Mageth

"We don't know 1 millionth of 1% of anything"

Einstein was using a bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but he would have been a fool to claim we knew most or all of anything, IMO.

"God doesn't play dice with the universe."

Certainly you are aware of the context in which Einstein used this quote, what he was referring to, and can thus explain it for us.

(Interestingly, he may have never actually said this exactly as often quoted - Instead he may have just said "God does not play dice."

fishbulb

For each year that we have had to try to imbue computers with artificial intelligence, life has had 60 million years to develop intelligence on its own. And while there have been, at best, hundreds of thousands of attempts to create artificial intelligence, life has produced billions of billions of "experiments." Our efforts to date have been completely insignificant compared to nature's.

Moreover, our own attempts to produce artificial intelligence have been pretty successful. Computers are only 50-60 years old (depending on what you consider to be the first computer), and only a few people are actively working to program them but already we have programs which can replicate the behaviour of simple insects; something that took nature billions of years to accomplish. Not only that, but we have made computers that can correct spelling and grammar, interpret voice commands, learn to recognize faces, play chess and get better at it over time, sort a list of documents in terms of their relevance to you (see google.com), and perform many other impressive feats. AI has come a long way in a short time. Compared to the sophistication of a human brain, the most modern computer is positively primitive. Yet we can make it do many of the things that were heretofore considered the exclusive domain of the human brain.

Of course, we have an enormous advantage: we know what we are trying to produce; nature doesn't have a plan at all. It simply churns out countless specimens, each slightly different, and whichever ones happen to work out best in their environment survive to make more of themselves, each with its own small variations.

yguy

The motions of the planets in our solar system were impossible to explain before we took into account the effects of gravity, but once we took that into account, it was easy for a child to grasp the essence of it, if not all the nuances. So what I'm suggesting that our understading of gravity as applied to the problem of how the universe formed is comparable to the understanding of atomic structure as viewed through the lens of Newtonian physics.

The earth appears flat, so it is natural to assume that it is. However, it is not necessary to assume it.

This quote didn't relate to the findings about the change in light speed, and is obviously based on the currently accepted paradigm. There is no mention in the article of how much change may have occurred, or even whether the rate of change is constant - so your assessment is baseless.

Let us remember that physical laws are only verbal crystallizations of our perceptions of the physical universe.

On a side note, there is another way to look at this. If light appears to be slowing down, perhaps that is an illusion caused by everything else speeding up. That, it appears to me, would mean the total kinetic energy in the universe is increasing.

CALDONIA

What can be more intelligent than "bacteria?" Considered a lower form of life, it is everywhere, it is a major component of all life on Earth. Is it complex?

Let us thank God for bacteria!

caravelair

correct me if i'm wrong, but i believe we were talking about the question of why the fundamental forces and properties of the universe are the way they are. surely gravity cannot be used to explain gravity.


actually, the earth does not appear flat, since we see horizons. and either way, a sphere is just as simple a structure as a flat plane.

the quote was the author of the article asserting that the light took billions of year to reach us. obviously he would not say that if his findings suggested otherwise.

but really, that's nothing more than conjecture. i really don't think it's possible that everything is speeding up. the speed of different processes are determined by different things.

Mageth

The motions of the planets in our solar system were impossible to explain before we took into account the effects of gravity

Not true. The motions of the planets were described fairly accurately long before Newton. And there were even explanations for the motions, though we now consider them incorrect. It's definitely not impossible to explain the motions of the planets without gravity; I could explain the motion by saying angels are keeping them in their orbits, for example.

so your assessment is baseless.

caravelair seems to have a rather thorough understanding of cosmology, so I don't think you can claim his assessment is baseless.

On a side note, there is another way to look at this. If light appears to be slowing down, perhaps that is an illusion caused by everything else speeding up.

The first postulate of Einstein's Special Relativity is "The speed of light is the same for all observers, no matter what their relative speeds." So speeding up would not give the illusion that lightspeed was slowing down, according to Special Relativity.

BTW, it's now thought that the rate of expansion of the universe may indeed be increasing.

yguy

You're missing the point. I don't know how to get it across any better, so I'll drop it.

That quote was tangential to the core of the article. He could easily have stated that without contradicting his findings if they shed no light on the amount of change in light speed. Remember, the idea of the universe being billions of years old has been an accepted catechism in the scientific realm for at least thirty years. After a while, those things roll off the tongue without thought.

Mageth

I don't see anything in the article that would indicate that the researchers think, based on their hypothesis, that universe might not be billions of years old. Quite the opposite, actually. Am I missing something?

Autonemesis

If it had to have an architect, why only one? Why couldn't there be a hundred architects?

This is the Grand Unified Fuckup of Intelligent Design Theory.

yguy

Maybe that's why I said "explain" rather than "describe."

His understanding of cosmology in general doesn't counteract his misinterpretation of the article.

I don't see how you can apply that to this hypothesis, since we're not talking about a particular beam of light being observed in real time from different observation points in space, but about the speed of light being measured from different points in time.

However, the subject is way over my head, so I invite others to weigh in on this.