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Parallel Universes


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Scientific American has a free, online article on Parallel Universes thats quite interesting. Parallel Universes

 

intro:

 

"Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on.

The idea of such an alter ego seems strange and implausible, but it looks as if we will just have to live with it, because it is supported by astronomical observations. The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here. This distance is so large that it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your doppelgänger any less real. The estimate is derived from elementary probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate. In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere. There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices. "

 

Personally, I've never been big on supporting an infinite universe. In an expanding universe, wouldn't that mean an infinite amount of space between each atom? SA cites the recent WMAP results: "COSMOLOGICAL DATA support the idea that space continues beyond the confines of our observable universe. The WMAP satellite recently measured the fluctuations in the microwave background (left). The strongest fluctuations are just over half a degree across, which indicates--after applying the rules of geometry--that space is very large or infinite (center). (One caveat: some cosmologists speculate that the discrepant point on the left of the graph is evidence for a finite volume.) In addition, WMAP and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey have found that space on large scales is filled with matter uniformly (right), meaning that other universes should look basically like ours."

(here's the full sized image)

 

I havn't read the whole thing yet, just thought I'd give a heads up.

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Perhaps there is a universe where Zarkov and Adam both have PhDs in theoretical physics and are respected members of the scientific community!

 

Theres also a universe where fafalone makes bad grades, has a two-digit IQ, and plays tennis well. :D

 

imagine that!

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Parallel universes are opposing to ours. Inf parallel universes are created in the infintly small period of time. in one, you might kill a flie that its kids might have annoyed you during a science quiz, causeing you to fail and having your IQ drop in school standards, which in turn will make you mad, causing you forget somethings, lowering you IQ, and making you stupid, all in parallel universes. Like in one parallel universe I may have an IQ less than 200, and be good at typing stuff so people will think I know what I'm talking about.

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Originally posted by MajinVegeta

OH! OH! I love multiuniverse theory (which is basically parallel universes)! Richard Feyman came up with it you know. It can be used to exlplain several paradoxes like the Grandfather Paradox.

 

Yea, you mentioned in another thread that if you were to go back in time, an alternate universe would branch off. I wonder if there would ever be any mathmatical way to figure all this stuff out, or if it will always be pure speculation.

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This isn't the parallel universe picture i've been presented in the path. I've only seen that "new" universes are created when any event occurs with probability<1. This only deals with one universe, and is thusly misleading, no?

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Originally posted by fafalone

Parallel universes are based on alternate probabilities, those things are simply not possible, which the exception of me playing tennis well, which takes place in this universe.

 

I don't believe that this particular theory is based on alternate probabilities. This theory seems to be based on infinite space and infinite configurations of matter. So if an alternate self decided to create a message for me on an indestructible, eternal medium and I devised a way to travel at the speed of light, theoretically it's possible for me to read that message should I be able to find it.

 

Come to think of it, it would be theoretically possible to meet my another self. Another way of looking at it is that the self is eternal.

 

This is quite a different theory of a Parallel Universes to the MWI theory proposed by Hugh Everett.

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Originally posted by MajinVegeta

That would violate the first law of thermodynamics. Each time you go to the past, you create a new history, so you can't quite "gather" yourself. and going back in time is paradoxical.

You are WRONG - see Star Trek: Voyager "Relativity" for irrefutable PROOF.

 

J/k, obviously.

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Originally posted by blike

Yea, you mentioned in another thread that if you were to go back in time, an alternate universe would branch off. I wonder if there would ever be any mathmatical way to figure all this stuff out, or if it will always be pure speculation.

If you mean mapping alternate reality pathways, predicting percentage chance of one path occuring instead of another, recording alternations between universes etc, then yes it would be possible to calculate assuming we could monitor all the factors.

 

Unfortunately we can't, however if we had a way to create pre-destination paradoxes in a controlled environment we could at the very least get a baseline for future calculations.

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Originally posted by Sayonara³

If you mean mapping alternate reality pathways, predicting percentage chance of one path occuring instead of another, recording alternations between universes etc, then yes it would be possible to calculate assuming we could monitor all the factors.

 

you would also probably need a computer with larger than the entire computational power of the universe.

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Originally posted by Radical Edward

you would also probably need a computer with larger than the entire computational power of the universe.

That would rather depend on the order of detail you needed, and how many alternations you wanted to map per event.
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Originally posted by MajinVegeta

The computer, should it have a sense of logic? It would only formulate POSSIBLE functions, right? It certainly wouldn't predict someone 'building' a wormhole out of a finger nail or something ludicrous.

If you were trying to predict all the possible but logical outcomes of timeframe X after period Y, yes.

 

If you were to use a pre-destination paradox as your starting point and work backwards to timeframe X then you would already have a computational constraint based on the outcome of the paradox, which would still allow for computation of alternations but would keep them in the realm of the 'not ludicrous' by providing probabilistic outcome targets for your software.

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Originally posted by Raider

This isn't the parallel universe picture i've been presented in the path. I've only seen that "new" universes are created when any event occurs with probability<1. This only deals with one universe, and is thusly misleading, no?

 

Are you sure the math presented to you implied that new universes would be created? That would mean there is an "outside" to this universe, and that this universe is really not infinite in size, but has an infinite boundary. Maybe what you may have misconstrued was actually talking about open time loops?

 

this is very interesting, none the less.

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Originally posted by Physics5000

Too many Paradoxes, not possible

You're going to have to do better than that.

 

Don't forget than in actual physical realities, triggering a paradox is just as difficult as resolving a paradox (in temporal terms both events are the same as the direction is meaningless).

 

In any case I don't see what paradoxes have to do with parallel universes or near-infinite possibility systems.

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Originally posted by MajinVegeta

Are you sure the math presented to you implied that new universes would be created? That would mean there is an "outside" to this universe, and that this universe is really not infinite in size, but has an infinite boundary. Maybe what you may have misconstrued was actually talking about open time loops?

 

this is very interesting, none the less.

 

the universe could be inf. large AND still have space outside. The space outside would also have to be inf. large and be some type of antimatter.

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