Quote from: Septy on January 12, 2015, 02:29:21 PM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch

The problem with the Big Crunch idea is that it forms an infinite regression. It has to acknowledge a start-point, because if not then there would be an infinite amount of time prior to our being here--which would necessitate our not being here.

It's certainly an interesting hypothesis, though.

That is an assumption, though. What makes you think this just isn't our time to be here? We're pretty close to killing ourselves off and them we will be just another blip in the universe.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on January 16, 2015, 01:38:03 AM

Quote from: Camnator on January 15, 2015, 04:53:14 PM

That is an assumption, though. What makes you think this just isn't our time to be here? We're pretty close to killing ourselves off and them we will be just another blip in the universe.

I'm not saying that. I'm making the point isn't infinite, because if it were we wouldn't be here discussing it. It's not a case of 'not being our time', it'd just be logically impossible.

But why couldn't we be here discussing it? Assuming time is infinite, that doesn't exclude the possibility of us partaking in its reality, it just wouldn't happen all of the time.

Quote from: SexyPiranha on January 15, 2015, 11:07:21 PM

The reaction didn't happen because the action caused it, it happened because it was just the next part in the previously determined sequence.

Is that supposed to explain quantum physics? When electrons seem to move in funny ways even though nothing has pushed it in that direction?

And as far as the second law of thermodynamics goes, shouldn't space and time have an equal opposite? What exactly could that be? Gravity? Matter?

The reaction didn't happen because the action caused it, it happened because it was just the next part in the previously determined sequence.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on January 16, 2015, 02:00:49 AM

Quote from: SexyPiranha on January 15, 2015, 11:07:21 PM

A scientific law is a verifiable statement

No.

OT: That was actually incredibly interesting. Is there any evidence for black-hole production efficacy correlating with life production efficacy? Could you explain the link some more? I'm no physicist.

No?

If you'd like I can link you a non technical paper after class.  In the most general of terms, spacetimes that have laws that allow for maximal black hole production over their lifetimes also allow for stars, so nuclear physics and chemistry. Biology tends to follow from there.

What would it mean in such a reality if it were possible for sufficiently advanced intelligent life to be able to create artificial black holes?

Hear me out here guys. I hate it but I'm about to sound like a crackpot.

A scientific law is a verifiable statement about regularities in behavior of some aspect of existence. Clear?

 Essentially, what we do when we do physics is we partition off some aspect of existence and study and try to describe it in a mathematically precise way, if we don't make this partition we quickly become bogged down due background and interference.  Its physics in a box. Locally this is fine but maybe thinking that this applies globally is fallacious. There's, to my knowledge, no particular reason laws should be eternally unchanging as most people conceive them to be. The math we use to describe them doesn't change, is eternal, but I'm not the Platonist I used to be.

Wait a minute, what about relativity? How can laws change if there is no globally agreed upon sense of simultaneity which can be referenced, no flow of time as it were. If you know anything about the conception of time in general relativity you know that it is essentially a complex-valued dimension. This gives you a block universe, complete determinism. This complete determinism could in some interpretations violate causality. . .
   ie. The reaction didn't happen because the action caused it, it happened because it was just the next part in the previously determined sequence.

This brings me to a new classical theory of gravity that may very well be more fundamental than GR and prove to be more amenable to quantization. This theory is called shape dynamics, it's been developed and worked on by several groups of theoretical physicists including Lee Smolin.

WARNING: What follows is a rundown of my very incomplete understanding of a difficult theory, bring your salt shaker.

It's in agreement with the ADM formulation of GR when it comes to experimental tests(so far, phenomenologists should be hard at work)but allows for some space times that GR doesn't and vice versa. Especially enticing is that it allows for singularities found in GR to be smoothed out, in which case they become wormholes(including the one we run into in the early universe). This is achieved by trading global relativity of simultaneity for conformal invariance(relativity of size) in which case Lorentz invariance should emerge. While the phenomenon of time dilation should be locally preserved this should allow for, at least in some sense, a globally preferred time.

OK that, possibly solves the issue of the absence of a needed a flow of time when it comes to laws that can change. How might they change. . .I don't fucking know, but I think Lee Smolin's idea of cosmological natural selection is on the right track. Essentially posits that every black hole spawns a baby spacetime(remember those wormholes from earlier and yes I'm intentionally avoiding the term universe). When this happens perhaps the laws in the resultant spacetime can mutate or change from the ones in the parent. Spacetimes that make more backholes produce more offspring, making it statistically likely that most of the spacetimes in existence are right for maximal backholes production(fun fact, this could explain the fine tuning problem w/o reference to anthropic principle because as far as we can tell our universe fit for maximal backholes production which coincidentally makes good at producing life).

How those laws change, I don't know. . .you could posit metalaws but then you run into the same question of "why should this metalaw be unchanging?"

I am of course ever aware of the fact that I could be totally full of shit here.