This is the age of PhDs. Nobody listens to you unless you’re one.
My cosmology education consists mainly of youtube videos and short articles.
So I’m using the conventional definition of “universe”. That’s a relief. I wonder why anyone would want to go unconventional with the universe. Coincidentally you brought up magnetism. Some say dark matter could be new physics; I respect Einstein and his SR/GR is a tour de force, but to extrapolate from a solar system to the entire universe or even galaxies is a bit of an overreach. The alternative is exotic matter, that’s gravitationally reactive. As I admitted, my science files are ancient. In my random websurfing sessions I see newsites with articles that have titles like, “scientists make breakthrough!”, “scientists discover new cure!”, “scientists create glowfish!” Are these clickbait, propaganda, or is science making real fast-paced discoveries?
But that’s a pretty big difference from what was quoted:
“Only that which you see or know about ‘exists’.”
That’s absolutely NOT the way most people use the word ‘universe’ or ‘exists’. Most people assume there are species that exist, and things that exist, that they haven’t seen and that also no human has seen. So as phrased, it’s solipsistic no? It’s like how a child lacks object permanence and thinks you pop out of existence when you hide your face behind your hands.
Because there’s never been a clear way of deriving gravity from the equations we have about quantum fields. Scientists know that there’s a unification of them precisely BECAUSE scientists know that big stuff exists in the same realm as small stuff, so the fact that they haven’t been able to unite these two things is… a big deal, a “craze”. It’s something that hasn’t been solved, that needs to be solved, that physicists know has a solution. They just don’t know quite what it is.
So you’re saying we’re still looking for the unicorns, kind of like big foot? I do take your point that everybody acknowledges that there are species not yet discovered. It’s just that unicorns are not typically on that list, and for the reasons I stated. Yet-to-be-discovered things usually don’t already have names.
It only seems relevant to a definition of universe as ‘all that exists’ since it kind of equates universe, existence, and reality. This is common for the ‘guy on the street’ but less so for people like you and me who know a little more about such things.
Only if other people don’t count. Sure, it’s a mind dependent definition of ‘exists’, but almost all definitions are, despite most not acknowledging that. The topic is about universe, so this is relevant only if the definition is ‘all that exists’, which is not how I would ever use the word since it is circular at best.
Maybe because the conventional notion doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Sure, most people don’t care about that, so a naive pragmatic definition works great.
The articles have links that make them sound more attractive than what is really discovered. Sure, science learns new stuff often, but most of it is less spectacular than the bait titles would have it. Pop articles rarely are written by people who actually know the subject at hand. Ditto with you-tube videos. I’ve even seen Sabine Hossenfelder (a real physicist and popular you-tuber) put out videos with nonsense in them, which was really disappointing.
Yes, big and small stuff are together. String theory solves the problem quite well, successfully unifying the big and the small, but it hasn’t quite made a mark in the empirical domain. Something about energy requirements for probing compactified dimensions. The CERN was a good bet; scientists expected violation of energy conservation. That was 15 years ago. Nothing in the news though. Interesting, no?
I think the math is college-level but the basic ideas are symmetry and compactified dimensions. One allows cancellation of anomalies and the other explains why we can’t see the extra dimensions required. Some find string theory beautiful, especially those working on it. Beauty is always a nice thing to have.
They solved the equations of string theory and instead of 1 solution, viz. our “universe”, out popped a solution set of 10^{500} universes. The model doesn’t uniquely identify our universe, but it is among the solutions. This is my understanding. I could be wrong.
For starters, call it ‘this universe’, a wording implying it is one of multiple ones. This totally deflates the ID argument. That page has several fallacies, including points 10-21 apparently arguing how this planet (and not the one universe) was designed for us instead of the other way around. But the most interesting part is the references, which includs:
John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
That reference is the rebuttal, the same thing explained by the weak anthropic principle instead of deliberate design.
I think most of the references are just sources of the numbers. Most don’t conclude ID.
So I should preface “universe” with “this” to let people know that I’m talking about the conventional meaning of universe (one that more or less fits a regular cosmologist’s definition). Ok.
ID is a modernized version of an older idea, God as a creator deity. Our emperor isn’t naked after all; he’s donned a white lab coat.
