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The fecund universes theory of cosmology advanced by Lee Smolin suggests that the rules of biology apply on the grandest scales, and is often referred to as "cosmological natural selection". Smolin summarized the idea in a book aimed at a lay audience called The Life of the Cosmos (ISBN 0-19-510837-X). This article is about the physics subject. ...
Lee Smolin at Harvard. ...
This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ...
Background
The theory surmises that a collapsing black hole causes the emergence of a new universe on the "other side", whose fundamental constant parameters (speed of light, Planck length and so forth) may differ slightly from those of the universe where the black hole collapsed. Each universe therefore gives rise to as many new universes as it has black holes. Thus the theory contains the evolutionary ideas of "reproduction" and "mutation" of universes, but has no direct analogue of natural selection. However, given any universe that can produce black holes that successfuly spawn new universes, it is possible that some number of those universes will reach heat death of the universe with unsuccessful parameters. So, in a sense, fecundity cosmological natural selection is one where universes could die off before successfully reproducing, just as any man can die before spawning children. For other uses, see Black hole (disambiguation). ...
A line showing the speed of light on a scale model of Earth and the Moon, about 1. ...
The Planck length, denoted by , is the unit of length approximately 1. ...
Darwins illustrations of beak variation in the finches of the Galápagos Islands, which hold 13 closely related species that differ most markedly in the shape of their beaks. ...
The heat death is a impossible final state of the universe, in which it has run down to a state of no free energy to sustain motion or life. ...
Photograph of a nude man by Wilhelm von Gloeden, ca. ...
If this theory is correct, the odds strongly favor this universe being not the first to ever exist, but a descendant of many that have existed through time. And, since a universe with conditions favoring production of many 'child' universes, i.e. favoring black hole creation, would have many more 'children' than one that did not, it is reasonable to expect a late universe to have 'evolved' towards conditions favoring black holes. Additionally, it is interesting to note that black holes do not necessarily have to be the original structures allowing for the near-exact reproduction of the universe, and in fact it may prove to be more likely that black holes are an emergent phenomena from the (possibly) long-line through the hierarchy of universes to our current universe instance.
Some critics have claimed that this theory is not falsifiable, and therefore unscientific. By definition, existence of "other universes" cannot be verified by scientific tools working within the time-space and physics laws of our universe. Smolin's counter-argument is that an observation of very many black holes in the known universe would be evidence for this view, while if black holes are rare or unusual, it would be quite strong evidence against; and since the hypothesized evolutionary process would be expected to find local maxima in fecundity, were a small change in cosmological parameters found to give rise to a universe favoring black hole production more than ours, this too would provide evidence against the theory. This page discusses how a theory or assertion is falsifiable (disprovable opp: verifiable), rather than the non-philosophical use of falsification, meaning counterfeiting. ...
A graph illustrating local min/max and global min/max points In mathematics, maxima and minima, also known as extrema, are points in the domain of a function at which the function takes the largest (maximum), or smallest (minimum) value either within a given neighbourhood (local extrema), or on the...
Louis Crane has proposed a meduso-anthropic principle, which suggests that universes could be fine-tuned for life by intelligent beings themselves manufacturing new universes. He argues that the destiny of highly evolved intelligence (perhaps our distant progeny) is to infuse the entire universe with life (similar to what Ray Kurzweil proposed in The Singularity is Near), eventually to accomplish the ultimate feat of cosmic reproduction by spawning one or more “baby universes,” which will themselves be endowed with life generating properties. Louis Crane is a theorist in quantum gravity. ...
The deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. ...
Dr. Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. ...
Cover of the book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking Penguin, ISBN 0-670-03384-7) is a 2005 update of Raymond Kurzweils 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines and his 1987 book The Age of Intelligent Machines. ...
Smolin's fecund universes theory was the subject of a science fiction short story by David Brin, entitled "What Continues, What Fails ...", and was a common theme in Stephen Baxter's novel Manifold: Time and the rest of the manifold trilogy. Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ...
Glen David Brin, Ph. ...
Stephen Baxter (born in Liverpool, 13 November 1957) is a British hard science fiction author. ...
The problem of undetermined parameters The standard model of elementary particle physics aims to unify the forces of nature so that they all possess the properties of a gauge field. This gauge field can be broken down naturally when combined with matter fields. In this way, we see that all the forces of nature are in fact the same force and so it only takes a small list of parameters to define all the forces in the universe (other than gravity). The matter fields have split these forces into those which we witness in our universe. However, while all forces (other than gravity) have their origin in the gauge field, there is no known origin for the matter fields that exist in our universe. The masses of the particles in our universe seem to be arbitrary in nature, not determined by any known mechanism. Gauge theories are a class of physical theories based on the idea that symmetry transformations can be performed locally as well as globally. ...
If these values are in fact arbitrary, why then do they just so happen to possess just the right values to create a universe so complex? A one percent change in the mass of the neutron or proton, or a doubling of the electron's incredibly small mass, would yield a universe with no chemistry and no stars. Hydrogen gas would be the only element in the universe.
A multitude of universes Virtually all hypotheses which attempt to explain this complexity involve the postulate that there is a very large or infinite number of universes, each one with its own set of mass fields. When applied to this assumption, the anthropic principle concludes that our universe is a rare exception within this large set of universes and that by chance it possesses exactly those characteristics necessary for life to exist. Since the number of universes is so large, it is expected that some of them will contain complexity. The problem with this explanation is that it is not falsifiable and is therefore unscientific in nature. That is, we know of no mechanism by which we can detect the existence of other universes (as of yet). In physics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is an umbrella term for various dissimilar attempts to explain the structure of the universe by way of coincidentally balanced features that are necessary and relevant to the existence of observers (usually assumed to be carbon-based life or even specifically human beings). ...
Modern scientific theory, however, does provide a mechanism by which universes can be formed. The original theory of general relativity predicted that when a black hole was formed it collapsed into a singularity. That is, space and time would become so curved here that everything would collapse into a point. General relativity also predicted that our universe sprang from a singularity during the big bang. But we now know that general relativity breaks down on such small scales as the atom. It is here that quantum mechanics begins to play a part. For this reason, physicists have suspected for a long time that a singularity would violate the uncertainty principle, and hence cannot exist. Recently, this conjecture has been investigated mathematically. This is still speculative, but according to one theory of quantum gravity a singularity is not formed. Instead, space and time do not collapse to a point but rather into a (four-dimensional) tube which opens into an entirely new region of space and time. The singularity "bounces" back out into a big bang. This means it is entirely possible that our own universe was created when a black hole was formed in another universe. For a less technical and generally accessible introduction to the topic, see Introduction to general relativity. ...
For other uses, see Black hole (disambiguation). ...
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In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a mathematical property of a pair of canonical conjugate quantities - usually stated in a form of reciprocity of spans of their spectra. ...
Evolving universes Lee Smolin's hypothesis of cosmological natural selection makes the assumption that each universe created in such a way possesses slightly modified versions of the mass fields of its "parent" universe. This concept is of course borrowed from Darwin, and is analogous to mutation of genes in modern evolutionary theory. There is some conjectural support for this in both string theory and quantum gravity. The change in the mass fields would be due to the intense energies and small scales reached within a black hole. By a simple extrapolation it is easy to see that universes which generate more "offspring" will ultimately become more numerous. A universe with no stars and consisting entirely of hydrogen gas can produce only one offspring because it can produce no black holes. All it can do is collapse back in on itself in a "big crunch", a reverse big bang, to generate a singularity. Given enough universes, some would by chance possess the matter fields necessary to generate stars and thus black holes. Since these would produce far more offspring, they would become far more numerous than universes without stars. (There is no known mechanism that "kills off" universes and so there is no actual parallel to "natural selection" in the theory of cosmological natural selection. It is for this reason that it is now technically referred to as fecund universes.) Charles Darwin Darwinism is a term for the underlying theory in those ideas of Charles Darwin concerning evolution and natural selection. ...
Interaction in the subatomic world: world lines of pointlike particles in the Standard Model or a world sheet swept up by closed strings in string theory String theory is a model of fundamental physics whose building blocks are one-dimensional extended objects called strings, rather than the zero-dimensional point...
This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
What Lee Smolin proposes is that a universe which produces more black holes than any other would in fact possess the laws of physics our universe does. He argues that cosmological natural selection is superior to the anthropic principle because it is falsifiable. That is, if we discover anything in our universe suggesting our universe is not ideal for producing black holes, the theory is disproven. The falsifiability in this case depends strongly on a principle of mediocrity, however. Even if universes amenable to black hole creation spawn far more universes than those that are not, there is still an anthropic landscape of possibilities. If there is an alignment of the parameters necessary for intelligent life and for black hole formation, then the fact of our existence has little effect on the prior probability part of a Bayesian calculation, but we can never neglect the possibility that we may live in a universe far from the peak of the distribution of parameters. At best, then, the principle of mediocrity provides probabilistic falsifiability. The scientific validity of such reasoning is the subject of much philosophical debate. The mediocrity principle is the notion in the philosophy of science that there is nothing special about Earth, and by implication the human race. ...
The anthropic landscape is the term coined by Lenny Susskind and used for a large number of different possible universes that are required for the anthropic principle. ...
A prior probability is a marginal probability, interpreted as a description of what is known about a variable in the absence of some evidence. ...
In addition, a thorough calculation of what exact values of the mass fields would generate a universe with the largest possible number of black holes may lead to predictions of so far unobserved elementary particles or other attributes of our universe. Unfortunately, this is not possible today.
See also A multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including our universe) that together comprise all of physical reality. ...
For other uses, see Black hole (disambiguation). ...
In physics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is an umbrella term for various dissimilar attempts to explain the structure of the universe by way of coincidentally balanced features that are necessary and relevant to the existence of observers (usually assumed to be carbon-based life or even specifically human beings). ...
The Anthropic Principle suggests that the Universe may be bio-friendly. ...
This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
For a less technical and generally accessible introduction to the topic, see Introduction to general relativity. ...
Fig. ...
Lee Smolin at Harvard. ...
The deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. ...
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