Meh, no such thing as a god. Until you can find an argument that argues for a deity that works for god X, but doesn’t work for the (expletive deleted), you have nothing.

Please tell me the rules on the use of this expletive.

Thank you for your answers to those questions, we all answer them in different ways and choose to place our faith in different reasons behind reality.

However, I bring your attention to my use of the interrogative adverb “why” - here I was not seeking a mechanism, I am interested intensely with the mechanisms of ‘why’ or ‘how’ things happen but that is another question.

Here the purpose of asking these questions was to seek a comprehension, the deeper reason, of why it should be so…..

Garth

If you’re a deist or pantheist, of course, the arguments get more subtle. But those aren’t that common.

That said, the four questions:

1. Why is there something rather than nothing - “What breathed fire into the equations to make a universe for them to describe?”

2. Why is the universe comprehensible?

3. Why is the one observable universe propitious for life and not otherwise?

4. Why did chemistry evolve into intelligent consciousness?

1. Why is there something rather than nothing? Well, the simple answer to this is that we don’t know, but there are some tantalizing hints. One thing that we do know, for example, is that if a certain type of particle can exist in a region of space-time, then that particle necessarily pops in and out of the vacuum. It might potentially be the case that the same is true for a universe like our own: the mere [i]possibility[/i] of existence may force existence to occur. But, of course, we only have hints that this may be the case, it may not be. The fundamental objection to this question, however, is there merely recognizing that we don’t know something does not indicate a deity.

2. Why is the universe comprehensible? Because it’s real. It’s just that simple: in a real universe, the law of non-contradiction must apply. That is to say, any sufficiently-specific statement about reality cannot be both true and false. This simple truth is necessary for a real universe, and is all that is needed for the universe to be comprehensible.

3. Why is the universe habitable? This question is nonsense. Were it not habitable, we couldn’t observe it. Might as well ask why we live on Earth instead of Mercury.

4. Why did chemistry evolve into intelligent consciousness? Here we know bits and pieces of the answer. It’s to be found in evolution. There are many gaps in our knowledge of course, but we’re piecing it together. As with the first question, though, simply not knowing is no reason whatsoever to assume a deity.

The important thing about this attitude is that I do not have to look for a unifying simplicity in physics, which I suspect does not exist. I only have to figure out how the “mess” of what we know about physics can fit together, and assume that God takes care of the rest.

The new concepts I would introduce would be defined solely by the assumption that they support the known scientific facts. I would not need to ascribe any independent properties to them — that is where most crank theories go wrong.

It seems that the anthropic nature of our universe leads us to have to make an act of faith - in either an unobservable ‘creator’, in which only one creation - this fecund universe - can be observed, or in an unobservable multiverse, in which only one member of the ensemble - this fecund universe - can be observed.

There are four questions that science leaves open:

1. Why is there something rather than nothing - “What breathed fire into the equations to make a universe for them to describe?”

2. Why is the universe comprehensible?

3. Why is the one observable universe propitious for life and not otherwise?

4. Why did chemistry evolve into intelligent consciousness?

My own personal choice is to put my faith in a God who is the author and guarantor of the laws of science.

Garth

especially considering that it is an “undeniable fact” that the universe appears to be under an anthropic constraint that is so strong that Lenny and Richard are going to find god if the landscape fails!!!

I think they already have. What they haven’t found is guts. They cannot come out and say “Being religious doesn’t make me an ID”, because their colleagues won’t believe them. So they pretend to be atheists.

If GR and QM are exact, the universe can be considered to be a mathematical “dream” in which we don’t exist but are too stubborn to admit it.

But if GR and QM are merely approximations to something more realistic, one might ask Who could set up such a clever approximation.

We may have an answer to this question as far as our own faith, but we do not want to discuss it, nor should we have to. However, in the face of intimidation by paranoids looking for a hidden agenda in our theories, we may be tempted to do one of the following:

1. Give up our brainpower and become religious fanatics.
2. Give up our scientific honesty and become revisionist classical alchemists.
3. Give up our personal honesty and become fake atheists.

I choose none of the above.

I think the burden is in the dark matter camp to explain the correlations found by Milgrom. Modified GR does not say there is no dark matter at all. It simply says that dark matter is not as prevalent as usually assumed. And, more importantly, it permits one to ask, on a case-by-case basis, whether a given galaxy or cluster contains dark matter, and it finds yes for some and no for others.

There are, of course, some apologists who try to use modified GR to deny all dark matter. But they are not the ones whose theory I’m asking about.

There is a discussion in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Fringe_theories concerning possible alternative words for “fringe. The thought is (probably mostly by me for obvious reasons) that “fringe has become a pejorative remark. There is currently an essay on the subject that may become policy, so some of us are trying to make it so that Wikipedia can be seen as fair to mainstream and alternative subjects alike.

What terms do you use to characterize subjects that are far off the mainstream without being insulting or insinuating that they are somehow flawed?

In advance, I thank you for the input.

Tom Butler

When we talk about the state of an atom or molecule, we are usually talking about the state of the system in terms of its energy levels, or some other well defined basis.

The internal state of a water molecule, as in you example, cannot be copied. It is simply impossible, being ruled out by the structure of quantum mechanics (see the wikipedia article).

You seem to be confusing the idea of copying a quantum state with the idea of entangling quantum systems.

Contrary to your assertion, it is very clear that not all information can be copied.

As regards your other comments, all I can say is that I doubt LSD will help you factor large numbers, simulate quantum systems or perform secure key distibution.

If you choose to believe that quantum mechanics is nonsense, and that the world is fundamentally classical, you are simply ignoring an enormous amount of evidence gathered over the last 100 years. If you choose to ignore this, then I’m not going to bother trying to convince you. It’s like arguing over creationism.

Joe, it is certainly worthwhile trying to see if what I am claiming could be inconsistent, and I can see how having some kind of replication could set off an alarm re the no cloning theorem. But I only need that certain very specific information be replicated, and even the no cloning theorem allows that. I don’t need any kind of general copying mechanism, so I don’t think there is any violation of the no cloning theorem.

Also, the information representing matter should probably behave like quantum information. But the information being replicated in Self-Replicating Space-Cells is information representing the laws (including all the Standard Model constants etc) and there is no particular reason why this information would have to behave like quantum information.

I’ve started working through you paper, but haven’t finished it yet.

My concern about replication is that there is way to replicate quantum information. I’m sure that you are aware of the no cloning theorem, but if not, see the link in my last comment to Qubit.

Basically my concern is that, since general quantum states cannot be replicated, then the fundamental units of information, whatever that may be, must also be unclonable. The reason for this is that quantum information is surely some special case of whatever this general information is, just as classical information is a special case of quantum information.

It is possible to come up with a process which clones some subset of quantum states, and that is exactly what copying classical information does. You’re photocopier, even if it made perfect copies could not copy a superposition of two documents.

So this leads me to conclude that if the information in your model can always be copied, then it must essentially be classical information. The problem this causes for me, though, is that it would seem to cause problems with Bell’s inequality, since it would correspond to a hidden variables model of quantum mechanics.

That said, I’m only on page 3 of your paper by now, so I may have misinterpretted what you were saying.

I’ll still add a few comments here.

Since some kinds of replicators exist (e.g. DNA and computer files) I expect that there cannot be an argument against models on the grounds that such models can give rise to replicators. If anything there is an argument against models that cannot give rise to replicators.

Whatever kind of mathematics ends up modelling physical reality, that mathematics may not end up looking much like what is currently recognizable as `quantum’ or `classical’ but could be something quite different. So I don’t think there is a quantum/classical dichotomy that covers all possibilities.

Also locality in a fundamental model need not correspond exactly to locality in the familar space that emerges from it.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_cloning_theorem for an explanation.