The Republic of Heaven

i thought there was limited proof of the multiple universe theory...

wombat wrote:Time. Don't get me started on time. First of all, Einstein was wrong. His own theory negates itself: since all motion is relative, nothing can be said to have an exact speed except in relation to everything around it. Therefore, light cannot have one fixed speed, as Einstein postulated. From this was based his calculation of how time must speed up and slow down as objects approach the speed of light.

The point was that every observer measures the speed of light relative to that observer as exactly the same quantity. The speed of light is still relative because Observer A and Observer B will agree on how fast a beam of light is moving relative to themselves, but if they both look at how fast it's going away from Observer A, they'll get different answers.

wombat wrote:In my opinion, time is only a concept we use to measure the rate at which events occur. It is not a quality that can be pictured as a river, or a dimension, or lots of little strings stretched across the universe. The universe is by definition everything that exists--it is infinite, and who knows how many other worlds are out there? Time is infinite, and it cannot be folded back on itself or traveled back and forth through. This is, for many, a hard concept to grasp.

It isn't hard to grasp--it's just wrong. That's exactly the Newtonian idea of time that was disproven both experimentally and mathematically by relativity (and quantum physics, to some extent).

Pyr wrote:i thought there was limited proof of the multiple universe theory...

As far as I know, there's no way to determine which of the several existing quantum theories (of which MW is one) is correct. They all make identical predictions; they just posit different unobservable entities/processes to explain themselves.

Isn't the point of the speed of light that it doesn't change even if you approach speeds close to it and are trying to measure it? Don't you and the people 'standing still' measure the same speed?

Anyway, back to the many worlds discussion...

I think that within the infinite number of worlds, only one subtle knife could exist. Or that, in all but the world Will and Lyra are now in, the important one, the knife simply doesn't work. Or it shatters. And if the infinite worlds thing is too mind-boggling, maybe think about the worlds in neighborhoods. So that in the area of infinite space, the universes form neighborhoods of unlike universes so that Will doesn't accidently step into a universe he has just formed. Like... you can't enter a universe that 'you' exist in.

er the book's multiple universes dont really reflect the real multiple universe theory...

Daniel wrote:

Pyr wrote:i thought there was limited proof of the multiple universe theory...

As far as I know, there's no way to determine which of the several existing quantum theories (of which MW is one) is correct. They all make identical predictions; they just posit different unobservable entities/processes to explain themselves.

I think the limited proof that Pyr is refering to is the minute light experiments which I can't remember well enough to explain, but which I'm sure you've heard off. Hasn't it also been postulated that the weirdness of quantam mechanics is due to interference from paralell universes?

supposedly if you shoot a single photon of light at a series of walls, the first with two openings, somehting like this |||| |||| ||||, there is still an interference pattern, even though there are no other photons for it to interact with...some people say that the photons interacting with photons in other universes.

And some people say that the photon travels through all possible paths and then some of them cancel out, and some just say that the photon is a probability wave, which has no problem making an interference pattern with itself.

and some people say that its proof photons are consceise and remember if another photon comes through...

I don't think that really makes them conscious.

andistar wrote:Isn't the point of the speed of light that it doesn't change even if you approach speeds close to it and are trying to measure it? Don't you and the people 'standing still' measure the same speed?

Yes, but if the people "standing still" try to measure the speed of the light as relative to the speed of the person approaching the speed of light, both will get different answers. Say, the person approaching the speed of light is traveling at light minus 1 kph according to those "standing still". The people "standing still" find that the speed of light relative to the speed of the traveler is 1 kph. However, the traveler will find that the light is traveling away at the speed of light, not 1 kph.