything related to infinity.
Some great thinkers were staunchly religious. Try Symbolic Logic and the Game of Logic. Computer science at it's basics.
God is not Great, page 6:
"Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any image or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book)."
I had the exact same thought. The Inflationary Universe by Alan Guth was a fairly decent intro to the concept.
If you want to further your understanding of the universe you should read this and this. 2 of the most mind altering books I've read.
You're right. Read Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe" for more details.
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality/dp/0307744256/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1407273658
These are some of my favourites:
That's apart from Timothy Leary's "The Psychedelic Experience" and Huxley's "Doors of Perception" thought, those are must-reads.
Have you seen Mr. Nobody?
I highly recommend it
But read this first:
https://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544
All planes differ due to your vibration state/level of awareness. I think I personally have only been to the lower planes(Near Earth/Near Time.) Generally everything looks like you would expect but some things are abnormal.
In 2007 I had an experience, felt the vibrations, relaxed, rolled out of my body and drifted straight towards and out the window landing two stories down into the grass(My bedroom was'nt in a multi-story home). To me, the grass was vivid and green. It was dark where my body was but in this reality plane , it was dayish, foggy. I could feel the moisture on the blades of grass touching my hands, I could smell the grass. I looked up, and all the houses around my neighborhood had 20 foot chain link fences around the entirety of the property. I stated to myself "odd.." I took off up into the air, and all of surrounding houses blocks away had the same. At the end of each street there were these large machines, they were operating though made no noise. I went to inspect one but before I got to close i was whisked back to my body.
I concur with danwasinjapan, read Robert Monroe's books. If you want a more scientific look on Astrial travel, etc check out "my Big Toe" by Thomas Campbell. https://www.amazon.com/My-Big-TOE-Complete-Trilogy/dp/0972509461
The book is by Sean Carroll and it is called The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. Amazon link.
DMT: The Spirit Molecule :: describes how DMT spikes are released when we're born and die and the connections the author believes are made once we understand that the pineal gland is the seat of the spirit.
The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History by Terence McKenna :: Discusses origins of mankind and the probable development of higher-consciousness through psilocybin and other entheogens. Also discusses beings in realms that closely resemble the same realms discussed in the book My Big T.O.E. below.
Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind by Graham Hancock :: Discusses how, through different culture's entheogens (natural cultural psychedelics), one can see/visit/communicate with other beings co-evolving with us through history. Just like humans are evolving in this plane, this author believes that the stories of Elves or Fairies are the same beings that have now become Greys/Aliens in today's mythos. He discusses his journeys and experiences as well as other's first-hand accounts on certain entheogens and the patterns seen.
Not In His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief by John Lamb Lash :: discusses how the current Judea-Christian god is a counterfeit-mimic deity (villain of the galaxy basically) and how we're trapped in a false-copy (matrix) of a more perfect realm. Goes through the Gnostic mythos that shows and explains how they came to write/believe such concepts.
My Big T.O.E./Theory Of Everything by Thomas Campbell :: doesn't use psychedelics to achieve other states of consciousness but uses transcendental meditation and science to map non-physical matter realities. The author is one of the early students from the Monroe Institute (of Out-of-Body experience fame).
>Well it is just that in my opinion is that string theory is the first thing that comes to mind for me. And it's not that I wonder where something comes from, but that it HAS to be made out of something.
Well I'd still argue that you haven't provided a coherent definition of what you mean by "something." I think you should try to think about this. Perhaps in a bath tub. With some marijuana. The fact that it is so difficult to define what you mean should be taken as a pretty big hint that the concept itself is more subtle or elusive than you realize.
> So that means the 'inside' of the smallest possible something could possibly be a 'field'? Then what would a 'field' be?
To the best of our knowledge, all there is in the universe are a set of mathematical relationships. A field is a mathematical object that has a value at every point in space. Our current best model of the universe posits that there are various fields that fill all of space. These fields have larger or smaller amplitudes at various places, and they interact with each other. What are the fields? They are mathematical objects.
Here is another book recommendation along the lines of "everything being math." The previous book recommendation is a bit more technical and emphasizes the "everything is information" side of things.
Sorry sourcing a book as a link (https://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality/dp/0307599809?tag=space041-20) There are some papers on google scholar but too high level for my comprehension.
Holy shit. Imma buy it.
Some good popsci-style but still somewhat theoretical CS books:
You should buy her a copy of Broca's Brain by Carl Sagan. He spends a lot of time talking about these sorts of ideas and how valid they might be. If anything it might get her to watch this and similar shows with a skeptical yet curious mind.
He has a new one releasing next week called The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. The table of contents alone is impressive LOL.
The book "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?" by Leon Lederman does a pretty good job at talking about quantum mechanics with out using math.
This book also talks about some history of science. Leon does a wonderful job with many of his metaphors, such as "the invisible soccer ball" which is the first chapter.
This book does not start to talk about quantum mechanics until about chapter 4, but it is defenitly worth it to read the first few chapters.
Also Leon Lederman is a well know physicist for his work with neutrinos and was the director at Fermilab for several years.
The entire book appears to be on google books (link). And is on amazon for $10 (link). So if you are unsure of this book you can still read it on google for free.
Mainstream physics tends to ignore many indicia of it (Empirical evidences in favor of a varying speed of light, gravity constant fluctuations, kilogram prototype fluctuations, meter prototype changes, astronomical unit changes, moon eccentricity changes.
One of common explanations: Earth may be crashing through dark matter walls, Is Earth Weighed Down By Dark Matter?.
IMO many constants may change at the moment, when the Earth will pass through dark matter cloud (or just gravitational shadow at the connection line of planets during eclipses and conjunctions). Inside of dense cloud of dark matter or neutrinos the material particles would swell and the strength of gravity would decrease. Also the fine structure constant will shift because the matter would become more transparent for EM radiation. The evolution of gravitational constant and mass of kilogram prototypes follows quite well the trend in global warming (the pause in global warming after 2002 year for example). The change of speed of light will depend on the way, in which meter prototype is realized.
The affection of terrestrial life with dark matter clouds (for example during black hole eruptions or passing through galactic plane) looks like quite viable possibility not just for me (1, 2, 3, 4). As the miniature example of this event may serve the Allais effect and various gravitational anomalies observed during solar eclipses and planetary conjunctions. In my opinion even the current climatic changes could be of this origin.
>Cosmology is in crisis. ... To keep cosmology scientific, we must replace the old view in which the universe is governed by immutable laws by a new one in which laws evolve...
Actually I don't think, that the laws of universe evolve at their very general level - I've no evidence for it. Yes, the speed of light can change from place to place - but it just requires to have look at every gravitational lens for to realize it. But it doesn't mean, this speed exhibits some trend or even evolution at the highest level of reality. Such an idea is still firmly rooted in creationist notion of Big Bang scenario. The "scientific" is to support all options freely, not just these, which belong into your pet theories (Mr. Smolin is a proponent of Universe inheritance and evolution).
> we often think that experience teaches us something about a mind-independent reality.
Wouldn't you say that idealism is quite distinct from solipsism? I mean Berkeley was also an empiricist and defended such arguments in favor of verifiability of experience. Idealism tells us that the workings of universe have their foundation in perception, not that the universe consists of fleeting experiences.
> One difficulty for idealism involves its analysis of perception.
Isn't perception ultimately a process? And isn't a process, in b-series time, ultimately a structure? I would say the occurrence (possibility?) of such a structure is what re-ifies existence - and being a structure would necessitate the "order" that Berkeley said would underpin what is real.
Also, there may be other constraints on this structure if, for example, reality is inherently mathematical.
Thoughts?
Great post.
A must-read book on the way ahead for cosmology and physics:-
The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time by Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin 2014.
In it Smolin argues that momentum and energy are intrinsic and that any effect of matter beyond the cosmological horizon (the Mach effect) violates causality.
Our mathematical universe by Max Tegmark is I think right up your alley.
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality/dp/0307599809
His position, which amounts to a highly stylized "from a certain point of view" style argument, is quite interesting and goes very in depth. He does a lot to establish some rules of sanity and then goes on to explain the role things take.
I don't want to spoiler alert the whole book, but the core tenant of his proposal is that you ARE mathematics. It's kind a of mind-bending concept when you first hear it, but by the end of the book it leaves you sort of "Okay then so what? What does that matter?"
That, as per usual, is an exercise left up to the reader. Though I would very highly recommend reading it, as it does give you a very different and honestly refreshing perspective on the role mathematics takes in our lives.
I don't know he was able to convince me I'm a mathematical quantity; but I don't not believe his interpretation either.
Did you happen to learn this reading Warped Passages? Because I just learned it yesterday!
Also you might appreciate this book; I found it interesting:
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-World-Exist-Existential/dp/0871403595
"Why is there something instead of nothing" is the fundamental question of reality. I enjoyed this post, thanks.
>Single point... a very hot and dense... already existing... single point... which rapidly expanded (the expansion being the Big Bang).
Ahh gotcha, so this is what you're talking about asking for proof the universe began.
Then I'd recommend the following further reading:
A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking
The Inflationary Universe by Alan Guth
>Universe was not created per evidence.
There's a high level primer here.
He broke his theory into three volumes.
I encourage your skepticism, but you will be served best by an open mind.
> [...] isn't the whole point of honest dialogue to learn from one another and test one's theories against those of others?
Nope. Theories are tested against evidence.
> If cause isn't a thing, then I need a better vocabulary and a better understanding of reality to describe why my car accelerates when I push the gas pedal [...]
This is a misunderstanding of scope. Cause is an emergent concept not found in the laws of physics similar to how baseball is an emergent concept not found in the laws of physics. "Baseball" can be a useful way to describe the macro world we inhabit just as "cause" can be a useful way to describe the macro world we inhabit. Does that mean the universe plays baseball?
> I honestly entreat you to help me learn what I am missing, and what I should read to correct my misunderstanding.
Please: https://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/dp/1101984252
You don't have to venture past page 4 to read that "[w]e find it natural to use a vocabulary of causes and reasons why things happen, but those ideas aren't part of how nature works at its deepest levels." The first section of the book elaborates.
> My supposition is that in claiming that something is unknowable we deny ourselves the ability to completely refute the unknown.
I didn't say it was unknowable. I said I didn't know.
> In other words, between atheism and agnosticism, atheism is a stronger claim, but is not defensible to the degree that agnosticism is.
This is venturing off point, but I disagree. If someone came to you and said, to use baseball again, that they know because of the existence of baseball that the universe plays baseball, would you find that to be a strong argument? Would you be agnostic on it, saying we could never know whether the universe plays baseball? Or would your response be similar to, "No, baseball is a complicated phenomenon inside the universe. What does it even mean for the universe to play baseball? That doesn't really make sense."
Your interlocutor would, of course, come back and point out that if baseball really isn't a thing in physics then he or she needs a better vocabulary and a better understanding of reality to describe nine men wearing pajamas on a field.
---
There is a distinct feeling from your writing that you can't understand why I'm closed off to the concept of "cause" to the universe. Isn't it at least possible that there was a cause? That there is a God? etc, etc? My response is you have no reason or evidence for it other than a sort of intuitive physics, which I should remind you is not necessarily a path to truth (see the famous single photon double slit experiment).
Let's read more Bertrand Russell (from "Why I am not a Christian" published in 1927):
> Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God). That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: ‘My father taught me that the question, “Who made me?” cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, “Who made God?” ’ That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, ‘How about the tortoise?’ the Indian said, ‘Suppose we change the subject.’ The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.
I'll give Richard Feynman the last word on a similar, but again tangential, topic:
> Now if the world of nature is made of atoms, and we too are made of atoms and obey physical laws, the most obvious interpretation of this evident distinction between past and future, and this irreversibly of all phenomena, would be that some laws, some of the motion laws of the atoms are going one way — that the atom laws are not such that they can go either way. There should be somewhere in the works some kind of a principle that uxles only make wuxles and never vice versa, and so the world is turning from uxley character to wuxley character all the time — and this one-way business of the interactions of things should be the thing that makes the whole phenomena of the world seem to go one way.
> And yet we haven't found it yet. That is, in all the laws of physics that we have found so far there doesn't seem to be any distinction of the past and the future.
Max Tegmark - Our Mathematical Universe
I cannot recommend enough this book "From Eternity to Here", a book that explores time as a thermodynamic phenomenon.
https://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=
wow. so well said! now I can get back to reading this book and it will make more sense to me https://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality/dp/0307599809 (the best book I ever read in explaining Guth's inflation theory and cosmology in general to lay folks like myself...oh wait, is that what you are talking about? is there a distinction between "expansion" and "inflation theory"? my understanding of the latter is what OP is discussing)
In my experience, nobody has offered a coherent explanation for why the universe exists (physics, in my view, only describes its contents and behaviors).
I'm not sure such an explanation is even possible in principle.
This book offers a digestible overview of the problem for some light reading: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-World-Exist-Existential/dp/0871403595
Perhaps this is the wrong question to ask.
The God Particle by Leon Lederman. Even more interesting now that it's been discovered. Dr. Lederman is also pretty funny.
I just subscribed to this sub, and I'm so sad you didn't get any answers here. I came here after reading a few books that deal with the actual science behind the physics of time travel.
Here are a few to get you started.
How to Build a Time Machine
Time Travel and Warp Drives
I really recommend From Eternity to Here, it's just raw science on time, though there is an interesting chapter that really explains what it would take for travelling through time backwards. Overall, a very important read if you want to know what time actually is, compared to how we perceive it.
Also, I'll recommend the first book I started with, which I got into because I was writing a short story for a college class that involved time travel. It explains time travel and how to use it in fiction, so it's much less technical but gives a solid understanding as to how we would typically perceive the effects of them. it deals with getting paradoxes right etc. Here it is.
EDIT: Just realized all my links were to Canadian amazon, I'm sure they'll be on the US amazon if that's where you happen to live. Have fun!
Check out Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time: https://www.amazon.com/Order-Time-Carlo-Rovelli/dp/073521610X
> For Rovelli, there is more: according to his theorising, time itself disappears at the most fundamental level. His theories ask us to accept the notion that time is merely a function of our “blurred” human perception.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/14/carlo-rovelli-exploding-commonsense-notions-order-of-time-interview
Sean Carroll wrote a book about time too, where it's all about entropy. You can always check out the amazon page of a book for a summary. Here's Carroll's: http://www.amazon.com/From-Eternity-Here-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544
I don't personally subscribe to either view, I think time is more fundamental than entropy and there's no good reason to believe our universe "closes up on itself".
Also here's a short Carroll talk on the subject of time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMaTyg8wR4Y#
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself - Sean Carroll
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525954821/
Relevant: http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime
And his book: https://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality/dp/0307744256
Cosmologist Sean Carroll explains Bayes' theorem and applies it to scientific method and everyday life throughout his book The Big Picture. This book is intended for a wide audience and is very well written.
No particular order:
Blind Descent by James M. Tabor. It is a great book about cave exploration and the race to discover the worlds deepest supercave.
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Are you interested in the universe and how it all happened? This gives some pretty insightful answers.
From Eternity To Here by Sean Carrol. A really interesting view on the nature and concept of time and how it relates to the us and the universe. It can get a bit deep from time to time, but I found it fascinating.
Adventures Among Ants by Mark W. Moffet. It's about ants. Seriously. Ants.
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. A first hand account of the ill-fated Scott expedition to the south pole in 1911-1912. Even after reading the book I cannot imagine what those men went through.
Bonus book: The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. Human intelligence and how it evolved. Some really interesting stuff about the brain and how it works. A very enjoyable read.
That's simply a mathematical description of it. We're saying that antimatter moving forwards in time is mathematically identical to matter moving backwards. Matter can be thought of as antimatter moving backwards in time, too.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics (entropy increases) comes from the definition of entropy: high entropy means that there are lots of ways to arrange things microscopically so that they're indistinguishable at our level. That means necessarily that there are more high entropy states than low entropy states, so by pure probability evolving a system in time (in either direction) leads to a higher entropy system. It's got nothing to do with individual particles moving forwards or backwards in time.
Most of what you consider to be consequences of time moving forwards are consequences of entropy increasing: a being moving "backwards" in time isn't going to remember the future, because remembering is about being able to work backwards from your current high-entropy state to a low-entropy past. Imagine you have a photograph: if entropy was lower in the past, it probably resulted from the lower entropy situation of a camera photographing the subject. If it wasn't lower, then it might just be a random chance collection of atoms that used to be a high-entropy gas.
So to answer your question: antimatter is going to obey the same laws here as everything else. Entropy increases because we don't know anything about the future, and know that in the past it was lower. The same applies to antimatter.
Sorry for the wall of text - but if you're interested you should read this book, which does a remarkable job of explaining entropy.
First article: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/opinion/can-evolution-have-a-higher-purpose.html
There's a link in there to another article that is also good.
Here's a talk given at a Mormon transhumanist conference. It's not really tied to mormonism, especially not this talk.
https://youtu.be/Q4jYlKavkmQ
The guy speaking is a friend of mine, and he describes himself as an agnostic, leaning toward the theist side. His definition of god is very different from the typical definition. It's more like the process of evolution heading towards more complexity and more cooperation, it is possible that there is something directing that. Of course there is no conclusive proof, there really cannot be, but it is still interesting to think about.
I also like a concept called the arrow of time. Here's a fun music video for an intro.
https://youtu.be/i6rVHr6OwjI
Look in the description for a link to the lecture that inspired the music video. The professor is Sean Carroll, and my friend recommends his book, https://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544
I hope that helps!
lol its an actual book
https://www.amazon.com/My-Big-TOE-Complete-Trilogy/dp/0972509461
Yes... I recommend this book first. Sagan is like a shakespear of science.
http://www.amazon.com/Demon-haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/1439505284
Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has enough passion for the concept of time that he's earned the nickname "Time Lord" (somewhat jokingly of course). In 2010 he published From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time and often posts on the Discover blog Cosmic Variance.
http://www.amazon.com/Demon-haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/1439505284
(Simplification and semi-mediocre understanding of a high-school student)
Essentially, it's a particle that, through fundamental interactions with other particles such as leptons and quarks and the so called "Higgs Field" cause inertia (mass) to arise. I would consult Wikipedia if I were you and would check out some readings.
Warped Passages by Lisa Randall
A Brief History of Time+The Universe in a Nutshell - Stephen Hawking
The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
Personally, I'd recommend the first because, if a little bit dry, Randall explains the Higgs theory better. (The second book was what got me obsessed in science two or three years ago.) Happy Trails!
Maybe you'd like the ideas of Max "Mad Max" Tegmark. https://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality/dp/0307599809
His book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself is my favorite book that I've read this year. I highly recommend it. I'm about 15 years out of college, so was worried I wouldn't be able to keep up, but he does a fantastic job keeping concepts clear. I find it (while much longer) a more enjoyable read than A Brief History of Time.
>Have, have you do your PhD thesis on anything? That skipped many many many steps lol.
No sir. I do not have a PHd. You went to college. Presumably, you have a Masters, at the very least. I never went to college.
​
>**This is my most important response here. So you're saying it was a product of chance. Great. Let's roll with that because I think that will be easier for now.
>
>Is chance purely random or preordained. Are the two mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive?
This question is too deep & I too unequipped to answer. I would recommend Sean Carrol's The Big Picture.
But of course we both know you're not gonna read it.
​
>You seem to have all the answers so give me your best here.**
I never made such a claim. You're confusing me for a religious person. Those are the people who have "all the answers".
As an atheist, all I have is a bunch of I-don't-know(s). If you want certainty, go get a religion. Any religion. Doesn't matter. They're all pretty certain.
I share my reasons with Smolin in this book.
There are a small number of people interested in UFOs etc, who are not kooks and who have serious credentials.
Most notably, Carl Sagan co-wrote a book in the late 1960s that may have accidentally kickstarted the ancient-alien-contact theory. He backed away from those claims in later years, but he did take the idea of aliens coming to earth seriously and handled the concept far more cautiously and provisionally than did most subsequent. https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Life-Universe-I-Shklovskii/dp/189280302X
Peter Sturrock is another example, a major-league astrophysicist who back in the 1940s did important work on development of radar systems in the UK. Alongside his mainstream work, he's occasionally written on UFOs. https://web.stanford.edu/group/Sturrock/Peter/
Here's a really interesting walk thru Hang in there buddy.
> A bit yeah, just moved in to my own apartment!
congratulations
> I understand the logic, but I still don't think these things have been demonstrated outside of philosophy essays.
Remember, demonstrability is only a qualifier for empirical evidence, evidence in general can be taken to be more vast and up for debate.
> I would disagree, but I don't even know what this means, unfortunately ;)
If you're interested http://www.amazon.com/Immortality-Defended-John-Leslie/dp/140516204X/
I don't think I can do his ideas any justice on a Reddit forum.
> I have heard of this, but I've never talked to anyone who actually held that view. I would like to talk with them about it for sure. I disagree, but on what part I disagree depends on what they say.
Well, if interested, I would suggest Max Tegmark's book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. He holds that our entire universe is literally made of mathematical numbers. He's also a physicist at MIT.
> Eh. So far as I am aware again, these are akin to borrowing theology's word-games in philosophy to demonstrate different things. I mean, sure, people can think of that if they want, but I don't think it shows anything particularly relevant about reality.
I would think that topics as our eternal destination, the fundamental metaphysical makeup of the world and the nature of reality help to bolster and reinforce scientific theory. I would doubt that many physicists would have stumbled onto space time without previous discussion of philosophy of time for example. Not to mention the ability of certain cosmological arguments to predict notions of a universes beginning. They might not be correct in the long run, but do provide certain hypothetical frames for future discoveries.
> True that, there are also plenty of atheists who are not rationalists at all, and believe all kinds of weird/unprovable things. I would be one of those strict materialists however ;)
Sorry to be pick the knits, but you mean empiricists, not rationalists in this case. Rationalist tends to focus on concepts through the work of a priori knowledge and then place it in an overall framework. The Mathematical and Platonic notions I mentioned are achieved through a rationalist frame work.
Empiricists are more about the posteriori verification of these ideas through induction and falsifiability. This does not preclude empiricists of being Platonists (Arif Ahmed is an example of such a case).
According to the philpapers, skeptical materialists make up only 5% of philosophers. So I would say tread lightly to claim these other 95% are being irrational.
The Tzimisce Teacher:
​
Carl Sagan warned of a world of scientific ignorance where illogical superstitions like the anti-vaccine movement and religious tribalism increasingly took hold.
​
John Allen Paulos warned of a world of mathematical illiteracy where pyramid schemes and predatory lotteries increasingly took hold, reflected perhaps even in the popularity of the non-mathematical D&D5e and v5 VTM tabletop games.
​
In an increasingly hostile environment for the Kindred, where through the ages, not only a secretive cabal of academic vampire mages attack the clan, but a zealot-led Second Inquisition and a beckoning spell to remove former leaders, the Tzimisce have to be more intelligent and clever than the huge population of psychotic, self-serving, technologically-adjacent humans to preserve the clan's secret affairs, and excel mentally beyond the ranks of the enemy clans and factions in order to ensure survival.
​
In countries across the world, the populace are encouraged through effective emotional manipulation to become mindless, passive consumers, docile, disposable workers, and uninformed citizens, an inclination infecting even the most vaunted of intelligentsia, so while a prospective candidate member for the clan (even among the revenant families) may be admired for certain strengths of personality and courage or a unique perspective or fetishistic abberance, such individuals still remain the product of successive centuries of refulgent anti-intellectualism, and as such, must be taught or destroyed if not able to meet the challenges of membership.
​
To this end, The Tzimisce teacher dedicates their unlife to a calling of judgement. The teacher pays visits to members of the clan one can find with auspex through the world (a personal specialty from the teacher's experience), and tests them and corrects holes in their understanding of the kindred or the world or political ensnarement. If the Kindred is receptive and willing to improve and shows reasonable progress they are allowed to live, and if they are intellectually stagnant, recalcitrant, or umasterful to a degree beyond redemption, then they are executed, along with any sires or packmates or regional Sabbat leaders that attempt to stop this from happening.
​
There are some Tzimisce that completely remove themselves from the reach of other clans through adapting their bodies to hostile environments far beneath the Earth, within the oceans, or even outer space (to still contend with other supernatural creatures), but for those that remain at risk among the humans, The Teacher has culled a huge number (perhaps thousands or tens of thousands) of unacceptable clan-mates. The Teacher has not been previously spoken of much through clan histories because many fail to live to tell of meeting The Teacher.
I do not deny that time exists throughout the universe, I say that it it a local phenomenon, not a universal one. Its not the same "time" throughout the universe.
>to say that the concept of "now" is not the same point in time throughout the universe is absurd!
Perhaps it sounds absurd, but it seems to be true nonetheless. Read Professor Carlo Rovelli's book for a pretty detailed discussion of why it's likely true, even though it sounds absurd.
It seems clear these days that there just is no universal concept of "now".
You refer to observers watching black holes consume each other etc. But time for this observer is only a personal construct.
>When I refer to universal time I refer to the way an outside observer sees the progression of events, and there must necessarily be a universal time.
That's not how general relativity works. There is no outside observer or universal time. It's a local and personal phenomenon. It's the difference between Newtonian, and Einsteinian time...
I do seriously recommend Rovelli's books and YouTube videos. He talks a lot exactly this topic from a seriously well informed point of view. I learned a lot...
Cheers!·
I love Carl Sagan's The Demon-haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark
I actually preferred this book “Why the world exists” by Jim Holt.
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-World-Exist-Existential/dp/0871403595
It’s more exhaustive when attempting to answer the question of existence from a critical perspective. Lawrence’s book seemed more geared towards people who shared his philosophical viewpoints IMO. Thanks for sharing though.
http://www.amazon.com/From-Eternity-Here-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544 is tough , but really interesting IMO.
This'll hardly explain it like you're five, but Jim Holt's book "Why Does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story is fantastic further reading that essentially investigates this existential question from every angle. Historical theories, different philosophical theories/ideas, scientific study and theory (basic physics through to advanced quantum stuff)...
I really recommend it.
For anyone really interested in an accessible look at the philosophy and science of nothingness and how the universe could have emerged from it, I recommend this book.
Max Tegmark thinks the universe is actually mathematical. Its an interesting idea but im not sure how i feel about it. He's definitely going beyond the mainstream with his ideas. He has a book and some youtube talks.
You should read Joe Sachs' translation: https://www.amazon.ca/Aristotles-Metaphysics-Aristotle/dp/1888009039
He provides an explanation about his style and the way he decided to interpret Aristotle. It's in a very fluid style that is meant to be accessible to students in philosophy while at the same time retaining the technical terms. It's a very reputable translation and I used it many times in my courses.
His biggest point is translating ousia by thinghood rather than substance, since the translation to substance was a mistake committed by the Scholastics in the Middle-Ages.
The book in itself is wonderfully edited too. It's big and the margins are wide so you can take notes on the side. He provides a glossary and a summary of each section too.
It's in my opinion way more superior than Penguin or Oxford.
I would have chosen Broca's Brain by Carl Sagan.
http://www.amazon.com/Brocas-Brain-Reflections-Romance-Science/dp/0345336895
The physicist David Deutsch has a good essay about this in his latest book
'Beginning of Infinity'
He explains that it's mathematically impossible to design a voting system which is free of bias. Deutsch prefers first past the post, because it makes it easier to get rid of bad governments and it's also less likely to result in a coalition government, which end up making compromises that nobody has voted for.
I completely understand why the liberal democrats are aggrieved at the current voting system, which underrepresents their share of the vote- but since all voting systems are unfair in some way, isn't it better to be unfair to the least popular of the three parties (whichever that may be)?
Check out the My Big Toe Trilogy. This is a mind exercise that can help remove the, therefore God argument.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0972509461?pc_redir=1411810596&robot_redir=1
I religiously identify as Buddhist. I agree that "God" is the universe, but I tend to take a very large view of what could be meant by "universe". I accept the "supernatural" as being natural because I think that the part of the universe we inhabit, Sagan's "Cosmos", is simply a low-dimensional subset of a greater multiverse, with a specific set of rules, and that the rules may not apply "elsewhere". For me, this helps explain weird shit that credible people report having happened to them. Max Tegmark offers a Saganesque explanation for the multiverse concept which somewhat justifies this for me. But, anyway, I'm not trying to convert anyone to believing one way or another. And I'm fine with Christians as long as they're not douchebags about civil rights.
excellent recent "progress to date" science book on implications of hidden dimensions in the universe
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060531096?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=reddit0e-20"&gt;Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions</a>
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions
You've already read some classics, so I'd wager you're beyond lay-person "introductory" level.
My absolute favorite is Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe. Starts out with a well-written, step-by-step intro to cosmology and our current understanding, but then ends up in some heady, and fascinating territory toward the end.
As for your location, I've visited Missoula (great and super friendly city!), and although it will have light pollution, you're surrounded by a lot of wilderness outside the city, so you should still have some great nights for home observation, or you could travel just a short distance outside the city for great views.
Have you read THOMAS Campbell’s My Big TOE?
My Big Toe: A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics: Awakening, Discovery, Inner Workings https://www.amazon.com/dp/0972509461/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_VzPxDb6C8GJA7
Could be a hollowed out asteroid like Carl Sagan was saying with Phobos, when he claimed it was an artificial satellite. Thats before he got famous though. It was his first book.
http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Life-Universe-I-Shklovskii/dp/189280302X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1323133726&amp;sr=8-1
Then he realized that he can't make those claims in public, and later on in life, essentially denigrated anything with UFOs/ET.
Personally, my theory is that UFOs aren't physical craft. They're intelligent entities unto itself. In essence, the UFO itself is alive, a living, intelligent entity.
I have read some Greene but I found Sean Carroll's "From Eternity to Here" much more illuminating in regards to the direction of time and entropy in general.
http://www.amazon.com/From-Eternity-Here-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544