Born to do Math 160 – Galaxies^2
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk about a material world and information processing, or that a material world taken as an information processor can get pretty big in all sorts of models.
Rosner: The principle of there being no limit to the size of things. Physics, information theory, and quantum mechanics are built around finitude, a lack of infinities. Once you run into anything that requires an infinite amount of something, you have a problem.
There are implied infinities, like with 2. It is 2.0000… out to infinity. But 2 is an abstract concept. You encounter two of the things in the world. They’re pretty much 2. You’ve got 2 apples. You’ve pretty much got 2 apples. The infinite precision of the number 2 doesn’t enter in, in practical terms.
To have a universe with an infinite number of particles, that doesn’t work. Anything short of infinite should work. We are bound by our universe having 10^85th particles, protons and stuff. If it has 10^85th, then it is reasonable to assume, at least, for the sake of thinking about stuff that any size is possible.
Jacobsen: Can we make an argument, future A.I. walking around or floating around in virtual space will have thought that will be so complicated and precise compared to us; what they think about, it will seem like infinity to us.
Rosner: There is the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. There’s the stuff that seems infinitesimally precise, like the wavelength of a baseball, the Planck wavelength of a baseball.
The deal is the Planck wavelength of something in Quantum Mechanics is inversely related to the mass of the object. So, you take something macro like a baseball. Its wavelength is super infinitesimal. You can talk about stuff so precisely that it might as well be infinitely precise.
In practical terms, any theory that has infinitudes in it is probably not right. Unless, the infinities are just these abstract things involved in the math of it. Anyways, we are forced towards the idea of any size of the universe is possible by the idea in IC that our universe is an information map of an information processing entity in yet another universe, and one that is likely way, way, bigger than ours.
Then you can kind of extrapolate from that. That universe implies a yet bigger universe. All the way out. That you probably don’t need that kind of thinking to still postulate that any sized universe is possible. Assuming that, you have to have a physics that allows for that.
That any kind of physics that says, “Once you get past a certain size of the universe, it is going to be inherently unstable and then collapse in itself to a smaller form.” Or some limit on duration. Universes can be of any size, not only in space or amount of matter but also in how old they are.
Based on Big Bang Theory or the variations on it, from what we know, I don’t think it puts limits on the sizes of universe, at least the masses of universes. When you take traditional Big Bang theory, they expand, use all their stellar fuel, succumb to entropy, and, eventually, develop into a lukewarm soup of decaying protons that is maximal entropy and has nothing going on in it.
It has nothing going on and continues for trillions of years or I don’t know what. I don’t think that’s an accurate future for the universe. But I do think that you can have an active universe. A universe that has a lot of the physics that we do with stars and galaxies of just about any size.
But the bigger the universe, under IC, the larger its apparent age. I guess in an old ass or super old ass universe with a lot of matter in it. I’d guess. Galaxies would have more time to crash into each other. There’d be many more galaxies.
Galaxies will crash into each other and form these globular structures, spherical galaxies. If you take two spherical galaxies and crash them into each other, then they combine. You get a spherical structure. I think it takes a few million years to calm down to a spiral galaxy again.
That spiral galaxies are settled galaxies. I assume in an old ass universe. You just have way bigger galaxies, way bigger blackish holes at the center, way more galaxies. I would assume galaxies would still be a unit of organization of matter.
We semi-know that there are larger organizations of matter, even in our universe, e.g., filaments, strings of galaxies, and matter, that stretch out across hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of lightyears.
I guess, in vastly bigger and older universes, galaxies are kind of self-contained. They are organized by their own gravitational fields to be limited in space. We have these larger structures that are not little blips in the overall map of the universe.
They are strung out across vast spaces. I don’t know, in a much bigger and older universe, if there would be structures that would be bigger than galaxies but would be settled down into galaxies of galaxies. That would be orbiting agglomerations of a pretty good number of galaxies.
There would be these mega-galaxies or galaxies^2. I don’t know if there would be a bunch of these spread out like a bunch of dots across the universe.
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