(Nov 1, 2017 03:54 PM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ][...] So what I mean by anomalies are 'prodigies', unexpected things that violate our expectations of how nature behaves. UFO's, ghostly apparitions, religious miracles and all kinds of 'Fortean' phenomena would fit in this category.
Some 'prodigies'/'anomalies' might indeed have conventional scientific explanations. In fact, I would guess that the large majority do. But it might not be easy to produce such an explanation, since the prodigy might be the result of conventional scientific principles compounding in unfamiliar ways.
But I'm inclined to speculate that a small number will resist conventional scientific explanation. That's because our current scientific understanding probably isn't the last word on how reality behaves and there may well be principles of nature or reality that the scientific community is currently unaware of that might make occasional appearances in people's lives. [...]
In terms of its long-term survival, I'd deem a full-blown anomaly as not even corralled by future formulations or regulating generalizations (principles that supposedly constrain the world). Maybe "miracle" would be more applicable. Although once accepted, even those might still be penned within some statistical probability which can't set exactly when or of what specific character such would be -- just a rough period over which one of them would be expected to occur.
Undergirding this (or a pre-conditional denial of them) is the view that the universe is totally managed by global laws, and thereby anomalies are impossible (with respect to the latter not being merely the result of deficiencies in human knowledge or of the rules). Paul Davies believes the "laws of nature" thought orientation is a remnant view descended from monotheism.[1] Others contend that the conception of the cosmos as being rational or intelligible long preceded a divine, personal-like authority being the source (Plato, the Pythagoreans, etc), though not necessarily free of mysticism.[2]
Actually there's no need for "laws of nature" to be intellectual entities residing in some "space-less place" or abstract level. Or even as Davies' supposed non-transcendent alternative of "programs being run on the great cosmic computer".[3] This historic tendency of reifying regulating principles seems dependent upon the tradition of treating time as a literal process. In which the world is magically blinking in and out of be-ing every yoctosecond or subatomic interval so as to render changes in the world (that is, the belief that only "now" exists). With the laws being the governance that the process is conforming to. What maintains consistency between one moment and the next or over long sequences of moments -- prevents the process from being as crazy or unreliable as a dream.
But once getting rid of that constant procedure of annihilating the cosmos and re-conjuring it, and instead allowing those changes of time to co-exist, then the "lawfulness of the world" is instead just the repeated patterns of that higher dimensional structure or field -- or however a discipline wants to technically conceive / represent such a "co-existence of changes". The patterns in that framework can be abstracted as "formulas" that the changes seem to be adhering to (like the vastly simpler shape of a triangle being convertable to a geometrical description). But that structure / framework of the world's extended existence came first, rather than the symbolic stuff representing the claimed rules which manage it in the context of a naive or commonsense view of time (as an unfolding process).
Eternalism also doesn't eliminate the possibility of anomalies. Since the latter would still be events or circumstances which don't conform to any known universal law / principle of governance or normal expectation that humans have inferred from the extended concrete existence of the universe or potential multiverse (extended in the sense of beyond just its global state in this specious "now").
footnotes
[1] Paul Davies: [...] The multiverse theory certainly cuts the ground from beneath intelligent design, but it falls short of a complete explanation of existence. For a start, there has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and allocate bylaws to them. This process demands its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.
The root cause of all the difficulty can be traced to the fact that both religion and science appeal to some agency outside the universe to explain its lawlike order. Dumping the problem in the lap of a pre-existing designer is no explanation at all, as it merely begs the question of who designed the designer. But appealing to a host of unseen universes and a set of unexplained meta-laws is scarcely any better.
This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law has its origins in theology. The idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws comes straight out of monotheism, which was the dominant influence in Europe at the time science as we know it was being formulated by Isaac Newton and his contemporaries. Just as classical Christianity presents God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, so physicists envisage their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships. Furthermore, Christians believe the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case. Correspondingly, physicists declare that the universe is governed by eternal laws, but the laws remain impervious to events in the universe.
I think this entire line of reasoning is now outdated and simplistic. We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws. Can we do better? Yes, but only by relinquishing the traditional idea of physical laws as fixed, perfect relationships. I propose instead that the laws are more like computer software: programs being run on the great cosmic computer. They emerge with the universe at the big bang and are inherent in it, not stamped on it from without like a maker's mark. --Yes, the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn't mean that a god fixed it
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[2] Dennis Overbye: Dr. Davies asserted in the article that science, not unlike religion, rested on faith, not in God but in the idea of an orderly universe. Without that presumption a scientist could not function. His argument provoked an avalanche of blog commentary, articles on Edge.org and letters to The Times, pointing out that the order we perceive in nature has been explored and tested for more than 2,000 years by observation and experimentation. That order is precisely the hypothesis that the scientific enterprise is engaged in testing.
David J. Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., and co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, told me in an e-mail message, “I have more confidence in the methods of science, based on the amazing record of science and its ability over the centuries to answer unanswerable questions, than I do in the methods of faith (what are they?).”
Reached by e-mail, Dr. Davies acknowledged that his mailbox was “overflowing with vitriol,” but said he had been misunderstood. What he had wanted to challenge, he said, was not the existence of laws, but the conventional thinking about their source.
There is in fact a kind of chicken-and-egg problem with the universe and its laws. Which “came” first — the laws or the universe?
If the laws of physics are to have any sticking power at all, to be real laws, one could argue, they have to be good anywhere and at any time, including the Big Bang, the putative Creation. Which gives them a kind of transcendent status outside of space and time.
On the other hand, many thinkers — all the way back to Augustine — suspect that space and time, being attributes of this existence, came into being along with the universe — in the Big Bang, in modern vernacular. So why not the laws themselves?
Dr. Davies complains that the traditional view of transcendent laws is just 17th-century monotheism without God. “Then God got killed off and the laws just free-floated in a conceptual vacuum but retained their theological properties,” he said in his e-mail message.
But the idea of rationality in the cosmos has long existed without monotheism. As far back as the fifth century B.C. the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras and his followers proclaimed that nature was numbers. Plato envisioned a higher realm of ideal forms, of perfect chairs, circles or galaxies, of which the phenomena of the sensible world were just flawed reflections. Plato set a transcendent tone that has been popular, especially with mathematicians and theoretical physicists, ever since.
Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate from the University of Texas, Austin, described himself in an e-mail message as “pretty Platonist,” saying he thinks the laws of nature are as real as “the rocks in the field.” The laws seem to persist, he wrote, “whatever the circumstance of how I look at them, and they are things about which it is possible to be wrong, as when I stub my toe on a rock I had not noticed.”
The ultimate Platonist these days is Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In talks and papers recently he has speculated that mathematics does not describe the universe — it is the universe.
Dr. Tegmark maintains that we are part of a mathematical structure, albeit one gorgeously more complicated than a hexagon, a multiplication table or even the multidimensional symmetries that describe modern particle physics. Other mathematical structures, he predicts, exist as their own universes in a sort of cosmic Pythagorean democracy, although not all of them would necessarily prove to be as rich as our own.
“Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you,” he wrote in New Scientist. --Laws of Nature, Source Unknown ... New York Times, Dec-18, 2007
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[3] Natalie Wolchover: [...In our universe...] the space-time fabric has a “de Sitter” geometry, stretching as you look into the distance. The fabric stretches until the universe hits a very different sort of boundary from the one in AdS space: the end of time. At that point, in an event known as “heat death,” space-time will have stretched so much that everything in it will become causally disconnected from everything else, such that no signals can ever again travel between them. The familiar notion of time breaks down. From then on, nothing happens.
On the timeless boundary of our space-time bubble, the entanglements linking together qubits (and encoding the universe’s dynamical interior) would presumably remain intact, since these quantum correlations do not require that signals be sent back and forth. But the state of the qubits must be static and timeless. This line of reasoning suggests that somehow, just as the qubits on the boundary of AdS space give rise to an interior with one extra spatial dimension, qubits on the timeless boundary of de Sitter space must give rise to a universe with time — dynamical time, in particular. Researchers haven’t yet figured out how to do these calculations. “In de Sitter space,” Swingle said, “we don’t have a good idea for how to understand the emergence of time.” --Quantum Gravity's Time Problem