Posted on 05/23/2002 3:02:41 AM PDT by lavaroise
Despite an aging Albert Einstein's famous comment, "God does not play dice with the universe," renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking and his academic collaborator Thomas Hertog now suggest that God did roll the dice at least once – at the moment of creation.
Like that familiar wizened sage atop the highest peak, God cast that first die down a mountain of potential energy where, according to Hawking and Hertog, it rolled like a snowball, growing, expanding and inflating into the universe we know today.
"The quantum origin of our universe implies one must take a 'top down' approach to the problem of initial conditions in cosmology," Hawking and Hertog write in their latest paper on the subject – "Why does inflation start at the top of the hill?"
Inflation – and creation – started at the top of a potential energy mountain, the two cosmologists claim, where fundamental field particles acted like snowflakes that coalesced into cosmological snowballs. A rolling stone may gather no moss, but the rolling die of creation – known to physicists as a subatomic particle called the "Hawking-Moss instanton" – gathered these snowflake-like particles.
"The early evolution of our universe is a bit like a ball of snow that grows while rolling down a hill," Hertog told WorldNetDaily in an exclusive interview. Hertog equated the growing snowball to a field of particles. "Our calculations show that our universe was most likely created by this field at the top of a 'potential hill.'"
Like mischievous children, quantum fluctuations in the early universe rolled the cosmological snowball down the hill and it expanded.
"Because of Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle, the field at the top of the hill fluctuates," Hertog explained. "Because the top of the hill is an unstable point, these fluctuations eventually cause the field to roll all the way down."
The snowball of creation eventually settled into a valley and became the universe that surrounds us today, Hertog explained. Although this valley is lower than it was at the beginning of everything, "the bottom of the valley doesn't seem to be at sea level," Hertog said. Cosmological sea level may be described by Einstein's famous "cosmological constant that cosmologists are measuring," he added.
Hawking and Hertog assert that their "top down" approach to cosmology is a fundamental departure from scientific tradition.
"The usual approach to the problem of initial conditions for inflation is to assume some initial configuration for the universe and evolve it forward in time," Hawking said. "This could be described as the 'bottom up' approach to cosmology."
The quantum nature of the cosmos, however, dictates the "top down" approach, Hawking claims, because the history of the universe depends on the mountain, the dice, the snowflakes and the snowballs. In other words, the universe "depends on the observables being measured."
God may play dice then, but only if the dice are loaded. If the universe depends on observables, it also depends on we the observers, so the dice had to somehow guarantee that we humans would emerge. Physicists call this idea the so-called "Weak Anthropic Principle" from the Greek "anthropos," which means "man" or "human."
"The top-down approach is a mathematical formulation of the Weak Anthropic Principle," Hawking writes, in which observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are restricted by the requirement that carbon-based life must exist.
"The top-down approach incorporates the Weak Anthropic Principle because it takes into account certain observed features of our universe – such as the fact that it expands – in order to explain its origin," Hertog said. "In other words, a top down approach does not tell us how the universe should be, but why the universe is the way it is."
"If Hawking speaks, we should probably listen," Randolph-Macon College physics professor George Spagna told WorldNetDaily from Ashland, Va.
"The approach Hawking and Hertog apply in their paper is to work backwards from the current state of the universe to its possible origins, rather than attempting to cook up the appropriate initial state and see if it evolves forward into something resembling the present universe," Spagna explained. "Hence, it is akin to attaching mathematics to the Weak Anthropic Principle, because we obviously inhabit a universe whose conditions permit our very existence in the first place."
Mike Martin regularly reports on breaking science news for ScienceNewsWeek, United Press International and other publications. View his other stories at sciencenewsweek.com.
Good point.
Going back to the definition really helps to see things more clearly.
;-)
As soon as you can run an SUV on them, don't worry, we'll get 'em.
1) You seem to have economics confused with finance though many economists are rich. Keynes for one was very wealthy. David Ricardo was. John Stuart Mill was. Certainly John Galbraith was. Betcha Uncle Miltie has a few millions what about you? Or Artie Laffer?
However, the predictive ability of economics is not individual prices or stock prices but what happens when certain policies are implemented. What is the impact of moving from a capitalist system to a socialist system or a mixed economy. Regulation impacts etc.
Economists have been crying in the wilderness about the government actions impacting the economy. Ever hear of Ludwig Von Mises, Schumpater, Friedman, Laffer, the Chicago School? But they are not politicians lawyers are. Ronaldus Magnus was the only economist to serve as president and his policies underlie the "unexplained" (to you perhaps but not to some trained economists) boom in the 90s.
Economists have no control over croney capitalism thought they have studied it and written about it many times.
Obviously you have not been much in the third world or you would realize the claim that the U.S. is becoming a 3d world country is ridiculous.
Economics was in fact known as Political Economy at one time and I actually prefer the term for accuracy. It is a deep subject little known by non-practictioners for good reason, it is hard, boring and not called the "dismal science" for nothing. However, it is a very worthwhile study for those up to it.
Oh, that's too bad - I really would be very interested in seeing it. Keep me in mind if you trip over it again.
Perhaps Carter's theory can be successfully applied to FR threads.
Doomsday for certain threads does seem to come with swiftness and regularity, doesn't it? ;)
Sort of an unprovable statement because if God did it, it is -but maybe not- and if He did not then maybe not but maybe so. So depends on your starting point. If we were incompatible then maybe God did it since it would be a miracle. Read Rare Earth. Shows both incompatibility and compatibility and the miracle that is earth and our life. It is a sobering book.
Googolplex aces over?
Why couldn't we just be something else -- even in a universe crawling with top quarks and no hadrons?
LOL. Well, I'm not sure. I guess we'll just have to keep abreast of the latest scientific discoveries. To my knowledge, those silicone implants haven't fed the first baby yet...
Never read it. Probably never will. May I suggest that if you have an interest in cosmology you should first read a book or two by some of the acknowledged experts in the field, in order to first get an understanding of what it's all about. Try one of the popular titles by Hawking, Weinberg, Guth, Sagan, or Rees. They're written for the intelligent layman. Sagan is probably the most accessable, but really they all are. Just visit Amazon and look around until you find an appropriate title by one of them. There are other writers too, like Asimov, who is always good. Then and only then, after you have a grasp of the subject, should you read something by a fringe figure who runs around claiming that the mainstream is all wrong.
The redshift is anything but local. One of the first methods we had of estimating the distance of stars was by the presence of Cepheid variables. Those are stars that pulsate regularly, and are seen to go up and down in magnitude. We could calculate the distance of the closest one (in the constellation Cepheus) using the parallax method, which is quite reliable and based on geometry. That star became the standard. By observing the magnitude of the more distant variables (which don't exhibit a parallax shift), we can easily determine their distances. A Cepheid variable that is one-fourth the magnitude of the standard (in Cepheus) is twice the distance from us. This technique is applied to stellar clusters that contain such variables, to get an approximate distance for the cluster.
The redshift of stars was observed by Edwin Hubble to coincide with their distances, as determined by the known Cepheid variables. So the redshift, which is now used alone for very distant objects, has been confirmed (where the variables exist) to be a feature of distance. It's not a local phenomenon at all. This is why I said you should have a good understanding of the subject before worrying about all the crank "theories" out there.
Lord Keynes predicted that if the Versailles Treaty were imposed on Germany the economic burden would drive Germany into a new war. Guess what happened and why?
Von Mises predicted that socialism would fall because of its incapability to produce and use information supplied by the market which it suppresses. Guess what happened?
As I said economics does not predict micro events though if you ever examined Econometrics you will find many highly predictive models for demand in specific markets. These economists are very well off. Perhaps a check of income levels for economists would answer your curiousity about the earning abilitiy of economists. Of course, I only listed a few but I would suggest that full professors at any major university are paid well into six figures.
Many economists predicted the negative results of the policies which led to 1929 but the politicians and bankers (only a few of whom were economists) would not listen. Today any B.A. economist can tell you that if you restrict the money supply the economy will decline and if you pass restrictive tariffs others will do the same and the economy will decline. Now predicting exactly how much it will decline is almost impossible.
Economics cannot be a field like chemistry or physics because all the variables can never be controlled. Once people and their history enter into the picture all bets are off.
One problem laymen must face is the inaccessible nature of the field today because of the highly mathematical nature of new work (attempting to do what you note- make it highly predictive mathematically). This has reduced the number of economists capable of writing and explaining in a literate manner as did Adam Smith, Mill, Keynes, Ricardo and others. It is also good to be aware that it is a young field of study. It's vast range of study also makes it less predictive since one must study history, finance, statistics, mathematics, logic, psychology, sociology, computer science, political science, organizational theory, labor relations and even have an ability to draw. Were it as useless a field of study as you believe the unemployment rate would be higher than it is.
Too bad you never had an opportunity to have a class with a really brilliant economist you would not feel the way you do if you had.
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