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Multiverse: Comic vid mocks the paradox

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If you have decided that a multiverse makes more sense than a designed universe, chances are, you will rethink after you see this:

“Time Travelling the Universe,” produced by Rob Bryanton of What You Ought to Know.

See also:
Science fiction scores big – on the reference shelf?

Science fiction: Reflections on the nature of time

Physicist to pop science writer: In a hole? Stop digging

Materialism strikes back: We create the universe, not God?

Not just aliens: The multiverse gotta be out there too!

No escape from philosophy through equations?

Now, remind me again why we need this multiverse theory in the first place …

Letter: Multiverses are nonsense but so is much contemporary physics

The universe has the hallmarks of design and what can anyone do about it?

Quantum mechanics and popular culture: Artist’s lot offers chance to produce trillions of universes

No escape from philosophy through equations?

Big physics could end up putting physicists out of a job?

Will it be a disaster for physics if the Higgs boson is the ONLY thing the Large Hadron Collider finds?

And so forth (Other stuff I have written on the bleeping multiverse, for which It, (Inc.) is suing me … But the writ was sent to an infinite number of wrong universes, so … )

Comments
Cantareus and tyke, You both make the point that I was making in my first post. Rob Bryanton, Can't you just tell us why the video is wrong? If it even is wrong. Myself, tyke, and Cantereus seem to be able to raise objections but you just redirect to another location. If you can't just state why the video is wrong it makes me think that a) maybe the video is correct or b) you are a poor writer.Jehu
March 27, 2009
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It's an amusing video, but the logic used in dismissing the idea of multiverses is faulty. Even if an infinite number of universes does exist, there is no reason to conclude that all imagined (and unimagined) eventualities must have occurred somewhere at some time in the multiverse. Just because there is an infinite number of something, doesn't mean that the "something" is free to be anything. Each universe, even if there is an infinite number of them, may be bounded by limits that are impassable. For example, there are an infinite number of integers greater than zero. Not one of them is -1.tyke
March 26, 2009
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Cantareus
If we are part of a multiverse then everything that can happen does happen. Everything else doesn't happen.
My comment: if the multiverse has built-in constraints which narrow the domain of possible events, then one can properly ask: why those constraints and not some other ones? Why not a multiverse with a wider (or narrower) domain of possibilities? If, on the other hand, there are no constraints, then what you are saying is that the multiverse is totally lawless, at bottom. In that case, we have no reason to believe that the laws of our universe will continue to hold one second from now. After all, why should they?vjtorley
March 23, 2009
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Hello, Rob Bryanton here. Just to give proper credit where it's due, I did not create the video you are looking at here. It was created by a pair of fellows who call themselves the Brothers Winn, without my knowledge or participation, and is clearly a comic piece intended for laughs rather than a serious discussion of the issues surround Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics. The confusion has arisen here, no doubt, because their video was created in response to a popular video of mine called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension", which explores the ideas from chapter one of my book of the same name. Please go to tenthdimension.com if you would like to see the original video, or go to youtube and search for videos by user "10thdim" if you would like to see a somewhat more serious discussion of these ideas from a unique perspective, a blending of physics, philosophy, and spirituality. Thanks! Rob Bryanton10thdim
March 23, 2009
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His reasoning is silly. The reasoning gives rise to questions such as: Can an omnipotent god create a rock it cannot lift? He resolves his first paradox by stating that the past cannot be changed from the future if time is linear and that time travel is therefore impossible. The other option to resolve the paradox is to say that linear time doesn't exist, it makes just as much sense to say that time travel doesn't exist. If he applied the same reasoning to the multiverse he would see that interaction between separate universes must be impossible to prevent paradoxes. Instead he says that they don't exist. If we are part of a multiverse then everything that can happen does happen. Everything else doesn't happen. Two blogs in one day I have stopped lurking on now :)Cantareus
March 22, 2009
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Gil please explain what you think your father meant by that statement. as he a relativist? I find the results of special relativity to be fascinating - at least how they are explained in all the physics books I have read. Personally I think that the realization that time is based on ones frame of reference is not surprising or fishy- but is actually interesting. Time still flows forward (generally) it is only from a single perspective that we must judge the accuracy of ones account- but as single human beings that means our accounts are as good as any- just not perfect. Any thoughts?Frost122585
March 21, 2009
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I looked up your father; he's a mightily impressive guy. (Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer is a hero of mine, though more for his activities after the war.) I'm curious if your father has views on ID. I don't expect you to speak for him, and I don't want to invade your privacy; I'm just curious about the views of clearly brilliant people.David Kellogg
March 21, 2009
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My father, who earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in his early 20's, while working on the Manhattan A-Bomb Project during WWII, and who is the most brilliant mathematician, physicist, and chemist I have ever encountered (that's what P-Chem is all about, the integration of physics, chemistry, and mathematics) once said to me, when I asked him at a very early age about time and the meaning of life: "There's something fishy about time." Certain comments from one's father stick in one's mind forever. This one did.GilDodgen
March 21, 2009
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Seversky #8, "...if it happened once it can happen again." What... like our universe's time continuum having hiccups? I imagine your short answer stepped right into the non-multiverse paradox. But maybe you can give the short answer for what exactly it means if you say an event "...if it happened once it can happen again." Do you mean exactly the same state of our whole universe repeats itself more than once and that would count as "...happened again"? The problem is that your statement excludes time from the proposed repeated event (you said "...again"), which means it is NOT the same as the one before. So, if the our universe can have "hiccups", it will be a no-event that is unobservable in this or any possible universe.mullerpr
March 21, 2009
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I think multiverse in inane.Frost122585
March 21, 2009
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Thank about this... In multiverse there is a probable universe where an Adam and Eve are the first humans and live in a garden of Eden. And where a guy named Noah escapes a massive flood on a boat full of animals while the rest of the human races is destroyed- and where alter on a guy named Jesus dies on the Cross gets put in a tomb- disappears then reappears latter on (spontaneously) in front of his disciples and then extends to the heavens. It seems like the only thing that cant exist in a multiverse is room for the God hypothesis.Frost122585
March 21, 2009
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If you go to his original site, he has a lot of other videos. I watched a couple and they are just as good. Hey, 2012 and the evolution debate comes to an end. I loved the one on the bailouts which ends with an evolutionary moral about who survives or what happens to survivors.jerry
March 21, 2009
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I'm a big sci-fi fan. Every last sci-fi show always feels the need to do at least one, if not several, time travel episodes. I HATE those episodes because there's ALWAYS a plot hole because of this paradox issue. I can't tell you how much I hate it. I HATE IT! Except for Stargate SG-1 because that show never takes itself seriously anyway.tragic mishap
March 21, 2009
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I imagine that the short answer would be that, as for an event within our Universe, if it happened once it can happen again.Seversky
March 21, 2009
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A multi-verse scenario does nothing to ID. IOW ID is not falsified by such a scenario. What it does however, is make the anti-IDists do more explaining. They wouldn't have to explain how unguided processes brought ONE universe into being, they would have to explain that multiple times.Joseph
March 21, 2009
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You mean the O'Learyverse? Well that's the problem with multiverses - they are not simply paradoxical - paradoxes are at least possible. Multiverses are absurd. You can't have an "exponential growth of universes," because they are already infinite. How much more infinite could they get? We can conceive of an infinite, but we cannot represent an infinite except by a symbol - which itself is only conceptual. To illustrate this, try counting to infinity. It's meaningless because we started to count. There are no numbers along a line to infinity. In an infinite set zero simply does not exist, and neither do any numbers. Well ok, for the sake of argument, let's suppose we could have an infinite set of numbers: Now subtract all the even numbers from that set and you get an infinite set of odd numbers, so you cannot add to nor subtract anything from an infinite set. If any of the multiverses were to be destroyed, (and we know that it's possible for our own universe to be destroyed), then we end up with an infinite set of universes minus one. So it's clear then, that an infinite set can only exist in the abstract. It cannot exist any other way. Multiverses, therefore, also cannot exist. The concept is indeed absurd. I wouldn't put it past OLeary with her blogs though.CannuckianYankee
March 21, 2009
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Time is fascinating, particularly, for me, the concept of blocktime or timescape which implies that all times exist simultaneously. Gregory Benford's novel Timescape is quite spooky in that respect. As for the multiverse, am I the only one to notice that it is foreshadowed by the exponential growth of blogiverses from a single source in Toronto?Seversky
March 21, 2009
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I think it does depend if on a conceivable universe can interfere with another universe. If it a conceivable universe can, then this completely hilarious video has, perhaps, completely proven its point. Man, this video is hilarious!Domoman
March 21, 2009
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There is a multi-verse. I have proof: My dog (who has no nose) said to me: "I have no nose. How do I smell" I replied: "Awful"! "Harrharrharr"!!, went dog. "Hahahahahhah"!!, went me.mad doc
March 20, 2009
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I think his point is exactly right. Basically a theory like multiverse which exponentially increases the universal probabilistic resources in order to account for specified complexity leads to an even more outragous and reduculous view of physical reality than the simple one held by the biblical literalists- and of course there is even less physical and empirical evidence that multiverse exists than that say the garden of eden did.Frost122585
March 20, 2009
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I don't think every possible universe is the same thing as every conceivable universe.Jehu
March 20, 2009
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