Black Holes, White Holes, and the New Facts

4 Responses to Black Holes, White Holes, and the New Facts

1. swami bv tripurari

   September 3, 2009 at 1:21 pm

   My reading suggests that the multiverse/string theory is wildly speculative at this point. More metaphysics than it is physics. Interesting though. I am not sure if any religion other than Hinduism acknowledges the multiverse idea. Let’s see what LISA says.

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   • Gaura-Vijaya dasa

     September 7, 2009 at 8:36 am

     Yes, in my discussions with mathematicians and physicists, there is no uniform opinion about string theory, quantum gravity etc. There is different interpretation of even the probability and statistics theory(frequentist and Bayesian) used by people. I was talking to a top statistical physics professor from Russia, and he said that the greatest thing to know is that we know nothing. He was disgusted at the fact that many practitioners of science just use complex mathematics and churn out numbers without really listing the limitations of their model, their assumptions etc. I am increasing beginning to feel that interpretation of physics atleast among current cosmologists is similar to philosophical camps of the past. Many people believe that string theory is not good as it has so many free parameters that can be changed to any empirical data. Anyway world is just too deep and it is good to be humbled by it and look for revelation. Only thing is that it would be good if devotees also present their version of the story with humility.

     Here is a small excerpt on String theory
     String theory predicts a large number of possible universes, called the “backgrounds” or “vacua.” The set of these vacua is often called the “multiverse” or “anthropic landscape” or “string landscape.” Leonard Susskind has argued that the existence of a large number of vacua puts anthropic reasoning on firm ground: only universes whose properties are such as to allow observers to exist are observed, while a possibly much larger set of universes lacking such properties go unnoticed.Steven Weinberg[39] believes the Anthropic Principle may be appropriated by cosmologists committed to nontheism, and refers to that Principle as a “turning point” in modern science because applying it to the string landscape “…may explain how the constants of nature that we observe can take values suitable for life without being fine-tuned by a benevolent creator.” Others, most notably David Gross but also Lubos Motl, Peter Woit, and Lee Smolin, argue that this is not predictive. Max Tegmark,[40] Mario Livio, and Martin Rees[41] argue that only some aspects of a physical theory need be observable and/or testable for the theory to be accepted, and that many well-accepted theories are far from completely testable at present.Jürgen Schmidhuber (2000-2002) points out that Ray Solomonoff’s theory of universal inductive inference and its extensions already provide a framework for maximizing our confidence in any theory, given a limited sequence of physical observations, and some prior distribution on the set of possible explanations of the universe

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2. Babhru

   September 6, 2009 at 11:01 pm

   Kaku acknowledges that this is speculation; at the same time, he asserts that emerging evidence points in the direction of the conclusions suggested by this speculation. These folks have found ways to keep science, such as it is, fun (and, yes, funded). After all, you can’t be a muni without having your own philosophy. Such speculation also suggests just how much we don’t know about how things are.

   I have found the speculation about ideas such as string theory, ten or eleven dimensions, and this multiverse idea (which has been around in different forms for years, as we see in Kaku’s reference to Wells’ Invisible Man, and in Abbot’s Flatland) fun myself because it hints at a creation that’s much more interesting than the one we grew up with, one that is beyond the scientists’ ability to describe because they’re really trying to imagine it at this point. And what makes it even more fun is that it leaves room for the kind of poetic understanding of creation we see in the Bhagavatam. It will be interesting indeed to see what we learn from LISA.

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   • Gaura-Vijaya dasa

     September 6, 2009 at 11:50 pm

     Yes if we are little sensitive and don’t dump literal understanding of everything in S.B on scientists, it is possible to see how S.B is speaking about the universe qualitatively, not quantitatively.

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