Natural Science Forum / Physics / New Theories / July 2004

http://www.geocities.com/tulsidas_ramayan

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp?forum=philosophy&show=0&cid=90905

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Sitaram/message/1477

"If your ship is sinking," he said to me, "why not get a lifeboat and leave?"
We earthlings can't do this just yet, Kaku observed. That is because we are a
mere Type 1 civilization, able to marshal the energy only of a single planet.
But eventually, assuming a reasonable rate of economic growth and technological
progress, we will graduate to being a Type 2 civilization, commanding the
energy of a star, and thence to being a Type 3 civilization, able to summon the
energy of an entire galaxy. Then space-time itself will be our plaything. We'll
have the power to open up a "wormhole" through which we can slip into a brand
new universe. (see below)

===================

Sitaram comments:

Something which I read recently pointed out that everyone frets about the
thought that they will not live forever, yet no one seems to mourn the obvious
fact that there was an eternity in the past, prior to our birth, in which we
did not exist.

Here are some excerpts from what I have been reading this morning, July 3,
2004.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2096491/entry/2096506/

http://slate.msn.com/id/2096491/entry/2096507/

http://slate.msn.com/id/2096491/entry/0/

Until recently, the ultimate destiny of the universe looked a little more
hopeful-or remote. Back around the middle of the last century, cosmologists
figured out that there were two possible fates for the universe. Either it
would continue to expand forever, getting very cold and very dark as the stars
winked out one by one, the black holes evaporated, and all material structures
disintegrated into an increasingly dilute sea of elementary particles: the Big
Chill. Or it would eventually stop expanding and collapse back upon itself in a
fiery, all-annihilating implosion: the Big Crunch.

Which of these two scenarios would come to pass depended on one crucial thing:
how much stuff there was in the universe. So, at least, said Einstein's theory
of general relativity. Stuff-matter and energy-creates gravity. And, as every
undergraduate physics major will tell you, gravity sucks. It tends to draw
things together. With enough stuff, and hence enough gravity, the expansion of
the universe would eventually be arrested and reversed. With too little stuff,
the gravity would merely slow the expansion, which would go on forever. So, to
determine how the universe would ultimately expire, cosmologists thought that
all they had to do was to weigh it. And preliminary estimates-taking account of
the visible galaxies, the so-called "dark matter," and even the possible mass
of the little neutrinos that swarm though it all-suggested that the universe
had only enough weight to slow the expansion, not to turn it around.

Now, as cosmic fates go, the Big Chill might not seem a whole lot better than
the Big Crunch. In the first, the temperature goes to absolute zero; in the
second, it goes to infinity. Extinction by fire or by ice-what's to choose? Yet
a few imaginative scientists came up with formulations of how our distant
descendants might manage to go on enjoying life forever, despite these
unpleasant conditions. In the Big Chill scenario, they could have an infinity
of slower and slower experiences, with lots of sleep in between. In the Big
Crunch scenario, they could have an infinity of faster and faster experiences
in the run-up to the final implosion. Either way, the progress of civilization
would be unlimited. No cause for existential gloom.

The dark energy theory spells inescapable doom for intelligent life in the far,
far future. No matter where you are located, the rest of the universe would
eventually be receding from you at the speed of light, slipping forever beyond
the horizon of knowability. Meanwhile, the shrinking region of space still
accessible to you will fill up with a kind of insidious radiation that would
eventually choke off information processing-and with it, the very possibility
of thought. We seem to be headed not for a Big Crunch or a Big Chill but
something far nastier: a Big Crackup. "All our knowledge, civilization and
culture are destined to be forgotten," one prominent cosmologist has declared
to the press.

Cosmology is not really a science at all since you can't do experiments with
the universe. It's more like a detective story. Even the term that is sometimes
applied to theorizing about the end of the universe, "eschatology" (from the
Greek word for "furthest") is borrowed from theology.

"The most plausible answer," Dyson said, "is that conscious life will take the
form of interstellar dust clouds." He was alluding to the kind of inorganic
life forms imagined by the late astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle in his 1957 science
fiction novel, The Black Cloud. "An ever-expanding network of charged dust
particles, communicating by electromagnetic forces, has all the complexity
necessary for thinking an infinite number of novel thoughts."

.... interrupting this thread of excerpts to insert passages on Hoyle

===========================

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hoyle.htm

The Black Cloud dealt with one of Hoyle's favorite subjects - intelligent life
in the universe. The story starts in the year 1964. At Mt. Palomar Knut Jensen
finds that a giant cloud of interstellar gas is approaching the solar system.
Professor Chris Kingsley from Cambridge calculates that the cloud will come
between the Sun and Earth, which will lead to a global catastrophe. Hoyle
follows the work of the scientist and reactions of politicians who first want
to keep the cosmic threat a secret. Hoyle's attitude to civilians is ironic;
only the scientist can coolly analyze the situation. The effects of the cloud
are disastrous when it arrives in the solar system. But it turns out that the
cloud is alive, and it starts to communicate with the scientist - it has
opinions about music, the roles of men and women, evolution, and the origin of
headaches. When the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union try
to destroy it with missiles, it sends them back. The cloud leaves the solar
system, encouraging humankind to create more geniuses. - The story also aroused
the interest of Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Laureate in Physics in 1945, who told
once to Hoyle that he had studied it together with Carl Jung, who wrote a
critical essay on it. "I didn't have the temerity to explain that I thought I
was only writing a story. But I had an intelligent life form in the story that
didn't think in words, a form that had to learn words before it could
communicate with man. Pauli knew all about Schrödinger's cat, about arguments
over the origins of mathematics, while Jung knew about human emotions. So it
was evidently the problem of what lies behind words that had been occupying
them." (from Home is Where the Wind Blows by Fred Hoyle, 1997)

"The astronomer Fred Hoyle once remarked to me that it was pointless for the
world to hold more people than one could get to know in a single lifetime. Even
if one were president of United Earth, that would set the figure somewhere
between ten thousand and one hundred thousand; with a very generous allowance
for duplication, wastage, special talents, and so forth, there really seems no
requirement for what has been called the global village of the future to hold
moire than a million people scattered over the face of the planet." (Arthur C.
Clarke <aclarke.htm> in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds, 1999)

(Sitaram comments:  The entire world population during the time of Plato, circa
300 BCE, is estimated at 6 million).

Jung addendum
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cjung.htm

Jung wrote: "The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his
own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a
human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he
is "man" in a higher sense - he is "collective man," a vehicle and moulder of
the unconscious psychic life of mankind." (from 'Psychology and Literature',
1930)

The American writer F.Scott Fitzgerald mentions Jung several times in Tender is
the Night (1934). When his wife Zelda had a psychotic episode in late 1930,
Jung was Fitzgerald's alternative choice for consultation.- Hermann Hesse's
novel Demian was inspired by Jung's theory of individuation. Among Jung's
patients in the 1930s was James Joyce's daughter Lucia, who suffered from
schizophrenia. Jung had earlier written a hostile analysis of Ulysses, and
Joyce was left bitter at Jung's analysis of his daughter. He paid back in
Finnegans Wake, joking with Jung's concepts of Animus and Anima. In his essay
'Ulysses' (1934) Jung saw Joyce's famous novel as an exploration of the
spiritual condition of modern man, especially the brutalization of his
feelings.

.... end of Hoyle insert

==============

....continuation of original thread of excerpts

How, I objected, can we really imagine such a wispy thing, spread out over
billions of light-years of space, being conscious?

"Well," he said, "how do you imagine a couple of kilograms of protoplasm in
someone's skull being conscious? We have no idea how that works either."

Practically next door to Dyson at the institute is the office of Ed Witten, a
gangly, 50-ish fellow who is widely regarded as the smartest physicist of his
generation, if not the living incarnation of Einstein. Witten is one of the
prime movers behind superstring theory, which, if its hairy math is ever sorted
out, may well furnish the Theory of Everything that physicists have long been
after. He has an unnerving ability to shuffle complicated equations in his head
without ever writing anything down, and he speaks in a hushed, soft voice.
Earlier this year, Witten was quoted in the press calling the discovery of the
runaway expansion of the universe "an extremely uncomfortable result." Why, I
wondered, did he see it that way? Was it simply inconvenient for theoretical
reasons? Or did he worry about its implications for the destiny of the cosmos?
When I asked him, he agonized for a moment before responding, "Both."

Would they come around to George Bernard Shaw's conclusion (reached by him at
the age of 92) that the prospect of personal immortality was an "unimaginable
horror"? Or would they feel that, subjectively at least, time was passing
quickly enough? After all, as Fran Lebowitz pointed out, once you've reached
the age of 50, Christmas seems to come every three months.

There was a meeting held at  the Vatican a few years back on the future of the
universe: "There were about 15 people, theologians, a few cosmologists, some
biologists. The idea was to find common ground, but after three days it was
clear that we had nothing to say to one another. When theologians talk about
the 'long term,' raising questions about resurrection and such, they're really
thinking about the short term. We weren't even on the same plane. When you talk
about 10^50 (ten to the FIFTIETH POWER) years , the theologians' eyes glaze
over. I told them that it was important that they listen to what I had to
say-theology, if it's relevant, has to be consistent with science. At the same
time I was thinking, 'It doesn't matter what you have to say, because whatever
theology has to say is irrelevant to science."
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