Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
Now you’re talking about some of the biggest unsolved problems in physics :)
I don’t know if it necessitates a creation myth, though. The big bang theory doesn’t imply a creator, but also doesn’t require a steady state.
What’s this about a strange loop? I don’t know if I’ve heard of this before.
I meant a strange attractor, but I think it also had prostitutes of a strange loop.
A strange loop is a hierarchy, or heterarchy, where as you proceed ‘up’ the hierarchy, you eventually arrive where you started.
A strange attractor is a system which, although never quite having the exact same state, cycles around the same general set of states. One way of thinking of this is “a loop which never quite mets up with itself”. An interesting example of this would be a three+ body gravitational system where the bodies are of comparable mass, and no stabilizing elements are present. Odds are very against them actually striking each other, but orbits are virtually completely unpredictable. Nevertheless, they won’t eject any of the bodies, so they will always be in the same general region.
As applied to the universe, you could set the ‘laws’ of the universe as values on a manifold, and these ‘laws’ would flex and shift as the overall state of the universe changes, but the universe would cycle around within a probability niche - a strange attractor. There’s also a potential it could leave that probability niche and ‘fall’ into, or enter into, another. One such probability niche would be the very strong tendencies of the universe - the ‘laws’ of the universe - as we know them.
My training is in applied mathematics, so I’m only conceptually aware of strange attractors. It’s my understanding that they are chaotic systems that tend towards a stable state. As such I’m a little skeptical of the claim that the universe itself is a strange attractor, since it is broadly predictable and hence not chaotic, and it’s expanding and thus not tending towards stability!