The Grand Design

[Lucky]

The Washington Post today has an excellent review of the new book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. These things are often above my intelligence level, but the review is user friendly and says the book is as well- imagine a science book without a single equation!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302118.html

[stevestacks]

The Washington Post today has an excellent review of the new book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. These things are often above my intelligence level, but the review is user friendly and says the book is as well- imagine a science book without a single equation!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302118.html

Awesome! I LOVE this kind of stuff!

Sex for the mind!

Thanks for pointing it out Lucky!

[TampaYankee]

It seems the older I get the more universes multiply. Fortunately for all, my remaining years are counted among the finite.

The more universes that appear, the more my head hurts. My head hurt even when there was only one universe. Was it in steady-state or expanding? Simple enough question but rooted in the mathematics of tensor analysis and definitve observations yet to be achieved. And then there were those pesky Quasars, unimaginable points of unbelievably high energy loitering at the edge of the observed universe. On top of that they were receeding at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. What's up with that? What we knew best was that we knew little. That made my head hurt too.

Now we have Hawking emerging from the Brief History of Time to shed light where only the darkest of shadows existed in my youth. He and his coauthor seem to have the uncanny knack to describe the unimaginable in a straightforward conversational manner. Somehow I think when I actually try to ponder what they tell me, my head will start to hurt. Maybe in our universe we are destined to repeat states over and over?

Call me lucky ( )that in my waning years I may be standing on the veranda of ultimate enlightenment as revealed by Messrs. Hawking and Mlowdinow. Whether ultimtely valid or not, I expect their explanation to be a smashing good read for someone of my ilk. I look forward to it, but I will have my aspirin handy.

[Lucky]

I still wonder what the practical effect of it all is. So there are a lot of universes.How is this meaningful to my life, limited as it is to this one universe and unable to travel to the others?

Now I do enjoy learning more about the universe, but practicality usually wins out. Or are you going to surmise that in death we simply move on to the next universe?

[TampaYankee]

I still wonder what the practical effect of it all is. So there are a lot of universes.How is this meaningful to my life, limited as it is to this one universe and unable to travel to the others?

It's food for the soul -- no more, nothing less. It's what separates homo sapiens from all other creatures that inhabit this planet. Just as Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Michaelangelo's David, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Mozart's Requiem, or understanding the dusty ancient bone fragments culled together to inspire the notion of a prehuman called Lucy and what she means to our understanding of who we are and from where we came; these all inspire to lift us above the plane of practicality. So does searching for an understanding of our place in the universe... or universes.

This human nature to ponder beauty and rhythm and color and abstract notions of the universe feeds our soul not our stomach. Fortuantely for homo sapiens, life is so much more than basic sustenance, even though our gardens must grow vegetables as well as flowers.

[lookin]

Imagine a universe chock-full of Ralph Woods lookalikes, sensual South American sauna boys, and romantic Asian twinks lusting for an evening of theater in the company of a worldly guide; a place where seasoned men of the desert are treated like royalty, and where your money is no good at all.

It's worth noting that Stephen Hawking rarely leaves his wheelchair, let alone boards a plane or rocket ship; yet he has given us all a view of worlds we may one day see for ourselves.

This very afternoon, with any luck.

[Lucky]

Imagine a universe chock-full of Ralph Woods lookalikes, sensual South American sauna boys, and romantic Asian twinks lusting for an evening of theater in the company of a worldly guide; a place where seasoned men of the desert are treated like royalty, and where your money is no good.

It's worth noting that Stephen Hawking rarely leaves his wheelchair, let alone boards a plane or rocket ship; yet he has given us all a view of worlds we may one day see for ourselves.

This very afternoon, with any luck.

LOL. I like the first universe, but it looks like it takes the second one to find it!.

[AdamSmith]

It's worth noting that Stephen Hawking rarely leaves his wheelchair, let alone boards a plane or rocket ship; yet he has given us all a view of worlds we may one day see for ourselves.

SHIT!

It's also worth noting that Hawking is now on his, I believe, third wife. For all that.

Life is worth living, every moment.

[seattlebottom]

I like the idea of alternate universes where a decision made, or not made, cause an entire timeline to be created.

[TampaYankee]

I still wonder what the practical effect of it all is. So there are a lot of universes.How is this meaningful to my life, limited as it is to this one universe and unable to travel to the others?

Now I do enjoy learning more about the universe, but practicality usually wins out. Or are you going to surmise that in death we simply move on to the next universe?

Maybe you should be asking what is the philosophical implication of all of this to me?.

I admit I liked a single universe much better. I understood that. It was an easy extension of the intuitive 'world view'. I'm in it, I know more or less where I am located realitve to everything else, ignoring the stick concept of warped time-space of course.

Now with this plethora of universes in the multiverse, where do I fit? Am I even unique? Where is my universe located relative to all other universes? Does any of that matter. If laws of physics are not generally immutable, but only immutable in this universe, what does that say about how things really work, in general, i.e. in other unverses?

It was a blow when the Earth was no longer the Center of the universe. It was a blow when the Solar Sytem was discovered to be only a mediocre run-of-the-mill star with a collection of orbiting junk around it, that is replicated probably millions, maybe billions of times in our galaxy. Our galaxy, a decent but not unusal example of billions of those. Now, our Universe?

Where does it stop? What does this say about our uniqueness as a species. Are we special or just one example of an infinity of forced accidents by different laws of physics? Is travel between universes possible? How can that be if the laws of physics differ in each? If it is then what does that say about our concept of 'Universe'?

I admit I do not understand any of the implications other than to note, if true, we likely have no special standing in the mulitverse. That does not mean life is not worth living or celebrating or revering; just that we are pretty much in it for ourselves while we enjoy life and passing it on. It will only last a brief instant in the scale of multiversal time. But who knows, it probably occurs in some form or other created and dashed in instants in the mulitverse like neverending popcorn kernals popping -- just part of the random background noise of physics and chemistry. Or maybe to the contrary, those laws of physics that give rise to life may be the rare random event that proves the exception. Can we ever know? My head is starting to hurt.

Yes, I preferred the single universe. It felt so much more homey. Or is that homier?