Re: The Creation of Man
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Dmitri\")</div>
Harte,
... I thought many worlds are not physically connected and will never be in the context of the concept. When we talk past ? present ? future(-space) how do we mean different or parallel universes if we have points of physical connections? Is it not like a four-bedroom house, with a utility room made into another bedroom, with several additions? ?[/b]
Dmitri, I can't be sure how well versed in the quanta you are. I am only a layman but I can explain the Many Worlds theory. Here are two experiments, one a thought experiment and another that has been conducted many times under laboratory conditions with the same results.
Actual experiment:
Cut a thin slit in a piece of paper and place it in front of a screen or some other such thing like a white wall or another whole piece of paper. If you shine a light at the slit and look at the light projected through the slit onto the screen you will see a blur of light (if you placed the slitted paper exactly right, you could see a projection of what your light source looks like - like a pinhole camera). This is exactly the pattern you would expect if you consider light to be made up of photons. It is exactly the pattern you would get if you threw a trillion baseballs at an opening in a picket fence, for example, or shot a trillion bbs through an opening.
Cut a second slit in the same paper, fairly close to the first slit and shine a light at both slits. Then look at the projected light pattern behind the slit on the screen. You may expect to see a larger blur, perhaps made up of two overlapping blurs, but you would be wrong. You will see an interference pattern made up of light and dark stripes, exactly as if you were forcing waves through the two openings and the crests from one opening were reinforcing the crests from the other opening while the troughs from one opening were reinforcing the troughs from the other opening, and every variation between.
Quantum mechanics explains this problem by considering the position of a photon (or any other particle) to be a function of what is called a probability wave. Since we don't know the exact position of each photon, that is we don't know which slit each one went through, there is only a probability that a particular photon went through a particular slit and it is this uncertainty that causes the interference pattern when we expect to see a blur. Feynman at this point explains that perhaps each photon took every possible path simultaneously.
BTW, this experiment has also been conducted with electrons that were fired at the slits
one at a time, and still the interference pattern emerged. So lets consider for the rest of this experiment that we are using the electron gun and shooting only one electron at a time.
I know this is wordy and somewhat dull but it's about to get interesting.
If you put some kind of electron detector at one (or both) of the slits, you could determine which slit an electron went through and eliminate the uncertainty.
When we do this, the interference pattern disappears and is replaced by the two overlapping blurs we expected to see when we first cut the second slit! The only change we have made here is detecting which slit the electron passes through, yet the projection on the screen behind the slits has completly changed. This is famously known as the Two-Slit Experiment, a rather mundane name for such a fantastic finding.
Thought experiment:
Imagine you have refined a piece of radioactive material in such a way that it has a 50% probability of emitting a bit of radiation every minute. The material is currently in a lead-lined box with a lid you can open with some remote control mechanism. Imagine you put the box inside another lead-lined box that contains a vial of cyanide, currently stoppered. Connected to the cyanide vial is another mechanism (with a radiation detector) to open the cyanide vial if any radiation is detected. Now put your cat in the large box with all the mechanisms and close it up. Then, using your remote control, open the container with the radioactive material for exactly one minute, and then remotely close it again. Is the cat dead?
We would think that the cat has exactly a fifty-fifty chance of being dead. Quantum mechanics says
the cat is both dead and alive. That is, since probability is the rule in quantum mechanics, and there is no reason to pick one probability over another, the cat exists in a sort of overlapping of universes to many worlds theorists, and the cat exists in a strange probabalistic sense to other theorists. According to the many worlds theorists, once you open the box, you determine which universe will contain both you and the live cat or you and the dead cat. This experiment is called Schroedinger's Cat, after one of the pioneers in quantum mechanics.
Using the electron detector in the first experiment, and opening the box in the second, is what most quantum physicists call "collapsing the probability wave." Those that subscribe to the many worlds theory (and there are quite a few) interpret these actions as a splitting off of a seperate universe. In the first example, you have created a universe (by using an electron detector) where electron "a" went through slit "b" and etc. In the second example, you have created a universe where your cat is alive (or dead, depending on what you find when you open the box). The other outcomes (dead cat or live cat) are just as valid and also exist. In fact, the cat was both dead and alive until you opened the box, that is, these two universes still overlapped up to the point that the box was opened.
Many worlds theorists consider that there are several overlapping universes, a universe for every quantum probability that exists. In this theory, we are living in a multiple universe where the only universes that don't overlap with ours are the ones that resulted from us making a quantum determination, such as detecting which slit an electron went through.
It is these and other facts about quantum mechanics that make me tend to prefer the multiple timeline theory of time travel. The process of collapsing the probability wave is akin, in my mind, to traveling into the past. If a future version of myself traveled into the year 1982 for example, and attended my first wedding, that would create a new universe because in this universe that did not happen.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Dmitri\")</div>
What bothers me most in Hoyle?s system is that he suggests two ways that direct evolution while either would be OK to me. This is not to say that there may not be even more than two, it is just how to bridge them. I mean viruses as vectors of evolution on the one hand and signals from the future on the other. This starts from the seeming conflict that life forms deteriorate by mutations with time unless they have means to fight chaos of thermodynamics. If life is being directly upgraded by viruses/ bacteria this solves the problem. If life has the property, even at quantum level, to accommodate information from future, this too solves the problem, without the need for viral upgrades. It seems, without viruses, pertinent molecules of life should behave according to and towards future biochemical-physiological solutions, thus build more information and complexity on the way to realizing these future states. This alone would explain evolution. All needed molecules are here at hand in the cell, moving, kicking each other looking for something better. Vs. viruses come from a very long way, likely from ET, maybe future ET. Maybe this is because our DNA does not yet have enough means to create new long chunks of itself however hard it looks ahead and forward to it. [/b]
Hoyle has confused me for a long time. His refusal to accept the Big Bang (a term he himself coined in derision) seemed like grasping at straws. His idea of some intelligence "placed in the distant future" also seems like a stretch. Who would he have us believe "placed" this intelligence in our future? Anyway, perhaps it is easier to influence the past batch-wise, that is to create these virus vectors all at once instead of manipulating quantum fluctuations in atoms making up DNA strands on a continuous basis. The information creating the viruses could be sent in a single batch, perhaps conserving energy or resources the future intelligence wishes not to waste.
To me, the problem with life coming from
our future is twofold. First, according to my belief in the multiple timeline idea, no time traveller that comes to our universe is from our future. My second objection you know well, for I have stated it many times in this thread.
That is not to say that life here could not have come from
a future. I can see some intelligence that evolved in some other universe perfecting the technology to look at other universes and finding a universe that had never developed life. I can see this intelligence traveling into the past of this barren universe and seeding life there. I mean, that's a little out there for me but I certainly wouldn't say it was impossible.
Ye gods this is a long and wordy post. Delete it if you want Mods.
Harte
