I'm convinced that when I die I'm just going to come back here.

[esse_est_percipi]

DAMN you're a smart motherfucker. Are you secretly a suicidal physicist? Do you have a degree? Have you written papers? Are you famous?

Answer this question: How much does your knowledge of physics and meta-physics contribute to your desire to CTB?

Thanks for thinking that lol
I nearly completed a phd once but stopped due to depression...
I'm just interested in a lot of things
But I'm really a nobody
I just want out

To answer your question, they have nothing to do with my thoughts about ctb

 

[DeadButDreaming]

Does anyone know what could cause the universe to contract? I'm open to all theories, however outlandish.

I read about a theory recently that postulates that universes "reproduce" through black holes. Once a black hole devours enough outside matter it explodes. Some of the matter it vomits will form stars, which will eventually collapse and leave black holes of their own. I don't know how much credibility this theory has in the cosmological community.

I do believe matter is eternal, but don't what to believe beyond that.

 

[Wayfaerer]

Prove Hawking believed in a Big Crunch.

I'll prove he didn't believe in it.

here you go:

Science | AAAS

www.sciencemag.org

@worried_to_death even if it is just infinity towards the future, that doesn't rule out (near-)eternal return. If there was truly nothing before the big bang, then what caused literally nothing to produce something? I still haven't gotten an answer to that but I assume that is beyond anyone's knowledge. It's so confusing and making my head hurt ffs that just can't happen! If there was truly nothing, then I think that leaves the only possibility as simulation theory, right? Perhaps the host universe works in another way?

 

[esse_est_percipi]

Does anyone know what could cause the universe to contract

The density of matter distributed throughout the universe, i.e. gravity.
So the higher the density of matter, the more gravitational attraction to overcome the expansion.

All the observational evidence says that the density of matter in the universe is not enough to slow the expansion down. It will expand forever.

I read about a theory recently that postulates that universes "reproduce" through black holes. Once a black hole devours enough outside matter it explodes. Some of the matter it vomits will form stars, which will eventually collapse and leave black holes of their own

This sounds like lee smolin's idea about cosmological natural selection.

I think it has some credibility.

If there was truly nothing before the big bang, then what caused literally nothing to produce something? I still haven't gotten an answer to that

I have no idea..

I think it's impossible for 'nothing' (i.e. no-thing, an absence of any thing, a big 0, not even an empty space with no quantum fluctuations or particles popping in and out of existence) to 'cause' something.

Maybe the word 'nothing' is misleading, as it tricks the mind to think that it can refer to an ontological condition, when in fact it's just an invented linguistic unit and cannot describe any kind of reality. Maybe there cannot 'be' nothing. It might be impossible. Maybe there always has to be something, even a random gluon popping into a 'void' for a milisecond. But then you get back to the problems about infinity...It's a head spinner, I agree @Wayfaerer

So it does seem that the big bang happened within the wider context of something else, within a wider condition, a condition of possibilities..
Yes, the big bang must have happened within the wider context of something else. That's the most I can say

Maybe the 'wider context' = the 'simulation generator', or 'God' (which is just a placeholder I guess), or a higher 10-D hyperspace, or something...

Your guess is as good as mine

 

[RedDEE]

here you go:

Science | AAAS

www.sciencemag.org

????????????? I don't get it. There's nothing there that says Stephen Hawking supported big crunch. Control+F "big crunch", I get nothing.

That website is someone's interpretation of Stephen Hawking's last paper. Why don't you read his last paper for yourself?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.07702.pdf

Big surprise, the words Big Crunch aren't on his actual paper either.

This shit is so fucking complicated - You cannot lay a blanket statement such as "oh Stephen Hawking's last paper advocated for the big crunch". That's just fucking ignorant dude, come on.

His last paper's work suggests that the multivierse is finite - that's all. In fact, it's advocating exactly what worried_to_death has been saying. That there is no infinite in the entire multi-verse!!!! That's Stephen Hawkings last big revelation that he shared with us, that the multi-verse is not infinite!!!!! And this paper is not be-all end-all. It is a framework that scientists will add to for many years to come. It's a "toy-model". It's incomplete.

The title of the paper is "A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?"

Do you see it? Here, let me help you.

"A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?"

Do you see it yet?
"A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?"

Is the name of the paper, "I, Stephen Hawking, absolutely believe in the Big Crunch". ??? Can you find any quote on the internet ANYWHERE that says "I, Stephen Hawking, believe in the big crunch".

GOD, this willful ignorance shit in this thread is getting way old. This thread is going to make me shoot myself in the head.

 

[TheQ22]

Who cares if it will expand forever or crunch, we'll all be long gone and won't know either way.

Unless like on Red Dwarf time will run backwards and we'll do everything in reverse - we'll die, then run through life until we're born, then there'll be nothing.

Imagine vomiting in reverse.

 

[RedDEE]

Who cares if it will expand forever or crunch, we'll all be long gone and won't know either way.

Unless like on Red Dwarf time will run backwards and we'll do everything in reverse - we'll die, then run through life until we're born, then there'll be nothing.

You kind of answered your own question there.The problem is, if there is a big crunch, that suggests that it may crunch all the way back to the point of a singularity, and then there will be another big bang, possibly creating the exact same universe all over again.

Which is impossible. It's just a scary theory that people take way too seriously. It's kind of the equivalent of 'OoOooOoO, what if the boogie man jumped out from under your bed?'. Kids believe it could be possible, but adults know it's not.

And yes, all you people that are proponents for eternal recurrence are at the stage of a 'child' when it comes to meta-physics and physics.

 

[Superdeterminist]

Who cares if it will expand forever or crunch, we'll all be long gone and won't know either way.

Unless like on Red Dwarf time will run backwards and we'll do everything in reverse - we'll die, then run through life until we're born, then there'll be nothing.

Imagine vomiting in reverse.

Just because we won't be here doesn't mean it can't be interesting to ponder! Also, the claim that we won't be here is debatable - yes, our particular arrangements of atoms won't be, but consciousness may still be.

 

[TheQ22]

Just because we won't be here doesn't mean it can't be interesting to ponder! Also, the claim that we won't be here is debatable - yes, our particular arrangements of atoms won't be, but consciousness may still be.

I just can't believe any of this re atoms and consciousness, etc. I started watching again a program I recorded ages ago - The Brain by David Eagleman - honestly, it's so mind blowing - everything we think is real really isn't, the world we perceive is all created inside our heads, it bears no semblance to the real world, and our brain - it deceives itself and us as well.

What we think is reality isn't, I don't think we can accurately ponder anything.

If you can find that series I recommend watching it, it really is an eye opener. It's too hard to explain, but life might pretty much be some kind of random dream like thing.

 

[Superdeterminist]

I just can't believe any of this re atoms and consciousness, etc. I started watching again a program I recorded ages ago - The Brain by David Eagleman - honestly, it's so mind blowing - everything we think is real really isn't, the world we perceive is all created inside our heads, it bears no semblance to the real world, and our brain - it deceives itself and us as well.

What we think is reality isn't, I don't think we can accurately ponder anything.

If you can find that series I recommend watching it, it really is an eye opener. It's too hard to explain, but life might pretty much be some kind of random dream like thing.

I agree that we are basically hallucinating an experience, that there are many deceptive aspects of our experience, and that the truest appearance of reality is not how we perceive it. Our senses are very limited instruments, and we only have five of them to work with. But I think we have to accept the assumption that reality is real, otherwise it becomes impossible to make any assertions whatsoever. This doesn't mean it isn't a simulation produced by some higher order reality, because that's still a possibility, but it would still be a real simulation.

 

[Wayfaerer]

@RedDEE "Borrowing a concept from string theory, Hawking and Hertog argue that there is no eternal inflation and only one universe. But what they're driving at is something even more basic: They're claiming that our universe never had a singular moment of creation. "

There you go. It's insinuating a big crunch.

 

[RedDEE]

There you go. It's insinuating a big crunch.

No. It's. Not.

You're insinuating a big crunch.

 

[Wayfaerer]

No. It's. Not.

You're insinuating a big crunch.

If the inflation ends (is finite) and there has not been a single moment of creation (no beginning), then what alternatives are there?

 

[RedDEE]

If the inflation ends (is finite) and there has not been a single moment of creation (no beginning), then what alternatives are there?

The heat death of the universe.

Eternal inflation IS NOT the same thing as the Heat Death of the Universe!!!

But I would like to point out - Stephen Hawking didn't advocate for the Big Crunch. He has never said publicly, or in any writings, that he believes there is a big crunch.

In his last paper - he only released the math. He didn't release any opinion on what that math might mean philosophically. And the math he released is incomplete. And the quote that you quoted was not a personal quote from Stephen Hawking, it's somebody else explaining his paper.

 

[Wayfaerer]

In his last paper - he only released the math. He didn't release any opinion on what that math might mean philosophically. And the math he released is incomplete. And the quote that you quoted was not a personal quote from Stephen Hawking, it's somebody else explaining his paper.

So you're saying the journalist is outright lying by stating that this is their (Hawking and Hertog) theory? Not that I would be surprised in the least if they were, they make a living that way after all...

 

[RedDEE]

So you're saying the journalist is outright lying by stating that this is their (Hawking and Hertog) theory? Not that I would be surprised in the least if they were, they make a living that way after all...

I say you're outright lying when you say "Stephen Hawking believed in the Big Crunch".

"Hey guys, there's no heat death of the universe! Everything is going to crunch! Our reality repeats itself forever! Stephen Hawking was a Buddhist!"

 

[Wayfaerer]

@RedDEE Lying implies to make an intentionally misleading comment, I am only going by what information I can gather and when people (more than one) are stating. I am in no state of pouring through god only knows how many abstract mathematical papers. There is absolutely no reason to act like a dickhead.

 

[RedDEE]

I made a picture just for this thread.

 

[ExitStageLeft]

Physicists Think They've Spotted the Ghosts of Black Holes from Another Universe

Weird patches of the sky where the cosmic microwave background radiation looks funny could be signs of long-dead universes, physicist Roger Penrose said.

www.livescience.com

We are not living in the first universe. There were other universes, in other eons, before ours, a group of physicists has said. Like ours, these universes were full of black holes. And we can detect traces of those long-dead black holes in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the radiation that is a remnant of our universe's violent birth.

At least, that's the somewhat eccentric view of the group of theorists, including the prominent Oxford University mathematical physicist Roger Penrose (also an important Stephen Hawking collaborator). Penrose and his acolytes argue for a modified version of the Big Bang.

In Penrose and similarly-inclined physicists' history of space and time (which they call conformal cyclic cosmology, or CCC), universes bubble up, expand and die in sequence, with black holes from each leaving traces in the universes that follow. And in a new paper released Aug. 6 in the preprint journal arXiv, Penrose, along with State University of New York Maritime College mathematician Daniel An and University of Warsaw theoretical physicist Krzysztof Meissner, argued that those traces are visible in existing data from the CMB.

...

Penrose said that the traces aren't of the black holes themselves, but rather of the billions of years those objects spent putting energy out into their own universe via Hawking radiation.

"It's not the black hole's singularity," or it's actual, physical body, he told Live Science, "but the… entire Hawking radiation of the hole throughout its history."

Roger Penrose has always posited that past and future universes will be radically different from ours - but it follows that if the background radiation from these black holes still persist in this universe, that they must have had stars like our universe in order to produce them, and it follows that planets, and thus conventional life, would have existed -- in other words, past universes would probably not have had radically different physical laws, and so were arbitrarily similar to ours.

 

[RedDEE]

I made another picture in this thread's honor.

 

[Wayfaerer]

Physicists Think They've Spotted the Ghosts of Black Holes from Another Universe

Weird patches of the sky where the cosmic microwave background radiation looks funny could be signs of long-dead universes, physicist Roger Penrose said.

www.livescience.com

Roger Penrose has always posited that past and future universes will be radically different from ours - but it follows that if the background radiation from these black holes still persist in this universe, that they must have had stars like our universe in order to produce them, and it follows that planets, and thus conventional life, would have existed -- in other words, past universes would probably not have had radically different physical laws, and so were arbitrarily similar to ours.

Really? Wow, that's crazy. Past and future universes as in other big bangs or universes that split off from a multiverse (if such a thing is more than figurative)? What really gets me is that it seems these physicist never seem to be able to reach a consensus on what happens and I keep hearing different things. I wish I were born 50 years later just so I can get some god damned answers!

 

[TheQ22]

 

[ExitStageLeft]

Really? Wow, that's crazy. Past and future universes as in other big bangs or universes that split off from a multiverse (if such a thing is more than figurative)? What really gets me is that it seems these physicist never seem to be able to reach a consensus on what happens and I keep hearing different things. I wish I were born 50 years later just so I can get some god damned answers!

You probably won't, tbh. A lot of the differences in interpretation of the evidence is largely philosophical, and physicists, to my layman's understanding, do not typically receive rigorous philosophical educations.

Now, as I mentioned, Penrose has always posited past universes with wildly different physical laws than ours, but if there are black holes in them, then there were stars, and fusion and everything else required to produce them must have been operative. If this cosmic background radiation is the product of black holes in 'dead' universes, then it follows that they must have been produced by stars. If they were produced by stars, then it follows that these (or at least one) past universe had comparable physical laws to ours. If past universes existed which had comparable physical laws, then it follows that there will be successive universes with the same. I exist in this universe - or at least my conceptual field of awareness - and so it follows to me, logically, that it could exist in another universe to come after my death, so long as 'my' biological and neurological matter are also produced in it, following a 'hard' reading of generic subjective continuity/existential passage.

 

[Superdeterminist]

View attachment 43225

These are so good

 

[RedDEE]

Past and future universes as in other big bangs or universes that split off from a multiverse (if such a thing is more than figurative)?

OH MY FUCKING GOD. There are so many things wrong with this sentence, I don't even... I don't even.. OKAY. Listen.

1. There is only one multiverse. There are not multiple multiverses. There is not "a multiverse". There is THE multiverse. The multiverse is the TOTALITY OF ALL EXISTENCE.


2. Therefore, nothing can 'split off' from the multiverse. Nothing can be separate from the multiverse! How can ANYTHING be separate from EVERYTHING?

 

[Wayfaerer]

@RedDEE No, you misunderstand me. I am not saying there is more than one multiverse. Granted, I suppose "branched from" would've been a better choice than "split off."

 

[ExitStageLeft]

Of course, as per the Penrose discovery, if there were 'prior' universes, and Copenhagen is true, doesn't it follow any multiverse bounded with that universe would have been different (at least numerically) from any bounded with this one? Thus actually producing separate, distinct multiverses?

 

[Wayfaerer]

I don't think that there's any such thing as free will. But if the universe returns to an arbitrarily identical state (A) enough times, such that it includes you, it follows that it might well return to identical states which are identical in every respect except for your own actions (A+1, A+2, etc.).

Okay, I see now, I had misunderstood what your position was. That is an interesting take on eternal return with a hard indeterminist interpretation and I had heard something similar before about how we would experience every possible outcome from having great lives to horrific ones and everything in between. I don't know if it would really be worth it to have good lives but in others get abducted as a child for example. It has some terrible implications but at the very least it offers variety.

 

[ExitStageLeft]

Okay, I see now, I had misunderstood what your position was. That is an interesting take on eternal return with a hard indeterminist interpretation and I had heard something similar before about how we would experience every possible outcome from having great lives to horrific ones and everything in between. I don't know if it would really be worth it to have good lives but in others get abducted as a child for example. It has some terrible implications but at the very least it offers variety.

Yes, this is my position. I think it makes for a decent metaphysics. I agree, too, with the concept of 'existential passage' (Wayne Stewart)/'generic subjective continuity' (Tom Clark), with the proviso that I do not believe that this generic continuity of 'my' perceptual awareness emerges or can emerge again into any other body and circumstances but my own from the first possible moment of awareness. This moment will be a moment shared with 'my' awareness in this current iteration, and so it follows that 'I' will experience again. I'm agnostic about its 'worth'. In a great life, I'm sure I'd be happy to do it over again; in a shitty life like mine presently, it seems horrific. I think the effect balances out.

One thing of which I am certain is that "I" can never experience nothingness, and so experience can never end for "me". There must always be a subjective point of view for me, because nothingness, by definition, does not exist.. The simplest and easiest way I can think of to reconcile this is eternal return within an indeterminist framework. Nothing transfers except for the sense of "I", and it will do so immediately upon true death (per Stewart/William James' "un-felt time gap").

It might require hundreds of trillions of iterations of the unvierse to achieve a history identical up to the point of my conception, and yet, if it is the case that the universe has repeated once, I think this is probably what will happen. And yet, each time "I" exist, "I" will have free will within that milieu.

 

[someone02]

I'm at the point that I don't care what's coming next. Nothingness, reincarnation, heaven or hell. I don't care. I just want to end THIS life.

I'm at the same point, but I'm really scared of having to live a next life.