Is Nature playing fair with Krauss Object?

[michel123456]

What is a Krauss Object ? It is an object (or observer) in the far future, that will not be able to have any evidence of the Big Bang (my definition).

 

Eminent cosmologist Lawrence Krauss explaing standard cosmology here answers some questions and says the following:

 

 

FLATOW: 1-800-989-8255. You mentioned in your book that we are lucky to be living in this time in the universe.

 

KRAUSS: Yeah, I mean for a variety of reasons. One is in the far future, and by the far future I mean hundreds of billions of years, astronomers and radio hosts on planets around other stars will look out at the universe, and what they'll see is the universe we thought we lived in 100 years ago, all of the other galaxies will have disappeared expect for our own, and people will assume, or beings will assume, they live in a universe that's basically infinite, dark and empty except for one galaxy, with no evidence of the Big Bang.

 

 

So as it seems our common understanding of cosmology has created a model that predicts that future observers will be unable to understand the Universe the way we do today.

 

Does that mean that Nature does not play fair?

Edited January 20, 2013 by michel123456

[ewmon]

Who cares about losing scientific evidence billions of years from now? If Krauss is correct, then conversely, what was evident millions or billions of years ago that's not evident today, and what would it be evidence of?

[swansont]

What is "fair"? Nature has no obligation to be understandable.

[michel123456]

It is supposed that the Universe is knowable.

[michel123456]

By "fair" I mean: Mother Nature don't play tricks. Or shouldn't.

 

But for Krauss Objects, Nature does play tricks. Imagine yourself a Krauss Observer, you have no idea of the Big Bang: how can you possibly understand nature then?

[StringJunky]

By "fair" I mean: Mother Nature don't play tricks. Or shouldn't.

 

But for Krauss Objects, Nature does play tricks. Imagine yourself a Krauss Observer, you have no idea of the Big Bang: how can you possibly understand nature then?

 

You can only understand from the information or data you have before you. The Krauss Observer, assuming an ubrupt discontinuation of acquired knowledge from the past, will not know and therefore could not understand nature as we in the present understand it.. It's not nature playing tricks, it's just that information has been and gone.

[michel123456]

 

You can only understand from the information or data you have before you. The Krauss Observer, assuming an ubrupt discontinuation of acquired knowledge from the past, will not know and therefore could not understand nature as we in the present understand it.. It's not nature playing tricks, it's just that information has been and gone.

 

Hiding information is what I call "playing tricks".

[pwagen]

If saying future creatures are treated unfairly because they won't be able to see the expanding universe etc, then the same has to be said for creatures living their whole lives underground. They won't ever see stars, planets, redshifts, they won't have a clue what's going on other than their underground caverns.

 

Is that also unfair? Maybe, depending on your frame of reference, but nature doesn't take sides so it doesn't matter.

[michel123456]

So in other words you all feel lucky that we are here and now able to observe the Universe as it really is?

[zapatos]

So in other words you all feel lucky that we are here and now able to observe the Universe as it really is?

Well, as we think it really is, based on the data we were able to collect.

[swansont]

By "fair" I mean: Mother Nature don't play tricks. Or shouldn't.

 

That's just restating the problem without defining what you mean. What constitutes a trick by mother nature?

[StringJunky]

So in other words you all feel lucky that we are here and now able to observe the Universe as it really is?

 

You could ask yourself, what if there were observers at the first period when life began on Earth, what would they have seen or known about the universe 3 billion years ago given the equipment we have now? They would probably think they were in a special epoch and the information is lost to us now in the present. You could go back even further when the whole universe was causally connected...now that would be the special epoch would it not and all we are actually seeing now is an illusion restricted by the Hubble boundary and CMBR?

 

 

 

That's just restating the problem without defining what you mean. What constitutes a trick by mother nature?

 

It's also rather anthropomorphic.

Edited January 21, 2013 by StringJunky

[michel123456]

The part of the Universe which we can see is a fair sample, and that the same physical laws apply throughout. In essence, this in a sense says that the Universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists.

[swansont]

Laws don't have to be simple. Fair/unfair is a concept that just doesn't apply to the situation. Is it fair that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us we will never know certain information? To me the question is absurd.

[michel123456]

I never said that the laws must be simple.

 

I simply copy-pasted from the Cosmological Principle Wiki page:

 

 

 

In modern physical cosmology, the cosmological principle is the working assumption that observers on Earth do not occupy an unusual or privileged location within the universe as a whole, judged as observers of the physical phenomena produced by uniform and universal laws of physics. As astronomer William Keel explains:

The cosmological principle is usually stated formally as 'Viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the Universe are the same for all observers.' This amounts to the strongly philosophical statement that

the part of the Universe which we can see is a fair sample, and that the same physical laws apply throughout. In essence, this in a sense says that the Universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists

.

[1]

The cosmological principle contains three implicit qualifications and two testable consequences. The first implicit qualification is that "observers" means any observer at any location in the universe, not simply any human observer at any location on Earth: as Andrew Liddle puts it, "the cosmological principle [means that] the universe looks the same whoever and wherever you are."^[2]

 

(emphasis mine)

 

"the universe looks the same whoever you are" does not apply for Krauss Objects.

 

---------------

You see I was playing a trick

Edited January 22, 2013 by michel123456

[zapatos]

I never said that the laws must be simple.

 

I simply copy-pasted from the Cosmological Principle Wiki page:

 

 

(emphasis mine)

 

"the universe looks the same whoever you are" does not apply for Krauss Objects.

If you are using 'whoever' to also mean 'whenever', than that is correct. But then again, it is true for all objects, not just Krauss Objects. Take me for example. Someone who lived only 100 years ago will never get to know me. And somone who will live 100 years from now will also never get to know me.

 

So it is true that if you have the chance to get to know me, then you really do live in a special time.

[swansont]

"the universe looks the same whoever you are" does not apply for Krauss Objects.

 

Sure it does. If everybody can only see their own galaxy the universe looks the same to everyone.

[michel123456]

If you are using 'whoever' to also mean 'whenever', than that is correct. But then again, it is true for all objects, not just Krauss Objects. Take me for example. Someone who lived only 100 years ago will never get to know me. And somone who will live 100 years from now will also never get to know me.

 

So it is true that if you have the chance to get to know me, then you really do live in a special time.

I am sorry to disappoint you but you are not the Universe.

 

 

 

Sure it does. If everybody can only see their own galaxy the universe looks the same to everyone.

 

 

Excellent answer.

 

------------------

(edit)

 

In this case, for .K.O. the Universe is smaller than the one we observe today.

Edited January 22, 2013 by michel123456

[zapatos]

I am sorry to disappoint you but you are not the Universe.

No, but I am an object in the universe that cannot be observed by everyone, so we could restate your previous post to say:

 

"the universe looks the same whoever you are" does not apply for zapatos object.

[michel123456]

 

Sure it does. If everybody can only see their own galaxy the universe looks the same to everyone.

No, you caught me previously.

 

"Everybody" in your statement means "everybody in the same time frame with K.O.". That is "everybody" living the same (present) time in the universe.

That is not "everybody" including you and me & Zapatos and our Neanderthal friend nor our sons & daughters.

It is a very restricted "everybody".

[michel123456]

On 5/4/2020 at 12:43 AM, joigus said:

The statement that the universe is homogeneous in time is tantamount to saying that it looked pretty much the same in the past than now or in the future.

It was obviously not the same in the past, as it looked like a singularity, then opaque to radiation and neutrinos (plasma), then radiation dominated, then matter dominated, and today it's considered to be dark-energy dominated.

So it doesn't really look like it's going to be the same in the future, as it will exponentially expand.

Yes I know. But that leads to statements like this answer coming from eminent L.Krauss in an interview:
 

Quote

 

FLATOW: 1-800-989-8255. You mentioned in your book that we are lucky to be living in this time in the universe.

KRAUSS: Yeah, I mean for a variety of reasons. One is in the far future, and by the far future I mean hundreds of billions of years, astronomers and radio hosts on planets around other stars will look out at the universe, and what they'll see is the universe we thought we lived in 100 years ago, all of the other galaxies will have disappeared expect for our own, and people will assume, or beings will assume, they live in a universe that's basically infinite, dark and empty except for one galaxy, with no evidence of the Big Bang.

 

from

https://www.kcur.org/2012-01-13/lawrence-krauss-on-a-universe-from-nothing

 

To me, the "we are lucky to be living in this time in the universe" rings a bell. The bell tells me that it is highly improbable that we are so lucky that we can observe & analyze the universe the way it really is. No, we cannot be that lucky. Something is wrong in this concept.

This has been discussed on this same Forum but that didn't help me change my mind.

The discussion here:

 

[joigus]

13 minutes ago, michel123456 said:

Something is wrong in this concept.

I sympathize with your qualms at https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/72263-is-nature-playing-fair-with-krauss-object/ as well as as expressed here.

But something far more immediate than what professor Krauss foreshadows in the interview you quote is the fact that the surface of last scattering really is about to disappear behind the kinematic horizon. "About to disappear" as compared to the age of the universe. So it seems that Nature doesn't care too much about what's devoutly to be wished by us.

I will confess something to you that's relatively private and only laterally scientific. In the Summer nights, when I'm alone looking at the starry dome, I like to think that somehow we they will find out that all the information that we've lost they will have lost, all the information that we're loosing as we speak, will be possible to salvage. One thing that gives me hope is that every major mathematical model that we use involves analytic functions. Maybe those beings Krauss talks about will pack more mathematical/observational punch than we do. Maybe they get to exploit the mathematics in combination with super-duper-high-precision observations to the point of being able to extrapolate where they can't see and cross-check back in the visible universe by analytic continuation arguments. I wish that were to be true, even if it's just to satisfy the curiosity of remote-future virtual minds running on computers.

This is the expression of a hope, rather than a conviction, but a reasonable hope at that, I think. 

 

[Strange]

29 minutes ago, michel123456 said:

To me, the "we are lucky to be living in this time in the universe" rings a bell. The bell tells me that it is highly improbable that we are so lucky that we can observe & analyze the universe the way it really is. No, we cannot be that lucky. Something is wrong in this concept.

You can't say all of physics is wrong just because of your intuition about "luck". You need to try and quantify your scepticism, at least.

It doesn't seem particularly lucky. The rest of the universe has been visible for many billions of years. And will be visible for hundreds of billions more. Life appears to start almost as soon as conditions are available. And the circumstance for life to evolve have existed for billions of years. And intelligence takes just a few million years to evolve. So there are potentially enormous numbers of intelligent species that will be this "lucky".(*)

 

(*) Assuming life can happen easily anywhere and will, in a relatively short time, lead to intelligence that can look out at the universe. Neither of which we can be sure of from a sample size of 1.

 

 

Your argument in that other thread seems to rely on it being "unfair" that future observers won't be able to see what we can. But we cannot see the earliest life on the planet. We cannot see the immense variety of life that existed for hundreds of millions of years (we are closer in time to T rex, than T rex was to the Stegosaurus). We can reconstruct a tiny part of it from the minuscule number of fossils we can find. But the vast majority of it will remain unknown. We cannot know how human language arose, or what the earliest languages spoken in Europe were (is Basque a remnant of that, or was it a late arrival that replaced older languages - we will never know). 

None of that is "fair" but that is the way the universe is. All things will pass. Most (nearly all) will leave no trace.

[michel123456]

19 minutes ago, Strange said:

You can't say all of physics is wrong just because of your intuition about "luck". You need to try and quantify your scepticism, at least.

I don't say that all of physics is wrong.

I believe that our understanding is wrong.

I believe that all observers, no matter where there are, no matter when they are, will observe a BB happening around 13 BY ago. I believe that our measurements are relative, not absolute.

[Strange]

24 minutes ago, michel123456 said:

I don't say that all of physics is wrong.

I believe that our understanding is wrong.

I believe that all observers, no matter where there are, no matter when they are, will observe a BB happening around 13 BY ago. I believe that our measurements are relative, not absolute.

That implies that general relativity, quantum theory and most of thermodynamics are wrong, just for starters. 

Can you provide any evidence for your beliefs? Or is this a kind of religious thing: not letting the facts get in the way.