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The Forum > General Discussion > 10^10^123

10^10^123

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Emotional? LOL

I only mentioned Dumbski as am example. The calculations tell me that there is something that we don't know, right? To quote a famous philosopher: As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

Now how is this conundrum to be solved on an online opinion blogsite? By discussing something none of us know about of course!

Sure, God did it, whatever.
Posted by Bugsy, Monday, 30 July 2007 1:14:05 AM
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Bugsy wrote:

>>By discussing something none of us know about of course!>>

I was never under the illusion we could solve this conundrum here on the online opinion forum. Just as I doubt we can solve world hunger, Iraq, what to do about GM crops or the miserable performance of the Melbourne Demons.

I did think posters might be interested to see what a real scientific conundrum looks like. A real conundrum as opposed to the pseudo conundrums posed by people like Dembski and the protagonists of intelligent design.
Posted by stevenlmeyer, Monday, 30 July 2007 9:09:42 AM
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I think you might be flogging the proverbial dead horse here, stevenlmeier.

>>Penrose's argument about low entropy is not all that abstruse. Anyone with two years of university level physics should be able to follow it<<

It isn't "following the argument" that is the problem. It is finding anything remotely useful to say in response to a statement that is simultaneously convincingly precise (10^10^123, not 10^10^122 or 10^10^124) and utterly meaningless. Meaningless, that is, in the sense that we cannot possibly extract any useful information from it.

Does it prove anything? no.

Does it, or will it, lead to any new theories about the universe? Not likely, is it?

Anyway, given the number of galaxies that we know about just in this dimension, the number of stars in those galaxies, and the number of planets/asteroids/comets shooting around all over the place, that particular level of "odds against" does not seem out of place to me.

It is almost even money, in fact, when you consider the uniqueness of the existence of the human race - we would have needed those odds to come into existence in the first place.

So what we have here is an incontrovertible premise, upon which an argument for almost anything may be built. Doesn't sound particularly fruitful ground.

Unless of course you are the natural heir to Douglas Adams, in which case there is a wealth of material to be mined from the single statistic, 10^10^123.
Posted by Pericles, Monday, 30 July 2007 11:11:36 AM
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Pericles,

I certainly did not mean to imply 10^10^123 was "precise." It is an "order of magnitude" calculation. All Penrose was trying to do was quantify in a rough and ready fashion what everyone already knew – namely that the entropy of the observable universe is improbably low.

Will it led to new theories about the universe?

It MAY play a role there. To be credible any new theory would have to explain the unreasonably low entropy we see. So saying the low entropy conundrum won't play a role is tantamount to saying we shall never have credible new theories about the universe.

The number of stars, galaxies, etc is besides the point. Penrose and others are making a statement about the entire observable universe which includes all those stars and galaxies.
Posted by stevenlmeyer, Monday, 30 July 2007 6:34:59 PM
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,

this is misleading , the universe might have a low entropy generally but it is not even ,
there are node and concentration in it , inside of which there is further concentrations , leading to rich area of matter/energy

they might be statistically rare but in a sample the size of the universe their are highly probable .

.
Posted by randwick, Monday, 13 August 2007 11:28:51 PM
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Randwick,

Entropy is a property of a system AS A WHOLE. If you like, the universe appears to more "lumpy" than one would expect by chance.

I might add that no cosmologist has challenged Penrose's "order of magnitude" calculations. Penrose has pointed out what all reputable scientists regard as a GENUINE scientific conundrum.

I cannot give you an online reference to Penrose's calculations but you can find them in his 2004 book, The Road to Reality.

Here is a link to a short biography of Penrose.

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Penrose.html

Penrose is one of the most acclaimed mathematicians of 20th Century and of the 21st so far.

My own feeling is that there is some physics we don't yet understand. (Answer 4 in my original post.)

I'm merely pointing out that, as things stand today, there is no way of deciding between any of the 4 possible answers I presented.

To say "God did not do it" is as much an act of faith – in our ability to understand the universe if nothing else – as it is to say "God did it."
Posted by stevenlmeyer, Tuesday, 14 August 2007 6:13:37 PM
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