From: Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com)
Date: Thu Apr 24 2003 - 14:23:38 MDT
"Tomaz Kristan" <me2icq@icqmail.com> writes:
> On 24 Apr 2003 14:39:37 -0400, "Perry E. Metzger" wrote:
>
> > That has been bothering me too.
>
> It doesn't bother me very much. I am quite sceptic
> toward any kind of infinity. This Universe might be
> much, much bigger and older than we assume. But it's
> probably just a finite world.
Why is a finite universe less bizarre than an infinite one?
I'll agree that an infinite world is strange, but so is a finite
one. Both yield odd puzzles. Neither is "intuitively satisfying" --
because we didn't evolve to need an accurate intuition about the
curvature of space.
The question is only what the evidence suggests, not what we feel
"should" be right. If the "finite space" hypothesis has low evidence
for it or has been at least partially falsified (which is true right
now given the WMAP data) and the "flat, infinite space" hypothesis has
not been falsified in spite of a lot of attempts, one should
reasonably accept the non-falsified hypothesis, regardless of how odd
it may feel.
What I will also note is, however, that data only a few years or
months old certainly has not stood the test of time. A lot more
experiments and a lot more data over coming decades will be needed
before the hypothesis solidifies into theory.
Perry
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:42 MDT