Tag Archives: the multiverse

Friday Notes (Jun 23, 2023)

There is an old saying about how one’s eyes are sometimes bigger than one’s stomach — something I have to watch out for when visiting a buffet. I think, too, that my imagination sometimes is bigger than my will.

So many thoughts that seem like good ideas but don’t ever go anywhere substantial. Or, perhaps more honestly, I lack the will to put in the effort required. Since I retired, I’ve gotten pretty lazy and self-indulgent.

These Friday Notes posts have been very helpful in reducing my collection of notes, so here we go again with a bunch of random little thoughts.

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Things I Think Are True

Last year I kicked off the new year with a post about open and challenging questions in physics. Those remain open and challenging and probably will for some time. Some of them are very old (and very unresolved) questions; others were from modern scientific efforts and understandings. It’s possible we may never find answers for some.

At some point, for some reason, about a month ago I started making a list of things I thought were probably true; things I believe in. I say “probably” because, as with those open science questions, we don’t know the truth of these things; many are vigorously debated.

Some of what follows pertains to those science questions, some of it is more social observation on my part.

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How Many Big Bangs?

Bang!!

I’m reading Our Mathematical Universe (2014), by Max Tegmark, and I’ll post about the book when I finish. However, he got my attention early with the topic of eternal inflation. That got me thinking about how there are some key unanswered questions regarding the Big Bang and inflation of the non-eternal sort.

Inflation certainly does need some explaining. It may be related to dark energy, as both seem to do the same sort of thing (push space apart). The putative physics of inflation is bad enough; eternal inflation is (in my view) fairy tale physics.

For one thing, eternal? Seriously? Infinite something from nothing?

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