Do we need a new paradigm for the origin of the universe

We don't know. Progress is still being made, so its a little premature to call it in just yet. Not really. There are lots of singularities in physics. It just means your idea isn't finished yet and needs some work - something drastic usually. The brittleness of a material changes with temperature but reaches a singularity when the object melts.The 'simple big bang' theory has mostly fallen by the wayside these days replaced with variants of inflation which is a little bit more involved than the Big Bang (Holy Crap!).

This would depend on what one considers to be rational. Even if physicist complete an ultimate theory of everything what would that mean to you and me? Nothing really, unless you fully understand the mathematics involved in such theories. We can try to understand it by reading layman books but that will only give us a false sense of knowing what we are talking about. The subject of theoretical physics is not for the layman. This would be one of those misunderstandings of what one reads. The singularity is not a "thing", it is the result of a mathematical breakdown. It is arrived at by using observational evidence of the current expansion and working general relativity(GR) in reverse. What they are left with is an unfinished equation. The singualrity is arrived at not by abstract thinking but by mathematics and observation. Maybe if one is simply making a philosophical attempt then yes, it's an abstract thought. But the BB is not an abstract thought, the singularity is not a "thing", and the conclusions of physicist has only involved detailed analysis of the current universe and mathematical equations that have been proven to work. Some maybe, but mostly it's a giant strawman.

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"I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky

Love it, onifre, great stuff Tiny quibble for the pedant in me: We (usualy) work GR in four dimensions, so there is no 'reverse' as such - we see the whole solution in one go: beginning, middle and end.

I agree with your views on the limitations of my lay person's approach/perspective....I hope to remedy that in the future as I would like to do maths and physics at uni...mmm if I am capableAll my stuff about human perception/cognition etc throughtout my discourse relates to something that I have been thinking about for a while. I am clear that I am an enquirer not an innovator -According to the tenets of the quantum physics based on the uncertainty principle and the complementarity principle, there is no reality until that reality is perceived. Our perceptions of reality will, consequently, appear somewhat contradictory, dualistic, and paradoxical. However, the instantaneous experience of the reality of an immediate experience will not appear paradoxical at all. Reality only seems paradoxical when we construct a history of our perceptions.Are we changing reality simply by observing it?In the world of quantum mechanics,ultimately and fundamentally we affect the universe whenever we observe it or anything in it?Our observation seems intrinsically linked to our perception/cognition, does that mean our "mind" (the brain's conscious and unconscious cognitive processes) fundementally affect the universe? Has conciousness, as an entity, played a role in the origin and evolution of the universe?I know this is a move a way from the original post - I will redo the that post soon in light of peoples comments - If people are still interested in adding their commentsEdited by letchim, : No reason given.Edited by letchim, : No reason given.

Having a desire to study maths and physics means you are 50% there. Just work hard at these subjects, and believe in yourself. My approach is to assume that I'm useless at the subject but to have a desperate urgent need to be seen to be brilliant - that tends to bring out the required work ethic It was actually your OP that had me thinking hard on how to write something about the very wide subject of multiverses. This was precisely the time that DA made his 'derogatory' comment about the subject, and gave rise to my petulant out-burst. But I gained a Post-of-the-Month nomination so I can't be too embarrassed by it But as you have brought up QM now, I'll answer that first: No - perception has little to nothing to do with it, other than in the realms of quack science. Admittedly, and rather tautologically, reality as we perceive it only exists in our perception. But this has nothing to do with QM. And... Not in any way so far considered, and we certainly have no evidence of any effect.The quantum world of superpositions, cats that are live AND dead, etc, flows into the perceived classical world by way of the near-inifnite interactions that occur between the constituent parts of that world. Wave-functions don't 'collapse' when we see them, they collapse when they bump into each other (interact) - which, at the classical scale, is all the time.Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

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No - perception has little to nothing to do with it, other than in the realms of quack science

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Is that a rejection of the Copenhagen InterpretationWolf said that interaction is only an assumption and not in the fundimental understanding of the theory?Edited by letchim, : No reason given.

No, the 'measurement' component of the CI which introduces 'collapse' is not based upon perception, conciousness, etc. It is an interaction of the quantum wave-function with the classical measurement. This 'measurement' can simply be something else in the environment.That said, I do reject the naive CI, but that is because of the assumption of the classical nature of the measurement process.

Sorry cavediver, I didn't realize that the multiverse theory was your line of work. The way it came out in the post is not really what I meant. I do think you physicists are making lots of headway with this (not that my opinion matters much in this regard), and did not mean to disparage this. I try to keep track but sometimes I think my own reading is 5 or more years behind where you currently are. "Reality as we percieive it" is not necessarily reality. I think we humans can be duped into the existence or nonexistence of something due to our limited understanding of the world around us. So in essense, reality exists irregardless of our perception of it since the very definition of reality is the state of things as those things that actually exist not of those things that we percieve to exist. If not than reality could really be just a dream or a mere fabrication of our or some other entities imagination. I agree with this philosophy of realism. That is, reality is objective and not subjective to the perception of the observer. Whether we can ever percieve this reality in whole is a different matter altogether.Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.

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For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Dr. Carl Sagan

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Wolf said that interaction is only an assumption and not in the fundimental understanding of the theory?

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Can I just come back to this for a second

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No - perception has little to nothing to do with it, other than in the realms of quack science

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Yes but a there are people suggesting that consciouseness has some infulence...apart from Wolf above,according to Amit Goswami, Ph.D., professor emeritus in physics at the University of Oregon Institute for Theoretical Science, "without consciousness there is no collapse, no material particles, no materiality." Here's a taste of how quantum physics astounds: Goswami says that the universe didn't come into being until the first sentient being, whatever that was, saw it for the first time, which collapsed one of its quantum possibility waves into the material universe we now perceive - and the collapse was backwards in history to the instant of the Big Bang.IF we consider here, random event generators experiments at Princeton (The Global Consciousness Project), specifically some audio experiments which suggest consciousness can infulence the collapse backward in history, when people hold intentions to change the non-randomness of the numbers.This would start to qualify as a new paradigm and seems to make some sense to me with regard to the "fitness" of the universe to intellegent lifeEdited by letchim, : No reason given.

Yes, we have all thought like this at one point - we then grow up. Goswami's ideas are purely pseudo-religious musings. The point is, you should be looking for scientific concensus, not any one lone scientist's thoughts, no matter what his credentials.

and the The Global Consciousness Project?

Utterly inconsequential at this stage, along with every bit of parapsychological research. Believe me, I would be one of the first jumping up and down in excitement if incontrovertible evidence were discovered - but it hasn't, and I get excited by what existence is, not what it might be. Existence is already mind-blowing on so many levels that there is zero need for speculations of magic, and twenty life-times are not enough to delve into all of the mysteries that we know are real.

Hi cavediver,I have a few questions, I am not disagreeing with you, just asking some layman questions about your chosen interpretation.1. I see this interpretation assumes the wavefunctions are real, objectively existing waves. What happens to the other real probability waves?2. How could there be waves at all, when the wavefunctions are interacting with the environment at all times(e.g. photons) and become particles? How could there be a molecule of H if the wavefunction is "collapsed"(decohered) to a single state, e.g. the hydrogen is subjected to light?3. If the impulse of a particle is known with great certaity, the wavefunction of that particle can be almost anywhere in space. Does this mean that the electron is everywhere at once, or does this mean that there are parts of an electron in different places at once? Is so, how can an electron be a part of an electron? If it's everywhere in space, what happens to the others after the interaction causes a particle to appear? Doesn't this imply that a single electron can be a billion electrons at the same time?4. It seems decoherence uses non-locality, how else could the information travel instantaneously from the decohered wave to the other real waves.5. At the double slit, does this interpretation imply that if there is any sort of light during the experiment, there would be no waves? If those waves are real, why aren't they interacting with the waves of the atoms of air while in transit?6. Richard Feynman says about the double slit, that an electron goes through every possible route before hitting the screen, incl. through other galaxies, but the overall mean value of the probability is the path that we see/assume the electron travels. Do you agree with this statement? Doesn't this imply that the electron uses non-locality? How does non-locality tie with the real waves?
Don't real waves deny non-locality and do you agree with Anton Zeilinger that besides locality we must also give up certain forms realism to match the findings in QM?7. Under this interpretation, how can a physical object - an electron, or an atom, or it's real wavefunction, travel through quantum jumps when SR forbids such FTL movement of real objects? Or is the wave not an object? How then do we define "real", and how could there be bumping waves? What happens to SR with these real waves travelling FTL?I have more questions but will ask later.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

The wave-fns are essentially replaced by the fields. So yes, they are real. And they are all that is. What other 'real probability waves?' At the classical scale, there essentially are no waves. That si what makes it the classical scale, and why 'particles' seem to behave like particles. Something that is close to being in a defintie momentum state is not what we would normally call a particle. There are no 'parts' of eletcrons or particles. It doesn't and they don't. Some do. Many don't because there isn't sufficient cross-section. Interactions have already 'collasped' down the molecule wave-functions, so there is little with which to interact. And photons do not interact with themselves (at 1st order) - which is good, because vision would be impossible without this feature. No, this approach is a method to construct the field configuration - we do not consider it real. It is preserved perfectly. There are no non-local effects. Wave-functions evolve perfectly well in accordance with causality. Despite what many may say... We specifically construct qunatum field theory this way and evidence demonstrates it to be our most accurate picture of reality.

But this can't happen without information being sent to the other uncollapsed wavefunctions FTL, e.g. through entanglement? And how are the wavefunctions replaced by the fields? Wouldn't they remain excitations of that field? What process cancels these real objectively existing excitations? And doesn't this leave the door open to the conclusion that other(multiple) real probability waves of the same particle could "collapse" to a single state at the same time(because of interaction) - i.e. one electron could become multiple single state electron particles, thus providing a possibility of constructing a perpetual machine powered by a single electron that would multiply and produce electricity? I think then the H molecule is a myth. How can this be? The H atom has only one electron, it relies on this electron to be in multiple places all at once, to keep the bonding between the atoms in a molecule. And we have evidence of H molecules. There must be waves being at multiple places at once, right? So my question stays - if the H molecules are showered with light(i.e. at noon), there would be no molecules of H? So the real objectively existing waves of a single electron are almost everywhere in space at the same time? I was talking about the double slit exp. done with electrons. Would light disturb the wavepacket and cause a particle to appear? Wouldn't an x-ray scanner break down any substance being treated with those x-rays by causing multiple molecular bonds to disappear(human body contains a very large portion of H, e.g. in H2O)? Last sommer it got to 45 degrees celsius here in Varna. The heat was scorching, the sun rays were dazzling and penetrating the crystal clear waters of coastal Black Sea. If photons can 'collapse' the wavefunctions of the electrons in the H atoms, doesn't this mean that i have been riding my jetski in something else, but not water on that extremely sunny day? So is quantum tunneling a myth? And, say, an electron wave that is supposedly a real object, gains momentum and changes orbitals. How does this not break SR? And how is this not a non-local movement? Are quantum jumps of assumed real waves a myth?Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.