Talk-Polywell.org

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you can see the Andromeda Galaxy with your naked eyes, if you go to a dark site and get dark-adapted. You can see much more with a telescope, but the hazy smudge of the galaxy itself is visible with no instruments at all. And it is 2.3 million light years away, and there is continuous light joining us to it.

The universe cannot be six thousand years old unless your god intended to lie.

Instructions:

Find Cassiopeia, which looks like a giant "W" with one smaller and one bigger V; follow away from the bigger V a few widths of the V, and look for the smudge. A pair of cheap binoculars will show you for sure it's there; then take the binoculars away and admire it. You are seeing light that proves the Babble is a pack of lies. With your very own eyes.

Schneibster:

How old is Middle Earth?

In one sense J.R.R. Tolkien created it, and the universe of which it is a part, in the middle of the last century.

But try telling that to Legolas (assuming you were able to do so) - he himself is hundreds of years old, and has living ancestors thousands of years old. If you found yourself in his world, and tried to explain to him that everything in it had been created a few decades ago by one man, Legolas would likely regard you as a madman. After all, he knew his world was far older.

But none of that means Tolkien lied in inventing a world with history going back many more years than it has existed from our perspective.

I am not expressing an opinion as to whether the universe came into being trillions of years ago, or was created by divine fiat 6000 years ago, or last Tuesday for that matter - but no matter which is the case, the existence of people and things far older than that from our perspective does not equal "God LIES!!!"

horsewithnonick wrote:Schneibster:

How old is Middle Earth?

In one sense J.R.R. Tolkien created it, and the universe of which it is a part, in the middle of the last century.

But try telling that to Legolas (assuming you were able to do so) - he himself is hundreds of years old, and has living ancestors thousands of years old. If you found yourself in his world, and tried to explain to him that everything in it had been created a few decades ago by one man, Legolas would likely regard you as a madman. After all, he knew his world was far older.

But none of that means Tolkien lied in inventing a world with history going back many more years than it has existed from our perspective.

I am not expressing an opinion as to whether the universe came into being trillions of years ago, or was created by divine fiat 6000 years ago, or last Tuesday for that matter - but no matter which is the case, the existence of people and things far older than that from our perspective does not equal "God LIES!!!"

Did you really just argue "there is god because J.R.R. Tolkien?"

I do you the courtesy of believing you have something a bit more persuasive in mind and have simply described it badly. Try again. I promise I read it three times before I wrote this.

LOTR is not written in the skies. The universe coming into being is written in the skies, in microwaves. And we have seen them and finally interpreted them. There's no more corner to back into. It's over.

Your mockery is ill-considered. I have in my life argued your side of the god/no-god debate, and you are doing a lousy job of it.

What I am arguing - without even going into whether or not there are one or more gods - is that the creator of any given universe gets to define, among other things, the apparent age of that universe. Furthermore, any discrepancy between that apparent age and the actual time of creation is no more a lie than is any creative work that describes events occurring before its actual time of creation. To insist otherwise makes you sound unnecessarily petulant.

If the multiverse idea is correct (it is only speculation now) our universe is not very old at all. But it looks very old.

So is the universe's age counted from the origin of the multiverses? Or since its last recreation?

The continuity we see may be an amino acid illusion. It works well enough for most purposes.

MSimon wrote:If the multiverse idea is correct (it is only speculation now) our universe is not very old at all.

Not familiar with "the multiverse idea." I know of at least three. None of them proposes that the universe is older or younger than 13.6 billion years.

MSimon wrote:But it looks very old.

Multiple lines of reasoning lead to the conclusion that it is 13.6 billion years old. Most of them involve data from electromagnetic radiation, so could be termed "looking." I agree 13.6 billion years is "very old."

MSimon wrote:So is the universe's age counted from the origin of the multiverses? Or since its last recreation?

Whut?

If there is an "überverse" it doesn't have time. "Age" is a meaningless concept. It doesn't have space. It has ten dimensions curled up into a Calabi-Yau space of random geometry, and it boils forth Planck-scale fluctuations of random character and constants. One of these became our universe.

MSimon wrote:The continuity we see may be an amino acid illusion. It works well enough for most purposes.

I think you've misunderstood some physics you heard somewhere. I know of a couple ideas that come close to "amino acid illusion."

In fact, what it really is is a slowly decaying low-entropy universe. It's low-entropy because entropy interacts with gravity differently than the other three forces, because gravity's dimensions are all big. Electromagnetism has one small Klein dimension, weak has two, and color has three. Add the four of spacetime and that's ten. Add one more that the individual bubbles can differ in and that's eleven.

That's why string physicists talk about "eleven dimensions." Their theory is an extension of the theory Theodor Kaluza presented to Einstein, in which electromagnetism acted in a fifth dimension. He actually derived Maxwell's Equations from the same source as Einstein himself had derived his own ten field equations that describe gravity.

Einstein couldn't see a way to make it work; the force of gravity itself would bleed away in a fifth dimension, as would the force of electricity.

Years later Klein proposed small dimensions, and this fixed the objections Einstein had thought of. Unfortunately Einstein was dead and no one with his vision then existed. It would be a decade yet before Susskind invented string physics to explain the confinement of the strong force, and string theory would be born.