Remember when a signal was detected in the cosmic microwave background’s polarization? It was used for every purpose from bashing Christians to claiming that gravitational waves strengthen the case for a multiverse. Indeed, National Geographic considered the waves evidence of a multiverse. (But when people are determined to believe something, they find evidence everywhere.) Now this:
Maybe it was just dust. From New Scientist:
An imprint left on ancient cosmic light that was attributed to ripples in spacetime – and hailed by some as the discovery of the century – may have been caused by ashes from an exploding star.
In the most extreme scenario, the finding could suggest that what looked like a groundbreaking result was only a false alarm. Another possibility is that the stellar ashes could help bring the result in line with other cosmic observations. We should know which it is later this year, when researchers report new results from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite.
Curiously, Rob Sheldon
predicted something like this at Evolution News & Views:
Or the polarization might be a result of needle-shaped dust that reflects the CMB differently depending on angle. Again, this was seen in the experiments preceding BICEP2 so the telescope was pointed away from most of the galactic dust lanes. Aerosols in the air might cause the effect, just as blue sky gets polarized. So BICEP2 was stationed at the South Pole to get the best view of the out-of-galactic, out-of-contamination, away-from-galaxy view of the CMB.
When the data was processed, the signal was still there, and stronger than the scientists had expected. This led to the hope that perhaps it wasn’t an artifact of matter in the universe, perhaps it was actually a property of the CMB itself. More.
Sheldon’s view is that, using Occam’s razor, dust should have been the first hypothesis.
The logic of the multiverse explains why it ended up being the last.
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Well good for Dr. Sheldon. I believe he unfairly got hammered pretty hard by Luke Barnes for going against the flow like he did.,,,, For myself, not being that well versed in the theoretical underpinnings that led to the prediction, nor having the wherewithal to discern the just how much weight should be given to these particular empirical findings, it has been somewhat of a wait and see attitude for me. Which is, I guess, the exact position that we are now in.,,,,, Another thing that has been of particular interest for me to learn in all this, is to learn just how quickly materialists are to embrace findings that would lead to the epistemological failure of science itself. Bruce Gordon talks a bit about that here:
Another voice here:
Even Max Tegmark admits ‘almost’ as much here:
Which one to retire? HMMM how about atheistic materialism which led to the epistemological failure (i.e. the insanity) in the first place?
It is also interesting to point out that Dr. Craig’s Kalam Cosmological argument actually receives a boost if the gravitational waves are found to be correct since Dr. Craig has been arguing from Vilenkin’s mathematical proof, which takes inflation into account, all along:
along that line, here is another voice that agrees with Dr. Craig that this, if it tuns out to be true, adds evidence for the beginning of the universe:
Thus no matter how the evidence turns out (my bet is with Dr. Sheldon) the atheists still can’t seem to catch a break no matter which way it turns out.
a few ‘Easter’ notes:
Verse and Music:
The day will come soon when the gravity waves idea will be seen for what it is, pure Einsteinian crackpottery, on a par with the flat earth hypothesis.
Soon, people will realize that Isaac Newton was right to assume that gravity was instantaneous, which makes it a non-local phenomenon. As we all know, nonlocality is anathema to the Einsteinian universe, what with Einstein’s bone-headed condemnation of spooky action at a distance.
Mapou, in a way I am glad that I am not a scientist. I don’t have to worry about what concept is going to go south tomorrow and what I can really believe and trust in – it is bad enough to live in the instability of politics and finance. For me when it comes to knowledge to an extent ignorance is bliss.
As my dad said many years ago when he was alive “believe only 1/4 of what you hear and 1/2 of what you see.” When I was trucking before retirement I was listening to a retired pastor on the radio say that when he graduated from seminary that he thought that he knew everything but toward the end of his life he could truly say that he knew nothing. The world around him grew over the years and with it all the gray area where answers are nebulous and very murky.
As a mechanical engineer once told me everything is putty. So in a sense everything tends to be undefined in the strictest sense and we are left knowing much less than we thought we knew. To me science seems to be quite arrogant at times and as the movie line puts it they think that they are one step ahead when they are actually two steps behind.
I’m not sure if anyone is still reading and commenting on this thread, but if so, I’d like to get some input on something.
I’m having a discussion with someone elsewhere regarding the multiverse, and this guy is convinced that multiverse models capable of accounting for the fine-tuning of the universe were developed in isolation from any consideration of the fine-tuning and were not at all motivated by the findings of fine-tuning, like the cosmological constant. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. This seems to me to be a rewriting of history. As far as I’ve been able to tell based on the comments of the very people who developed and believe in these multiverse models, they came about directly as an attempt to account for the unusual features and values of our universe, including the fine-tuning of its initial conditions. This is the impression I get from Rees, Guth, Linde, Susskind, Tegmark, and more. Paul Davies seems to suggest the same thing. And the paper, “Multiverses and physical cosmology” (G.F.R. Ellis, U. Kirchner and W.R. Stoeger, Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town), says this:
These are the types of comments I find everywhere I look. And I mean, when talking about the types of multiverse models that could possibly account for fine-tuning in our universe, we’re mostly talking about inflationary multiverses, which are models within inflationary theory, which was itself developed to account for certain values observed in our universe. And Chaotic Inflation, which seems to be the primary model that would allow for the other universes to have different values for their physical laws and constants, seems to have admittedly been proposed as an alternative to standard inflation specifically because the standard model of inflation didn’t properly account for most of the fine-tuning.
Am I missing something here? Because based on all the information I’ve been able to find from all these supporters of the multiverse, the multiverse models that could account for fine-tuning (as opposed to the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics) were specifically developed to account for fine-tuning, and this other guy I’m talking to seems to be building some kind of alterna-history of the relevant science.
HeKS, as far as I know you are basically right save for, I believe, the 10^500 multiverse of string theory which was developed to try to reconcile General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. But even there the 10^500 multiverse was developed not from what was directly observed empirically, but from what was desired theoretically.
HeKS, this it might be of interest for you. Multiverses are basically generated purely in the imagination of atheists/materialists to try to increase the probabilistic resources so as to account for the fine tuning of this universe for not only life, but intelligent life like us.
But what is interesting to point out in this is that not only do atheists have no empirical evidence for a multiverse, save for in their fertile imagination, to explain why the universe is so finely-tuned for life, and for higher life such as ourselves in particular, but in such imagined scenarios, where anything must happen in order to explain what we do see happening, then, by necessity, ANYTHING THAT CAN HAPPEN AND WILL HAPPEN in such a unconstrained scenario,,
Moreover, whereas the atheist who postulates, without empirical warrant, a infinite multiverse simply to get away from the Theistic conclusions for why the universe is the way it is, Theistic conclusions he is unwilling, or unable, to accept for whatever severely misguided reason, the Theist, on the other hand, does have empirical warrant for his belief that this universe originates, and is sustained, by God from a ‘highest’ transcendent dimension. i.e. That there actually is ‘higher dimensions’ above this one, as the Theist holds, is verified by Special Relativity, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. And these higher dimensions are even verified by direct observation in Near Death Experience testimonies. Which is a claim the atheists are no where near making.
To lay this evidence out, ‘if’ a hypothetical observer were to accelerate to the speed of light, time, as we understand it, would come to a complete stop for the hypothetical observer. To grasp the whole ‘time coming to a complete stop at the speed of light’ concept a little more easily, imagine moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light. Would not the hands on the clock stay stationary as you moved away from the face of the clock at the speed of light? Moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light happens to be the same ‘thought experiment’ that gave Einstein his breakthrough insight into e=mc2.
Some may think that time, as we understand it, coming to a complete stop at the speed of light is pure science fiction, but, as incredible as it sounds, Einstein’s infamous thought experiment has many lines of evidence now supporting it.
This following confirmation of time dilation is my favorite since they have actually caught time dilation on film
(of note: light travels approx. 1 foot in a nanosecond (billionth of a second) whilst the camera used in the experiment takes a trillion pictures a second):
This higher dimension, ‘eternal’, inference for the time framework of light is not only warranted by empirical evidence but is also warranted by logic, because light is not ‘frozen within time’ yet it is shown that time, as we understand it, does not pass for light. The only way this is possible is if light is indeed of a higher dimensional value of time than our temporal time is. Otherwise light would simply be ‘frozen within time’ to our temporal point of observation.
Another line of evidence that supports the inference that ‘tomorrow can exist simultaneously with today and yesterday’, at the ‘eternal’ speed of light, is visualizing what would happen if a hypothetical observer were to approach the speed of light. Please note, at the 3:22 minute mark of the following video, when the 3-Dimensional world ‘folds and collapses’ into a tunnel shape as a ‘hypothetical’ observer moves towards the ‘higher dimension’ of the speed of light, (Of note: This following video was made by two Australian University Physics Professors with a supercomputer.).
Of related note to this is ‘flatland’:
And, we have ‘observational’ evidence for both time dilation and tunnel curvature from Near Death Experience testimonies. Here are a few quotes for time dilation:
And here are a few quotes, from near death experience, for tunnel curvature to a higher dimension:
,,,Yet, even though light has this ‘eternal’ attribute in regards to our temporal framework of time, for us to hypothetically travel at the speed of light, in this universe, will still only get us to first base as far as quantum entanglement, or teleportation, are concerned.
Light and Quantum Entanglement Reflect Some Characteristics Of God – video
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4102182
Science vs God: Bryan Enderle at TEDxUCDavis – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn7YQOzNuSc
That is to say, traveling at the speed of light will only get us to the place where time, as we understand it, comes to complete stop for light, i.e. gets us to the eternal, ‘past and future folding into now’, framework of time. Moreover, hypothetically traveling at the speed of light in this universe would be instantaneous travel for the person going at the speed of light. This is because time does not pass for them, yet, and this is a very big ‘yet’ to take note of; this ‘timeless’ travel is still not instantaneous and transcendent to our temporal framework of time (as quantum teleportation is), i.e. Speed of light travel, to our temporal frame of reference, is still not completely transcendent of our framework since light appears to take time to travel from our temporal perspective. Yet, in quantum teleportation/entanglement of information, the ‘time not passing’, i.e. ‘eternal’, framework is not only achieved in the speed of light framework/dimension, but is also ‘instantaneously’ achieved in our temporal framework. That is to say, the instantaneous entanglement/travel of quantum information is instantaneous to both the temporal and speed of light frameworks, not just the speed of light framework.
Information teleportation/travel is not limited by time, nor space, in any way, shape or form, in any frame of reference, as light is seemingly limited to us in this temporal framework. Thus ‘pure transcendent information’ (in quantum teleportaion experiments) is shown to be timeless (eternal) and completely transcendent of all material frameworks. Moreover, concluding from all lines of evidence we now have (many of which I have not specifically listed here); transcendent, eternal, infinite information is indeed real and the framework in which ‘It’ resides is the primary reality (highest dimension) that can exist, (in so far as our limited perception of a primary reality, highest dimension, can be discerned).
Moreover, as with time dilation and tunnel curvature, we have observational evidence from a Near Death Experience for this ‘highest’ dimension.
This following video interview of a Harvard Neurosurgeon, who had a Near Death Experience (NDE), is very interesting. His NDE was rather unique from typical NDEs in that he had completely lost brain wave function for 7 days while the rest of his body was on life support. As such he had what can be termed a ‘pure consciousness’ NDE that was dramatically different from the ‘typical’ Judeo-Christian NDEs of going through a tunnel to a higher heavenly dimension, seeing departed relatives, and having a life review. His NDE featured his ‘consciousness’ going outside the confines of space/time, matter/energy altogether to experience ‘non-locally’ what he termed ‘the Core’, i.e to experience God. It is also interesting to note that he retained a ‘finite sense of self-identity’, as Theism would hold, and did not blend into the infinite consciousness/omniscience of God, as pantheism would hold.
There are many more nuances that can be drawn out, (such as the hellish nature of eternity at blackholes and Christ reconciliation of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics) but what I have listed so far HeKS should be more than sufficient for getting the point across that the Theist has far more going for him, in terms of empirical evidence, to verify his belief in higher dimensions above this one than the atheists has for infinite multiverses parallel to this one.
Verse and music:
@bornagain
“(of note: light travels approx. 1 foot in a nanosecond (billionth of a second) whilst the camera used in the experiment takes a trillion pictures a second):”
How does that work, exactly? Wouldn’t the camera have to be faster than light to take so many pictures of it or am I confusing the fact it’s taking trillions of pictures per second for actual speed?
@bornagain
Also, I’ve looked around and quantum entanglement and teleportation still confound me, but I’m fairly certain that neither is instantaneous, and that things using them simply travel at 10000 times light-speed.
Hi BA77. Could you please tell me how to find the video of the NDE of the John Star you mention in #7, please? I’ve tried, but to no avail. Thank you.
VunderGuy, you will have yo dig into the engineering details (if they are available on the web) to see how they devised a camera that can take a trillion pictures a second. I take their word for it since they are showing the results right there in the video I linked.
Entanglement is indeed instantaneous. As far as I know, all conjectures trying to show that entanglement travels at some finite speed have been overturned. Teleportation uses entanglement to accomplish teleportation of atoms and photons, with the caveat being that the decoding bits used to measure the teleported photons or atoms must be transmitted over classical channels.
Axel, I did not quote John Star from a video but from this website:
http://www.near-death.com/expe.....rch13.html
@bornagain77
So, what you’re saying is that, while REALLY small things can be teleported or entangled, trying to transport something, like say, a human, is HOW far away, in your opinion, or, at least, how difficult?
VunderGuy:
I have a video on that topic:
New Breakthrough in (Quantum) Teleportation – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xqZI31udJg
Quote from video:
“There are 10^28 atoms in the human body.,, The amount of data contained in the whole human,, is 3.02 x 10^32 gigabytes of information. Using a high bandwidth transfer that data would take about 4.5 x 10^18 years to teleport 1 time. That is 350,000 times the age of the universe.”
also of note:
(A fun talk on teleportation – Professor Samuel Braunstein –
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~schmuel/tport.html
VunderGuy, also in relation to your mistaken belief that entanglement travels at some finite speed, it is interesting to note that note only is entanglement ‘instantaneous’ in regards to space time, but that entanglement can also ‘reach back in space-time’ to effect the state of a particle a time in the past:
Quantum physics mimics spooky action into the past – April 23, 2012
Excerpt: According to the famous words of Albert Einstein, the effects of quantum entanglement appear as “spooky action at a distance”. The recent experiment has gone one remarkable step further. “Within a naïve classical world view, quantum mechanics can even mimic an influence of future actions on past events”, says Anton Zeilinger.
http://phys.org/news/2012-04-q.....ction.html
“If we attempt to attribute an objective meaning to the quantum state of a single system, curious paradoxes appear: quantum effects mimic not only instantaneous action-at-a-distance but also, as seen here, influence of future actions on past events, even after these events have been irrevocably recorded.”
Asher Peres, Delayed choice for entanglement swapping. J. Mod. Opt. 47, 139-143 (2000).
You can see a more complete explanation of the startling results of the experiment at the 9:11 minute mark of the following video
Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser Experiment Explained – 2014 video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6HLjpj4Nt4
In the preceding experiment, besides the centrality of ‘consciously knowing’ to the experiment, it is also important to note that free will is of primary importance in the experiment as well:
What Does Quantum Physics Have to Do with Free Will? – By Antoine Suarez – July 22, 2013
Excerpt: What is more, recent experiments are bringing to light that the experimenter’s free will and consciousness should be considered axioms (founding principles) of standard quantum physics theory. So for instance, in experiments involving “entanglement” (the phenomenon Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”), to conclude that quantum correlations of two particles are nonlocal (i.e. cannot be explained by signals traveling at velocity less than or equal to the speed of light), it is crucial to assume that the experimenter can make free choices, and is not constrained in what orientation he/she sets the measuring devices.
To understand these implications it is crucial to be aware that quantum physics is not only a description of the material and visible world around us, but also speaks about non-material influences coming from outside the space-time.,,,
https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/content/what-does-quantum-physics-have-do-free-will
How Free Will Works (In Quantum Mechanics) – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMp30Q8OGOE
In other words, if my conscious choices really are just merely the result of whatever state the material particles in my brain happen to be in in the past (deterministic) how in blue blazes are my choices instantaneously effecting the state of material particles into the past?,,, These experiments from quantum mechanics are simply impossible on a reductive materialism (determinism) view of reality!