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Joe Mahmood

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Goodnight...wherever you are...

Joe

KID ROCK - ONLY GOD KNOWS WHY

 
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Joe Mahmood

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It has been very exhausting couple of days for me at work with Singapore National Day Parade and celebration etcs etcs and I can rest now...off day finally...

Goodnight everyone...I need to sleep at least for 24 hrs to rejuvenate again haha..

Take care all..

LARKIN POE - MAD AS A HATTER

 
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Joe Mahmood

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CAPTIVES - SIGNS



GLIDING INTO THE MULTIVERSE

Eternal inflation ties in with another notion currently in vogue, the multiverse. In this scheme our universe isn't unique but only one of many, many universes - bubbles in the bubble bath - whose number could be nearly infinite (we'll go into this in detail later). Because the big bang is so widely accepted, the possibility of eternal inflation has a leg up on steady state theories. Once the door is opened, there are as many shots at creating a universe fit for human life as you may desire. In the cosmic casino, nature fizzes away with universes, and odds are it will hit upon the right one - our universe - eventually. After all, there are infinite rolls of the dice. The cosmic casino even allows for infinite changes in the rules (i.e., laws of nature) governing how a cosmos works. Gravity, the speed of light, the quantum itself can be jiggled as you please - so the theory goes.

But imagine that you are in a car with a friend acting as navigator. You're in unknown country, so you ask him which way to turn at the next intersection. He replies, "There are infinite ways to turn at the next intersection, but don't worry, they lead to infinite other intersections where we can also take an infinite number of turns. Eventually we'll get to Kansas City." Physics finds itself talking this way when dealing with the multiverse, eternal inflation, and the cosmic casino. The most absurd part, besides the fact that there are no data or experiments to show that a theoretical multiverse matches reality, is that such theories wave the map of infinite choices under our noses, claiming it's the best map anyone has ever drawn.

The standard view among cosmologists is that some combination of different models, perhaps including the quasi-steady state, may still be viable. But no matter how many universes are allowed, the theory still begs the question of what existed before the creative process began. Before remains a useless word, yet claiming that everything is, was, and always shall be the same feels intuitively like a hat trick.

There are other ways of avoiding the question of a beginning. Before the "big bang with cosmic inflation" model became established, many cosmologists had favored cycles of expansion and contraction leading from a beginning to an end and back again. In Eastern spiritual traditions, cyclical universes were accepted as a general concept taken from the life cycles of creatures being born, dying, and renewing themselves. Analogies aren't the same as scientific proof, but we need to remember that in the human universe, the processes that govern life as we know it must be tied to the mechanics of creation on a cosmic scale.

A variant of the cyclic universe would exclude a big bang popping out of nothingness while yet accounting for the present universe described by general relativity. Specifically, Roger Penrose has proposed a series of universes stretching back in infinite time. The current state emerged from a previous universe by recycling everything in it, and most important, the current physical laws and physical constants in nature. One big bang leads to another in an endless cycle, and so the pre-created state is just the tail end of the previous universe. The sequence of creations retains a certain kind of memory from one cycle to the next. In Penrose's intriguing conception, the entropy (or disorder) found in the universe plays a fundamental role. There is a law in physics (the second law of thermodynamics) that holds that the disorder in the entire universe increases over time. The words sound abstract, but it's this law that governed how a superheated early universe grew cold, how stars die, and why a log out on the fireplace goes up in smoke and leaves behind ashes. On scales both large and small, entropy increases.

There are islands of negative entropy in the universe, where energy can be used for more order, as in living ecosystems, instead of winding down or dissipating. You are an island of order. As long as you keep consuming food, air, and water, your body is such an island, turning raw energy into orderly processes in trillions of cells, renewing and replenishing them. Earth became an island or negative entropy, on the surface at least, when photosynthesis began billions of years ago. Plants converts sunlight into orderly processes, just as your body does. Turning into an energy consumer instead of an energy loser is critical. Disorder causes energy to dissipate into heat, like the heat given off by a bonfire. To combat this entropy, living creatures consume the extra energy needed to counter the loss. A fallen tree in the woods has lost the ability to get energy from the sun, and therefore disintegration and decay begin to do their work.

Penrose didn't argue against the second law of thermodynamics - he acknowledged that the entire cosmos is becoming colder, more spread out, and more disorderly. His objection specifically targeted inflationary theories of the cosmos. If disorder increases as time passes, he pointed out, then the reverse must be true - if you go back in time, any system will display more orderliness early on. For example, if you reverse time, the smoke and ashes given off by a bonfire would re-form into a piece of wood, and a rotting tree would return to being alive and growing. Therefore, the early universe should be the most orderly state of all - yet it wasn't. The Planck era was a time of pure chaos. So where did the "specialness" (Penrose's term) of the universe come from, making possible the development of life on Earth? Nothing about the early universe, from its first instant of utter chaos, seems to prepare the way for the evolution of galaxies so that life on this planet is favored in advance.

To a layperson, Penrose's objection to inflationary theories seems entirely cogent, although there are technical considerations brought up by skeptical cosmologists. He makes a second point that is subtler. Let's say we accept that life on Earth is so unique that the early universe had to pave the way through special conditions. Let's even accept that there were special conditions emerging when the cosmos was superheated and infinitesimally small. What about the rest of the vast universe? Life evolved on our planet regardless of what was happening in billions of other galaxies - we didn't need them. So how could the universe be set up to aid our evolution, if that is indeed true, while everywhere else doesn't look special at all? It's far more likely, Penrose declares, that the conditions for life on Earth became special later on. Perhaps it was only a matter of random chance. The less improbable explanation is the one science must choose.

Recently astronomers have somewhat undercut Penrose's objection with the discovery of thousands of stars with planetary systems. Some of these stars are enough like the sun that they could foster life on planets similar to lifeon this one. Great excitement followed the news that we are probably not alone in the universe. However, the good mood fades when it's pointed out that "probably" doesn't actually explain how life evolved from lifeless chemicals. The odds could be so long - millions and millions to one - that even a multitude of suns in faraway galaxies aren't enough to find the magic key to life. The objection can't be refuted; on the other hand, it can't be proven either. But as soon as you start talking about odds and probabilities, you are assuming that life evolved randomly, and "specialness" has taken as severe blow.

Extracted from YOU ARE THE UNIVERSE - Discovering Your Cosmic Self And Why It Matters, by Deepak Chopra, M.D. and Menas C. Kafatos, PH.D.

https://www.deepakchopra.com/
https://www.menaskafatos.com/
 
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Joe Mahmood

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"The earliest evidence of anything like mythological thinking is associated with graves...Burials always invoked the idea of the continued life beyond the visible one, of a dimension of being that is behind the visible dimension...I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology - that there is an invisible dimension supporting the visible one."

~ Joseph Campbell

GRIEF - BURIAL

 
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