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From: tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel)
Newsgroups: net.physics
Subject: Re: White Holes?
Message-ID: <490@talcott.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 17-Aug-85 17:44:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: talcott.490
Posted: Sat Aug 17 17:44:11 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 23-Aug-85 07:33:37 EDT
References: <3656@decwrl.UUCP> <166@prometheus.UUCP>
Organization: Harvard University
Lines: 76

In article <166@prometheus.UUCP>, pmk@prometheus.UUCP (Paul M Koloc) writes:
> > My intuition tells me that the universe is a continuous function.
> 
> Two things tell us that the universe isn't continuous.  First, the "big bang",
> and second, the constant "h bar" or even the fact that particles are not 
> points. 
> [...]
> If space were continuous then an infinite number of points would exist along 
> a path an "inch" long.   Scanning this space with a "point" test particle 
> would not discover any "spatial holes" or gaps where "points" aren't defined 
> (exit).  In fact all of the information known to man (and the angels) could 
> be put into a binary code and stored in such a space.  Our space is "grainy" 
> and there are gaps and spaces, and nature has a special trick to make it 
> "look" continuous.  Mathematically it is a "delta function" and in reality 
> it is "the particle"   
> [...]
> True that physics can
> not understand the creation of the universe YET, it may well do so in the
> future.  The idea that time is quantized seen as the continuous discreet
> fading and replacement of information "frames" means that in a sense the
> process of creation is still going on. This would occur for each and every 

Nice that you all have intuitions and feelings about the universe.
I do too. Nevertheless, the only fact is that we don't know whether
the universe is continuous or discrete in either time or space,
whether it is finite of infinite, or whether it has discontinuities,
even if it is a continuum.

Modern physics has lots of theories about these questions, some
of them proven to higher degrees of accuracy than others. None
of them promise to be 'the final theory' of the universe.

Your remark about QM and discreteness of time strikes me as odd.
Time is, of course, treated as a real variable in QM, and you
can't just go from differential equations in time to difference
equations and still have a working QT (at least I have never seen
such a theory... it would definitely be interesting, though).

Your remark about QM and discreteness of space strikes me
as even odder. If you know of a way of representing QM on
a lattice, I would like to hear about it. What tells you, by the way,
that you can't store infite amounts of data in a limited space,
and by what means can you infer from that that space is organised
as a lattice? Unless you have a better argument than you presented
in your posting, I would be extremely careful in making such statements.

Finally, the object of physics simply cannot be to find out the
'cause' for the existence of the universe. By definition, the creation
of the universe took place outside the realm of the physical laws that
govern our universe. Therefore, physics is just not applicable to
what happened before the universe existed.

Another way of stating the above is that any physical theory must
be testable. A theory of the creation of the universe is not
testable or verifyable.

Don't misunderstand me: I love physics, and there are lots of extremely
interesting questions to be answered. Like any other natural science,
physics does not give final answers, though. Every theory, however well
established, may always turn out to be incorrect after all. Physics
can only describe the universe to better and better approximations,
and we may eventually find a theory that describes our world better than
we have means to test it. Nevertheless, it is only a theory. QM and
GR do not even meet these criteria. There are serious conflicts between the
two theories, and (at least) one of them needs a lot of fixing.

But physics is also not a religion or a philosophy. Physics cannot
tell you either *why* or *how* the universe was created, or what the
*purpose* of life or intelligence is. Physical sciences can only
tell you what probably happened right after the universe was created
and what kinds of systems may give rise to life and intelligence.
Purpose and reason, although often used euphemistically in physics
courses, have no place in the sciences. (reason here not in the sense
of logic or intelligence, of course).

						Thomas.