(OOC: I have an answer, and thought I'd share it with all, for future reference.

Shannara said thus:


So, when posting a link which may have questionable, but not R-rated content, including naughty adverts, simply label it clearly as such and perhaps put it in spoiler tags. I've gone ahead and done that for silveroak's link, since some of the adverts were... inappropriate (funny thing, on a sci-fi forum but you know, whatever.)

M-theory has 11 dimentions (various forms of string theory had 10, they were unified into M theory with 11), the idea of multiple universe actually comes from an alternative explanation to the orrigins of the cosmos to the big bang in which a collision between universes initiated a 'holographic ripple' in the brane described by M theory for our universe. Like everyone has agreed thus far it is entirely hypothetical and untested with teh tests which can support or crush it scheduled for 2012 and 2014. *however* the fact remains that it is a mathematically sound theory which takes into account all existing data, which differs tremendously from 'whatever wild hair rubber science model we want to pull from a Star Trek episode' and it does have some very concrete limits as to what is or is not possible if it turns out to be correct.

Mathematical Soundness, however, isn't in itself evidence that such is the case.  The major difference between Maths and Sciences is that one deals in Proofs and the other Evidences.

There are mathematical models that are able to add conjectural variables while still remaining an accurate model of the evident world.  However, this is only proof of its own self-consistency, and not evidence of the variable's actual existence.

Sound proofs of how Exotic Matter such as a Tachyon (matter lacking mass) would interact with existing forces or even other Exotic Matter, exist.  Yet it not made evident that Tachyons exist, despite knowing how they might interact with reality if they did.

These proofs are certainly a way of finding out the proper test to perform (Large Hadron Collider noted).



And I hope I'm agreeing with you when I say that if any outcome of the experiments match the models, then Math did its job; we may not know if triangles exist on Alpha Centauri Prime, but if they do we know exactly how they're shaped.

Really there are three 'levels' of model-
conjecture 'it's matehmatically sound'
hypothesis 'it's mathematically sound and fits all available data which is not insignifigant'
theory 'mathematically solid, fits all available data which is not insignifigant and some fo which was predicted by teh model before the data was collected'

There is never prof that any given model is correct, in fact it is a given that there will be flaws. The goal of science is to arrive at models which acurately predict outcomes, Truth is for religion. However science does get itself into a bit of a snit when two wildly divergent theories seem to be equally valid models. tehre are some general guidelines for which one to follow (simplest model is most usefull, no needlessly multiplying entities, etc.) but when those are also either equal or at least apparently so (Niether M theory based orrigins nor the Big Bang theory could be considered a simple model by any strech of the imagination as they currently stand) then they start pouring over the model for differences in prediction that have yet to be uncovered.

Though personally I think they have the expiriments backwards, since in 2014 they plan to look for gravity waves with a satelite in investigating the cosmology for evidence of which orrigin did occur while in 2012 they are using teh large Hadron collider to try and replicate events in the extreemly young universe. That seems to me  abit like deciding to clone the dinosaur before investigating the fosilized tracks to see if it was a herbivoire or a carnivoire...

Umm, actually mathematical models do use proof, and go by the following levels:

1. Statement - A proposition that is either true or false, and nothing else; also known as Truthbearers.

2. Conjecture - A statement that is unproven but appears correct and has not been disproven.

3. Theorem - A statement which has been proven on the basis of previously established statements.

4. Axiom - A proposition that is not proved or demonstrated but considered to be either self-evident, or subject to necessary decision. Therefore, its truth is taken for granted, and serves as a starting point for deducing and inferring other truths.

The String "Theories", are Mathematical Models, and as such rely on proofs, not evidence.

String theories are scientific theories, and are being discussed in that context.

Since they have not as of yet been tested Scientifically/Emperically, only proven Mathematically, you cannot really call them scientific theories.

They are Mathematical Models formed with Mathematical Proofs that may or may not be evident and are as of yet untested.

In the scientific context, String Theory is as much a theory as Intelligent Design Theory.  Neither meets the qualifications.  To differentiate between them absolutely requires you to speak in Mathematical contexts.
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Additionally, Msg #36, posted by you, seems to conflict with your statement that things are being discussed in a scientific context rather than a mathematical context, since despite being incorrect about the matters you refer to 'levels' in a mathematic context, not a scientific one.

In the scientific context, String Theories are speculation, currently lacking any hypotheses that have been tested.

Not trying to make an argument ad-nauseum, but I thought I'd just reiterate my point; if you're speaking about them as if they were already proven, you can only be speaking in a Mathematical context.

Theories in a scientific context are not proven, they have merely 'stood the test of time' and weight of evidence. M-theory is decades old and as it stands complies with all available evidence, and furthermore is refered to in teh scientific community at large as a theory. I do not personally decide the dividing line between tehory and hypothesis in science, but as it is continually refered to as a theory and has been for over a decade, I will refr to it as such, though I am cognizant that some will choose to disagree at this point in time. I have never claimed that it has been proven, nor is it the only theory which fits teh evidence in question, and yes it is still a speculation. However since this entire thread began with that specualtion as it's founding principle I felt it was necessary to maintain the limits of the model in question.

Which is why String/M-theory are not theories.



You seem to be under the impression that "standing the test of time" is just being a really old idea.  If it hadn't been testable those past decades, it wasn't standing any "test of time".

So to summarize, your first point is an argument from age, and the second point is an argument from popularity. Both are fallacious.



Intelligent Design has been continually referred to as a theory, doesn't make it so.  And just because you choose to call it a Theory doesn't make a difference on whether or not you can discuss it in a scientific context; all it does is add "Theory" to the proper name.

I.E. Calling something a God doesn't make it a God, nor does calling it a God while referring to whether or not it likes pudding or pie doesn't make the conversation have a theological context.



It has been proven.  The problem is they've all been proven, and they all disagree with eachother, and there's no evidence or test to make things go one way or the other.  That's why they're Mathematical, not Scientific, models.



That's what I'm saying; and the limits are that these models are Mathematically proven, not Scientifically evident.  Theorems, not Theories.

http://science.discovery.com/v...awking-m-theory.html

Science chanel documentry, in which *Phsyicists* are describing M theory as a promising *scientific* theory.

Good enough for me, I don't know what your criteria is, but this is being described *by leading physicists* as a *scientific* theory in *physics*. Which is not something you can say for creationist models.

I love this book :) Apparently I'm not the first person to think of this. There are some scientist Edward Harrison was addressing the question as to how we had the tremendously good luck of a universe existing with exactly the right physical characteristics necessary to support life (since the odds of that are something like 1 in 10^220). Harrison suggested simply that universes can be both naturally and artifically created, and noted what was already accepted, that a created universe will largely accept the characteristics of the parent universe (in cases where there is a child-parent relationship). Some of those universes capable of supporting intelligent life will support creatures intelligent enough to create child universes - which will have the same life-supporting characteristics, spawn new life, and so on.

In this case, not counting the First Cause problem, the probability of life-supporting universes becomes quite manageable - in fact, they become the baseline, rather than the abberation. By Harrison's hypothesis, the universe having an intelligent creator isn't just possible, it's extremely likely.

The downside is that this hypothesis doesn't comment on whether travel from parent to child is possible, so it could truly be the absent watchmaker scenario.

I've always had a problem when people said things along the lines of "the probability of our universe existing in just such a way as to..." because their estimates of the probability are pure speculation.  In order to put any kind of number on it, even just a ball park figure, we'd have to know something about all the possible ways a universe could be created (I mean all the possible configurations, not all possible methods), and I don't think anyone has any idea about that.  Could there be a universe with a different gravitational constant?  I don't know, and I don't think anyone else does either.  If there could be, are all values of the constant equally likely, or are some more likely than others?  Again, I don't think anyone had any idea on that.  All the statements about the probability of a universe such as are seem to be based on an assumption that a certain number of physical constants are just randomly selected out of a hat when the universe starts, and I don't think there's any reason to think that is or must be the case.

As for the cascade of universes idea, I think there are a lot of questionable assumptions (not necessarily wrong, just that we have no idea whether they're right or not) involved with the argument.  It's possible, but it's also possible that it's completely off, and I don't think we, at present, have any way of determining which is the case.  Nothing wrong with speculation and thought experiments (in fact, there's a lot good about them), but it's important to keep in mind that that is what they are.

This fellow was studying the bonds of carbon atoms, and looking specifically at the number of different possible configurations, and which ones would permit the carbon chemistry necessary for life.

To a degree, you can guess if these other things could exist. For example, if the gravitation constant were lower, you wouldn't have stars and planets form. If it were higher, stars would collapse and wouldn't create the constant stream of nuclear energy required for life.

It seems that quite a few cosmologists agree that, without knowing a particular cause for the universe, the odds of the complex chemical interchanges that we categorize as life being possible is, statistically, miniscule.

But again, unless we have some idea of how many other ways it could be, it's pure speculation.  Yes, there are plenty of constants, laws, etc., that if different would make life (at least as we know it) impossible in our universe.  But is it even possible for them to have been different?  Could the strong force have been stronger?  Could gravity have been weaker?  Are the constants just randomly selected at the start of the universe from any possible number?  Or are they related in someway that we don't understand that limits the possible "choices"?  Or something else altogether?  I don't think anyone has any real evidence for any of these at this point.  Which doesn't mean it's not worth thinking and speculating about, but I think it's important to keep in mind what we don't know when we're making such statements.

There was an episode of the family guy I remember seeing commercials for a long time ago, in which the guy said to his dog "My alphabits are sending me a message!  They say 'oooooooo'!"  To which the dog replied "those are cheerios."  I think there's a parallel here to the universe thing here.  Yes, if you're eating alphabits cereal, the odds of getting a bowl full of just O's is next to astronomical.  But if we're eating cheerios, it's pretty much guaranteed.  I feel like people making statements about the likelihood of our particular universe are assuming we've got a really unlikely bowl of alphabits, without considering the possibility that we've actually got a pretty standard bowl of cheerios.

Another way of putting is is that a sample of 1 universes gives us pretty much no information about the statistical likelihood of that universe (except that it's non-zero).  It's overstepping, in my opinion, for anyone to make any kind of claims about the probability of our particular universe, since we simply don't have enough information to say anything beyond "the probability is non-zero."

It's a bit like someone saying "we rolled ten thousand dice, and they all came up with numbers between 1 and 6", and someone else saying "Ten thousand dice, and not a single 20?!  That's so incredibly unlikely, something must be going on!" without actually knowing if they were rolling d6s or d20s (or something else).  Yes, if you rolled ten thousand d20s and they all came up 6 or lower, that would be incredibly unlikely.  But it's guaranteed if you roll ten thousand d6s (or d4s for that matter).  If all you see is the numbers rolled (not the actual dice), and you assume the dice were d20s, you'll reach some conclusions that won't square with the reality that they were actually d6s.  To make meaningful statements about the likelihood of the given roll you need extra information about the dice, or more generally, about what types of rolls are possible.  For the case of our universe, I don't think we have that kind of information, and I think many people (some cosmologists included) are a bit careless in making those kinds of statements without sufficient knowledge to base them on.

On the other hand we don't know how many universes there are either. To put this in the frame of reference of evolution (which we have a lot more information about) people frequently talk about how improbable human evolution is, but an alternative is that there could be senteint descendants from wombats sitting arround talking about how improbable *their* existance is. Or of course for millions of years there were dinosaurs who didn't debate their existance and relative probability at all. The fact we exist in a low probability situation proves nothing if measured solely against a large number of more or less equally improbable outcomes.

In response to Tycho's statement - we probably can't get an exact number, obviously. But I don't see anything intrinsic to the conditions necessary for life that would seem to make those conditions intrinsic to the creation of a universe. There's no reason a universe must have concentrated energy or mass, or be anything but hydrogen. Even if we eliminate things which would make the creation of the universe impossible, say an overly strong gravitational pull, I simply cannot imagine that the conditions necessary for life get more than even a 1% probability. And if it did, then the question is, what are the odds of universe creation being so closely linked to the conditions of life? And you're back where you started, with questioning odds which are hugely unlikely.

Simply said, if you were to randomly create a universe, even without any knowledge of what defines the laws of that universe, expecting it to be able to harbor life would be hugely unlikely.


Silveroak's point of course is very strong. Let's say yes, there's a 1 out of 10^220 chance of life existing. But if you have 10^600 universes, most likely you will have life in at least one of them. But this is still post hoc ad hoc logic, and nothing about it invalidates the question. If the answer is, there are infinite universes, then that is the answer (although that then begs the question - infinite universes implies infinite different sets of laws, which would seem to imply that SOMEONE somewhere has figured out how to create and jump between universes - feeding back to the original conclusion of the thread).

actually the othe rpoint is that even if life is incredibly improbable, it exists. Maybe there was an equal chance of a universe that was completely hydrogen (actually there may have been a universe that was completely hydrogen for a while) then we got lucky, but the hydrogen universe simply wouldn't question it's existance.
There is also some possibility that over *very* long periods of time many of the 'constants' we observe in the universe may not be so constant, in which case life and intelligence may be a question of *when* the numbers line up rather than *whether*.

No, nor do I.  But to assume that therefor everything is completely random, with any possible number being equally likely for any constant is a very large leap.  You're taking a lack of information, and trying to use it as positive information about likelihood.


Isn't there?  Do you know that?  I certainly don't.  It's possible, but I have no idea of the probability of it being true.  Again, you're going from "I don't know of any reason why X should be true" to "therefor we should assume X is false" which is a big leap.


I think that's a failure of imagination then. ;)  I think you're stuck in the mindset that physical laws and constants are randomly selected from a large set of possible values, when we have no evidence that that is the case (and also no evidence that it's not, unless you count the existence of this universe).  Remember, we're going off a sample size of one here.  To look at one single event, and to assume that's its an astronomically unlikely outlier seems very dubious to me.  Think of it this way:  A friend hands you a bag full of tiles, and tells you to draw on at random.  You do so, and pull out a tile with the number 7 on it.  Do you think "A whole number?!  No way!  What are the odds, that out of all the numbers in the universe, I'd get a whole number?!  Pretty much nothing, really!"  Yes, if your friend had a bag full of real numbers, and you happened to pick a whole number, that'd be incredibly unlikely.  But without seeing any other tiles, does it make sense to assume that the bag is full of real numbers, rather than just whole numbers?  Likewise, if this universe is the only one we know anything about, does it make sense to assume that it was randomly picked out of a vast set of which it was a very non-representative member?


Again, you're assuming a degree of randomness for which we have no evidence (for or against).  Your conclusion (that our universe is incredibly unlikely) is entirely a result of your assumption (that universes are created with completely random parameters, of which the vast majority don't support life), but you have no evidence for that assumption.


Really?  Do you know enough about creating universes to really make that claim?  I certainly don't, and I'd wager pretty heavily that no one else around here does either.  We don't know what is involved with creating a universe.  We don't know what ranges of values are possible to randomly select.  It may be that there's just not that many ways to make a universe.  It may be that selecting one variable determines all the others at the same time.  We simply don't know enough (because we basically don't know anything) about the rules governing the creation of universes to make any kinds of claims about the probabilities of any given universe.

Again, I want to stress that I'm not saying you're wrong, just that what you're saying is based entirely on an assumption that we have no knowledge of.

Define universe, give 3 examples.

Depending on how we define our terminology the laws of physics as we are used to them may not be necessary for life. Take the World of Warcraft, in this virtual universe there is life, though not as we know it puts Star Trek to shame in this case. Now you could argue that the World of Warcraft isn't a 'real' universe. Why? Because we created it on a computer? Why would we assume that anyone who created our universe (if it was created) would see our universe as any more real than we see WoW?

Those who believe in God will probably believe that you cannot prove the existence of God in this lifetime.  If you could, one of the primary purposes of this life (the finding and exercising of faith) would become irrelevant, thwarting the purposes of God.  And since God can't be thwarted, he cannot be proven to exist in this lifetime (at least not through any objective test).

Heath, you might notice that the model of God being proposed as proven for this exercise departs radically from teh judeo-christian one. In fact it pretty well isolates the 'creator' component from any spiritual signifigance and attempts to prove by calculation that there is a logical inescapability to the existance of an entity which creates universes. Hopelessly flawed in some ways, though if e use WoW as a valid universe completely proven in others...

The Book of Mormon gives a proof for God -- it says to follow the scientific method, basically.

1. Form a question.  Does God exist?
2. Do background research (with an open mind).  Read the Book of Mormon.
3. Form a hypothesis.  God exists.
4. Test with an experiment.  Ask God whether or not he exists (pray).
5. Analyze results and draw a conclusion.

I ssy that God is real.  He has answered my prayers.  Add my testimony to that of many others who say that they know, one way or another, that God is real, that he does exist.  Consider this as part of step two, background research.

So if you did prove the existence of God, would it therefore disprove the existence of God?

(For the record, 'those' does not apply to 'all'. While I think proving God is highly unlikely, I don't think it's impossible.)

Unfortunately, that's a horrible test, and it's pretty nonacademic to suggest using it.

In the end, it's a lot like Intelligent Design; it's trying to pass itself off as scientific, but it really isn't.



This is not a scientific question; you haven't defined the terms being used.  What is a God, and what qualifies as existing?



Background research refers to accessing the collection of previously published and unpublished information about a site, region, or particular topic of interest and it is the first step of all good archaeological investigations, as well as that of all writers of any kind of research paper.

This usually requires reading more than a single book, and it does not mean doing it with an open mind.



This is a bad scientific test, for two reasons:

1. There are too many unknown variables.
2. There are too many axioms assumed without having tested them.
3. You are using a test sample of one.

Because of this, the significance of any result is absolutely meaningless; the resulting confidence interval is very low.



I performed the exact same test that you did.  There was no answer.  By your own test, the sample size of two shows your results to be inconclusive.



That would be very bad and unscientific background research.  Testimony like this is bad evidence for the same reason the above test is poorly performed; its results are not demonstrable.

You have to believe the results of others, you can't simply see for yourself.

If I tell you I put iron in chlorine, and the iron caught fire and dissolved, not only can I repeat the experiment and have you witness my results every single time I do it, but you can also do the same experiment alone and always get the same results, whether or not you believe me beforehand.

Thus, the result of drawing a conclusion from the above tests, and the nature of the research that led up to it, leads one to the conclusion that the researcher is acting on a biased presumption, and was merely looking for something to reaffirm the conclusion they've already made.
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personal testimony is at best anecdotal evidence, which is only useful for inspiring a question, not answering it conclusively.

The Book of Mormon occasionally gives a personal testimony for the Mormon God, though usually only if you're a christian in the first place.

Let me read to you from my BOM ;)

Bart, If I ask teh flying Spaghetti Monster if he exists, and get back a positive result, does that mean the flying spaghetti monster exsts, or that I should be locked away in a rubber room with a straitjacket (okay, honestly that would be a bit extreeme, but it illustrates the point).
There is a difference between objective evidence and subjective evidence.
Now if every time I pray to teh flying spaghetti monster I enter a clean room with clean clothes and no food and walk out with tomato sauce stains on my knees, *that* is evidence. Even if you don't get the same result by praying to the flying spagheti monster it is something measurable and quantifiable. It wouldn't be scientifically proven (not being repeatable by everyone) but it would be real evidence.