[b]Max Tegmark
Some ancients speculated that the stars were small holes in a black sphere through which distant light shone through. The Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno suggested that they were instead objects like our Sun, just much farther away, perhaps with their own planets and civilizations—this didn’t go down too well with the Catholic Church, which had him burned at the stake in 1600.[/b]
Let’s try to put this in perspective.
Getting more tech-savvy people into law schools and governments is probably a smart move for society.
Perhaps even into philosophy departments. Or would that be entirely irrelevant?
Again Einstein comes to the rescue with a loophole, this time from his general relativity theory, which says that gravity is caused not only by mass, but also by pressure. Since mass can’t be negative, the gravity from mass is always attractive. But positive pressure also causes attractive gravity, which means that negative pressure causes repulsive gravity!
Dasein once again being largely irrelevant. Mine anyway.
If you increase the number of space dimensions beyond three, there can be neither stable solar systems nor stable atoms. For instance, going to a four-dimensional space changes Newton’s inverse-square law for the gravitational force to an inverse-cube law, for which there are no stable orbits whatsoever.
Three dimensions work fine for me.
…some concepts such as symmetries retain their central status. In contrast, other concepts, such as initial conditions, complexity and randomness, get reinterpreted as mere illusions, existing only in the mind of the beholder and not in the external physical reality.
For example, out in the world that we actually live in.
Perhaps life will spread throughout our cosmos and flourish for billions or trillions of years—and perhaps this will be because of decisions that we make here on our little planet during our lifetime.
Right, it all comes down to us.