Born to do Math 129 – Do You Want Size With That?
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the limit to the possible sizes of the universe or other informational objects within the conceptual and physics traditional of digital physics in which all that exists reflects the objects, quantities, and dynamics of information?
Rick Rosner: The idea that there is no limit to the size of things, including the sizes of universes. We live in a finite universe. A large thing compared to things that we familiar with that aren’t the entire universe. The universe has 10^85th particles. Stars have 10^57th particles are something like that.
The universe is one million billion billionth the number of particles of the entire universe. So, it is kind of small. The Earth has like 10^50th particles or something. The human body has Avogadro’s number, so like 10^23rd particles or something.
So, we are a lot smaller. Even though, the universe seems fantastically big. It is. Under IC and the possible turtle stack of universes containing other universes, it seems like there is an idea that a universe can be any finite size, which a) seems obvious.
We live in a big universe. The rules of physics do not seem to preclude a smaller universe or a ibigger universe. Although, we do not know the rules of physics that preclude the size of a universe. There’s nothing saying a universe could not be a billion ties bigger.
That’s thing a), the universe can be bigger. Thing b) is the universe is the universe is rather self-balanced in terms of its gravitational energy. Although, there’s now the expanding universe, which has fucked with an open and a closed universe. It seems very closely balanced to having the amount of matter within it.
I guess, that includes dark matter and some other shit. It is precisely or exactly balanced being an open and a closed universe. That is, a universe that will keep on expanding forever, but just has enough energy it needs to do that.
If it even had a billionth less expansive energy, it would, at some point, run out expansive energy and then start collapsing into itself. IC doesn’t entirely believe that that’s by accident. It is more that it is a property of information.
However, the universe does seem to be precise in its dynamics. So, you could argue that, at some limit, larger than our universe it becomes impossible to have a universe or a stable universe that can expand uniformly, at least apparently uniformly, in a Big Bang way and have a bunch of local collapses and fold into itself like a big piece of paper.
Because it has a bunch of anomalies in the states or densities of matter. Assumption A is that you can any size universe. Question B, “Really? You can have a universe that is an octillion times bigger and still get the matter arranged in such a way that it doesn’t become unstable and just quickly unfold into itself.”
Part A is you can have any size universe with Part B as a retort of “really?” Anything short of infinity. We postulate that not only is any size universe possible. But if you’re cataloguing possible universes, the frequency with which different sized universes show up – I don’t know what “show up” means because we only live in one universe and only one universe showed up.
But if you are counting universes somehow, you can still get any sized universe because there may be a principle that says any sized universe can exist. But if the likelihood of that universe drops to zero, then it can’t exist. The principle that any sized universe can exist includes that there is a non-zero probability of any sized universe existing.
This leads to another weird infinity. If any sized universe out to infinity has a non-zero chance of existing, then that implies that there is an infinity of possible universes. Is that determining infinity? Or is it an infinity that seems okay? I have no idea. I don’t even know, as I said, what that means in terms of counting or making a zoo of universes. That’s pretty much the end of that whole deal.
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