Scientists find first evidence that many universes exist | Hacker News Reader

Scientists find first evidence that many universes exist

physorg.com

Still, the scientists acknowledge that it is rather easy to find a variety of statistically unlikely properties in a large dataset like the CMB

One is reminded of "Assassinations Foretold in Moby Dick!" as an example of this error (http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html)

Yes, I think this comment gets it exactly. This kind of research always bothers me because it starts with narratives like the Big Bang and parallel universes and then (ab)uses the data to corroborate them. The problem is that, on a multiversal scale, we really have only one observable data point (our universe) so just about any cognitive model that we can come up with can be used to explain its idiosyncrasies with equal validity.

This result is very different from actually observing many universes bumping into each other, or multiple universes starting from a big bang. It's more like seeing a coin come up heads once, and then claiming that the model "coins always come up heads" is the best model describing that situation.

Isn't this really just a variation on the Penrose fallacy that occurred not-so-long ago, probably resulting from an inability to account for the statistical and technical properties of our CMB measurements?

I read this headline as "Scientists find first evidence that many universities exist". Vacation clearly cannot come fast enough.

This would make for an epic onion article ;p

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the two-slit experiment the "first" evidence that other universes exist?

My head just exploded, that explains everything! The collapse of the electron wave function is a symptom of something causing the electron to stop behaving as a multidimensional particle and begin behaving as a single dimensional particle. woah.

I'm not sure if you're making fun of me, or your response is just way over my head.

> I'm not sure if you're making fun of me, or your response is just way over my head.

Honestly, cosmology is like that for most people.

No, there are a few interpretations for quantum trickery, that being just one. If multiple universes did exist, it still wouldn't be the same as what that QM interpretation is claiming. It's claiming a new universe pops up pretty much every time some particle isn't sure where it wants to be. Terrible waste of energy and effort, IMO. Occam's razor would have a field day.

Copenhagen interpretation has my vote.

I really hope this isn't true. I can't begin to imagine the horrors we'd have to accept as part of reality as a consequence.

What horrors? Our sun is already one of 100 billion in the Milky Way, and our galaxy one of (is it?) 1 trillion in the 13-billion-year-old observable Universe. It's only a small step to accept our observable Universe is only one of 10 trillion bubbles in the Multiverse.

Well there's that stupid beard that Spock wears, for one.

am I the only one always quite surprised that the universe is 'only' 13 billion years old?

That always struck me as odd too, since the Earth itself is ~4.5 billion years old. It just seems odd that our little planet has been around (in some fashion) for a significant portion of the lifetime of the universe.

In addition to that, our solar system probably formed from the remains of one or more second-generation stars, so our planet has already been around longer than at least one of its "ancestors".

I believe Hindu cosmologies put our universe's lifespan on the order of trillions of years.

The fact that the apparent randomness seen in quantum mechanics is actually our traveling down one of many possibilities, each of which manifest of their own right. Which means that, if I reach success in my life, thinking back to the hopeful sorry self in my past, I can no longer say, "to think, that sorry guy became the success he is today". That sorry guy also died of cancer, fell off a cliff, died alone, became a heroin addict, and won the lottery. It means that if we as a race ever successfully end poverty or oppression, there will be infinite other amount of scenarios where it never happened and probably got worse. I could imagine all sorts of horrible possibilities but I won't.

I'm just going off of what other people seem to conclude from this theory. I admit it seems a bit juvenile that every conceivable thing is possible. ("Everything you can think of is true" - Tom Waits) There's probably a lot of physical limitations. But I still worry what sorts of horrible scenarios it may allow for.

But, I dunno, maybe not all multiple universe theories are the same.

I have a wild and semi-unprovable theory that whenever you feel fear in a life-threatening situation, you are in fact feeling the simultaneous multiple-universe death of your other selves who don't survive the life-threatening situation -- sort of the way identical twins report that they can sense each other's feelings, or know when the other is in danger. It's probably total BS, but it's fun to think about.

I think it's cool too, since every possibility has a non-zero probability of occurring, so I can attempt absolutely anything I want, no matter how crazy, and somewhere I will have succeeded. I don't even have to put in any effort.

Of course, if the set of possibly horrible things is much larger than that of possibly great things, then yes reality sucks. Given that there are always many more ways things can go wrong than right, I guess reality sucks.

So, the end result is I don't even have to do anything and my dreams come true, but that doesn't matter because so do my nightmares, and there are more of them.

>I think it's cool too, since every possibility has a non-zero probability of occurring

So, in some universe there is no extent multiverse?

Not every thing that appears possible is.

Physically speaking.

It's turtles all the way down...

We've already got theories which say that the universe is spatially infinite and quantumly branching. One more level of infinity on top of that isn't going to make much of a difference. I suggest you regard all events not part of your decision-theoretic future (those you have no influence over) as part of the generalized past, and ignore them.

One day your kidneys will shut down and poison you. If you can deal with that (or similar) you can deal with the "horrors" of multiple universes.

With multiple universes, where every possibility is explored, there will always be one where you don't die. Your consciousness might be navigating you into that universe. So even when you're 104 and have only 50% of making it to your next birthday . . somehow you will. Everlasting life, that would be a true horror.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", right?

How much data would be required to determined which of the googleplex of imaginable alternate universes are the ones which intersected this one?

googolplex; the Googleplex is a place :)

(Can't resist pedantry in this case; my grandfather taught me what a googol and a googolplex are way back in the dark ages and I have some affection for the terms)

Extraordinary claims require sufficient empirical evidence as proof; proof that need not be extraordinary.

another article trying to perpetuate the big bang myth by fitting evidence around a predetermined conclusion. We really need to abandon the big bang theory and just admit we just don't know yet instead of fitting evidence to our conclusion. If the paper concludes no single bang, and no singular event, then no big bang happened.

Big Bang is currently accepted to the extent that it is because it has managed to fit the facts best. Isolated suggestions here and there will explain this bit better or explain that bit better and it makes for a great New Scientist article every last freaking time somebody somewhere puts a pre-pre-print up on arxiv, but nobody has actually put together a theory that explains the totality better than the current standard theory. Everybody already knows that it's broken, that's not news. And it takes more than "one paper" to determine the matter either way, I can pretty much find "one paper" that'll say just about anything.

We know we don't know. That's not news. Nobody has anything better yet. But that's hardly an excuse to just throw our hands up and "abandon" what is currently the best we've got.

In other news, everybody knows the Standard Model of particle physics has to be broken; it is accepted not because it is right but because nobody has actually come up with anything uniformly better.

Scientists call it the Big Bang Theory. And in Science, the word "theory" is supposed to basically be the equivalent of a proven phenomenon. Scientists do not admit that the Big Bang theory is broken. They really believe that everything in the universe came from nothing even though it violates everything in cause-and-effect.

Go back far enough and everything boils down to "something from nothing" or "something was always there". Both options violate everything in cause-and-effect.

We either don't exist - demonstrably false - or the universe's start doesn't necessarily abide by cause-and-effect as we humans understand it.

Couldn't God have created everything from nothing? God is philosophically understood to be a self sufficient being. He is also understood to be all powerful, thus capable of creating something from nothing.

Seems a justified and tidy resolution to the supposed problem you refer to.

You are just adding another layer of abstraction. Something created God or God has existed forever.

If the universe existed forever, you don't need to create a God to create the universe.

There is a difference though. From what we know of the big bang, there is a starting point of the universe. The universe being started from nothing violates physical laws. A spiritual entity wouldn't be bound by the same physical logistics. Even if someone argues that it is "unlikely" for God to exist, it is still atleast a logical possibility.

> From what we know of the big bang

There's a lot we know we don't know of the Big Bang.

> The universe being started from nothing violates physical laws.

So does a God. Something has to be violating physical laws as we currently understand them (and we hardly know everything yet...), so adding God doesn't really get you anywhere.

No, it's a third option because God is outside of time. So, since the term "always" is tensed, it doesn't apply.

Why can God exist outside of time, but not a natural process?

"Process" is time bound by definition. There are also other characteristics of God's causality that natural processes cannot have. For instance, free will is the ability to create something from nothing, and natural processes cannot do this.

That would be a case of "something was always there."

And in Science, the word "theory" is supposed to basically be the equivalent of a proven phenomenon.

Citation please.

There are a lot of theories in science. They vary greatly in how well accepted they are.

As for the source of the Big Bang, there is a wide variety of speculation on that. Including a previous universe collapsing (no coming from "nothing" and a quantum fluctuation. But until we have a theory that combined general relativity with quantum mechanics, we won't have a real idea how reasonable different theories are.

> And in Science, the word "theory" is supposed to basically be the equivalent of a proven phenomenon.

No, that's a "theorem". A "theory" refers to a widely accepted idea, like gravity or evolution.

I think you mistake an indicator for an indicated. A theory tends to be widely accepted because it is the best explanation for evidence.

If something is a theory just because it is widely accepted, then that would make the idea that "lifting our arms is hard due to gravity" a theory, whereas the correct view is merely an idea that experts believe is correct.

You post that as a comment on an article claiming to have found support for a variant of the eternal inflation theory? Scientists are proposing all sorts of variants of various theories and many of them are way more upset about an initial singularity at the start of the universe than you, a known problem since pretty much the first day it was proposed, with numerous discussions on how this is incompatible with quantum mechanics and all kinds of other known issues it has. I take it you didn't read the article or actually know anything about the state of modern cosmology, which implies that you're just triggering on keywords and then knee-jerking a post in response. Please take that elsewhere.

The scientists are not "upset" about the inaccuracies of this. If they truly thought that the Big Bang has a lot of problems, why would they not call it the Big Bang Hypothesis? Scientists don't propose this as a "possibility that may have occured", they speak of it as a fact where only tiny details need to be worked out.

"Big Bang is currently accepted to the extent that it is because it has managed to fit the facts best. "

well the problem is is that it doesn't. And in science, if you find a contradicting fact in a theory, then that theory is totally abandoned. The problem with the big bang is that multiple facts have come up debunking the big bang theory, but it is still accepted as a science. I could give you a few facts debunking the big bang theory, but the real question is: If I could prove to you a fact that disagreed with the big bang, would you then abandon the theory or would you not accept my evidence, and believe in two contradicting facts at the same time? When two facts contradict in simultaneously in a scientific theory, it is no longer a science but religion. Therefore, the big bang is actually religion disguised as science.

Just prove it, and stop criticising the reaction that you've decided that everyone would have if you did.

One thing I've heard is quasars show the red-shift phenomena may not be as good of an indicator of universe age as we'd thought. The red shift, I believe, is one of our primary evidences for a big bang.

There are a few anomalous millisecond pulsars that are older than the universe. The orthodox explanation is the pulsar age calculations are flawed. The heretical explanation is the age of the universe calculations are flawed.

A theory isn't completely abandoned just because of a single contradicting observation. The theory may explain a host of other phenomena very well, in which case then new observation merely shows a limit past which the theory no longer applies. As an example, we know of many observations which contradict the predictions of Newtonian gravity, but we still use that theory for planning space probe trajectories.

I would like to know what you mean when you say "big bang theory". I think that would help ensure we're all talking about the same thing.

When I say "big bang theory", I mean the idea that the universe we live in was in a very hot, dense state roughly 13.7 billion years ago, along with some other details such as a brief period of cosmic inflation.

"A theory isn't completely abandoned just because of a single contradicting observation."

Uhhh, yes it is.

You've just demonstrated that you're not interested in a conversation.

Welcome to my killfile.

> Uhhh, yes it is.

Did you not see the bit about Newtonian physics in the post you're replying to?

Every scientific theory gets revised as new information comes out. Our understanding of evolution, physics, biology, etc. have all changed drastically over the last few decades, but we didn't throw out the theories - we adjusted them were necessary to more accurately include new data.

"If I could prove to you a fact that disagreed with the big bang, would you then abandon the theory"

Sure I would! What are some of your facts?

red shift

Could you be more specific?

The down votes of parent comment makes me feel like this debate is turning more like a religious debate. Where ideology and faith dominates reasoning and logic.

That's cosmology for you! There certainly is a quasi-religious element to the debate. I graduated in physics and although the Big Bang theory fits the evidence quite well, so do some other theories. The Big Bang arguably fits the closest, but I would hardly call it proven. Thats why we call it a theory. But I've always been surprised by the ideological reactions to doubt in that field of physics.

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