It's amusing to see such grandiose predictions about the fate of the entire cosmos when our science doesn't hold water even at the galactic scale, I mean its dark matter band aid. If the accuracy is only 10% at the galactic scale, it must be less than 1% at the scale of galaxy clusters, and beyond that it's no better than tea leaves reading.
New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
51–59 of 59 posts
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#52Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might like this: https://qntm.org/responsibilit
Everything by qntm is phenomenal if a bit rough around the edges. Fine Structure was one of my favorites, along with There is No Antimemetics Division, which is now being published as a proper book!
>a bit rough around the edges.
You're right. It almost lost me with this nonsense
>Pi to the last digit? A triviality
Cool stuff though
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#54New thinking on physics... by a self-described neuroscientist. I think we already know how seriously to take this.
As soon as the article mentioned Ray Kurzweil, I knew there was no scientific basis for the claim.
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#55As such, the second law appears to hold a chilling prophecy for humanity in the very long term. The idea that our species is so uniquely capable of transcending extinction and surviving long enough for the fate of the universe to be relevant to it is optimistic to the point of absurdity. It fits the evidence better to suppose that we're particularly capable of self destruction.
If you look at who supports this theory, it's all ego-driven software engineers who believe they can solve physics from first principles, ignoring hundreds of years of evidence that these laws do apply.
Highly recommend reading this book for how these sci-fi theories are being used to promote eugenics, climate destruction, and pseudoscience: https://www.amazon.com/More-Everything-Forever-Overlords-Hum...
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#56Practically stars are mostly burned out in another 50 billion years and radioisotopes that produce a heat gradient will also be mostly decayed by then. Eventually good tidal energy situations like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating_of_Io will end as well since this kind of situation changes the orbits. So energy for life and usable thermal gradients will disappear even if entropy will continue to increase fo…
I've had plans for a sci-fi book I plan to never write that takes place in the ultra far future. The chapters' numbers would be the time dilation scale in a base 10 logarithm. The book would be made up of a series of short stories told from the point of view of a "time coast guard" rescuing idiots who refuse to time dilate from their creaking space hulks. A later (set?) of chapters might just be in the 90+ scale; at…
You will like this shorty story from Stephen Baxter
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still maintain that we're not just a simulation, we're a screensaver on the computer of some extradimensional office worker who has been out of office for their version of a weekend.
You might like this: https://qntm.org/responsibilit
Loved this story.
Although, *spoiler*, my mind is still having a hard time understanding how the characters could exist before their simulation started.
Did they just not realize that their reality was sped up before the moment where the simulations began?
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#58> ... all believe that the universe is not destined to grow more disorganized forever, but more complex and rich with information. Maybe it's just a problem of being loose with terminology, but this seems to be contrasting entropy and information content, which is backwards?
The usual handwaving for entropy v. information/complexity is to observe that our universe goes from simple low entropy state (Big Bang) to a simple maximum entropy state (Heat Death).
Both have low information. The complexity rises and falls, peaking somewhere in the middle, as energy from the gravitational field is turned into structure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weyl_curvature_hypothesis
Penrose likes zero initial Weyl curvature because it provides low entropy, but also conformal flatness, thus enabling his CCC theories.
Another consequence is that the Big Bang is not a reversed black hole (white hole). Black holes have high Weyl curvature. The Big Bang is the lowest entropy configuration, but a Black Hole is the maximum entropy configuration (just mass, spin and charges).
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had plans for a sci-fi book I plan to never write that takes place in the ultra far future. The chapters' numbers would be the time dilation scale in a base 10 logarithm. The book would be made up of a series of short stories told from the point of view of a "time coast guard" rescuing idiots who refuse to time dilate from their creaking space hulks. A later (set?) of chapters might just be in the 90+ scale; at…
For anyone interested, Vernor Vinge does something like this but minus the massive scale, in Marooned in Realtime. Set 50 million years in the future. My all time favorite sci-fi fwiw.
It is good and the bobbles are a cool idea but A Fire Upon the Deep is a better book. The end where a character asks why the sun is dimming and the hero casually says "Something has to power this thing" is so awesome.