Brian Greene on How To Make Your Own Universe

According to this radio broadcast, Stephen Hawking’s butt boy, Brian Greene, claims that humans are very close to being able to “create their own Universes.” Readers of this blog shouldn’t be surprised that Greene’s (probably Salvia-induced) hallucinations have reached this new low. But fans of Greene’s might be disheartened. At least now they can know the truth.

Greene’s idea has a couple of premises. One is his mythological view of history, that the beginning of the Universe happens “over and over and over again.”

He also talks about – get this – a “cosmic bubble bath.” If you listen carefully enough, you’ll notice that he admits his theories are a “mental exercise.” Indeed. So basically Brian Greene is doing Yoga, not physics. I ask you:

Interestingly, Brian Greene also justifies the Holocaust in this broadcast. He says, “I don’t think it’s a good guide to use our senses and our intuition to determine what we think is right or wrong.” Well Brian, that’s what Hitler said. Don’t worry, you just think genocide is wrong. Really the math works out quite nicely!

Without further ado, here are Brian Greene’s instructions for how to build a Universe:

If you want a manageable way of building a Universe, what you want to be able to do is build something pretty small. But a small thing is not a Universe, so it has to expand. For something to expand, there’s got to be some outward push, there’s got to be some repulsive push. And that’s where this repulsive side of gravity come into the story. There are conditions, which according to the Laws of  general Relativity, the laws Einstein wrote down a long time ago, well tested, those laws tell us that in this context of the right energy density carried by the right substance, you will have repulsive gravity, which means, if you can build this little seed, this little nugget, it will on its own start to expand, grow, faster and faster and faster, begin tiny and sprouting into a gigantic Universe. You can calculate that the nugget that we believe perhaps gave rise to our unvierse – maybe someone created it in their aprartment in some other universe – was about roughly, mmm, ten to the minus 26 cneitmeters across, weighed about ten pounds. That’s small! You wouldn’t really think intuitively you could build the whole universe from ten pounds of stuff. … But it turns out that that’s all you need, because the repulsive side of gravity is so powerful that it actually injects energy from gravity itself into the expanding space. So from that point of view all you need is the seed and the gravity takes over and does the rest of the work.

Now Mr. Greene thinks this “seed” needs a black hole. But how to get a black hole? As always, Greene has the answer.

It turns out that black holes don’t have to be big. You give me any object, and if I squeeze it sufficiently small … it will be a tiny black hole. There’s nothing that you could give me that I couldn’t turn into a black hole by squeezing it sufficiently small.

And if you’re worried that the Universe would expand and kill everyone, don’t be.

This Universe that you create would in essence create its own space. It wouldn’t encroach on your space by expanding into your domain, your house, into your region. It would expand by creating new space, space that hadn’t existed before. So it would be off on its own, if you will, creating its own bubble universe. What you’re creating on the other side is there, and in principle you could go there.

If you feel like after that primer, you’re still not quite able to make your own Universe, don’t feel bad. Greene’s instructions are border-line incoherent, and where they are coherent, they are impossible. For example, everyone knows that creating a black hole would cause Planet Earth to be sucked into itself. And so on.

The Three Thousand Year Reich of Negative Numbers (part one)

The curious reader might be interested to know that Diophantus and the Greek thinkers rejected the concept of negative numbers (and irrational numbers, of course) as “patently ridiculous” and “idiotic.” And we are a Greek-based society. So to borrow David Hume’s plaintive question – Then whence Negative Numbers? The answer to this question lies in the Orient. If there was ever a “yellow menace,” negative numbers are it. The Chinese, the Indians, and the Muslims gave us negative numbers. Not the superior Greeks. Is this a coincidence? I think not. These countries have had a vested interest in the concept from the very beginning.

Fortunately, however, negative numbers are behind a very thin conceptual veil. Once removed, it is easy to see the “Chinaman behind the curtain.” I’ll just say QUED ahead of time. Observe:

I can have three horses, but I cannot have negative three horses. Some people, suffering from Cognitive Dissonance (CD), suggest that “debt” is a manifestation of negative numbers. But that’s really just arguing semantics. Wittgenstein and Derrida disproved semantics back in the 20th century. In any case, what’s really going on in the situation is not that I have negative horses; rather, I owe some positive horses (Positive horses=horses that exist; countable horses. Who would want to be owed imaginary horses?). We can get by just fine without negative numbers. Besides, the Universe is full of stuff, not -stuff. If you would like to confirm this, here is the relevant empirical experiment:

Turn your head this way and that, and look at things. You may if you wish do this in a lab, for a more sciencey feel.

This conclusion, in conjunction with the abolition of infinity, has pathbreaking – nay, watershed – consequences for the number line, which now looks like this:

I constantly get compliments for how incredibly parsimonious my arguments are – well, this one perhaps beats them all!

If the abolition of negative numbers in the conceptual schema catches on in the West, we can expect an end to the Three Thousand Year Reich of the Neo-Zoroastrians who think that the number line is an exact balance between negative and positive (seriously, what are the chances anyway that it would be an exact balance? It’s even worse than 1/Penultimate. It’s zero!). Now some might say that empirically the Universe is symmetrical, and they might cite anti-matter as confirmation of this. But there is not room here to discuss anti-matter; I’ll leave that for a future post!

Relativity and the speed of light

Unlike subatomic particles, this blatant lie cannot be salvaged with resort to the world of magic. Fraud scientists, like Einstein, have decided, erroneously, that light, uniquely, has a constant speed. In other words, if you were chasing after a beam of light, you would measure it going the same speed as would a stationary observer. We have a word for this: Bullshit (I am using the term not in its derogatory sense, but in its technical sense, as extensively defined by Cambridge Professor Harry G. Frankfurt in his book by the same title.)

There are many ways that we can know that the constancy of the speed of light is bullshit in the technical sense. The most valuable method is common sense. Think about it. Think about things that move. Is light one of those things? Yes. Can you move? Yes. Can you catch up to things? Yes. Is light a thing? Yes. Then you can therefore catch up to light, by the transitive property. You might doubt that just “thinking” about it is scientific. But little do you probably know, thought can be a scientific experiment. The literature on this is penultimate. For example, see here.

The second method is a bit more technical, appealing to pure logic rather than thought. Here we have to employ a reduction ad absurtion argument. The alleged constancy of the (also alleged) speed of (so-called) light leads us to absolutely ridiculous consequences. The proof? Well, according to Wikipedia, “[This ridiculous idea] leads to some unusual consequences for velocities.” There is simply no place for the “unusual” in science, especially relating to something as straightforward as velocity.

Einstein, who Hitler was right about, also had some kind of crazy idea about what would happen if one were to reach the speed of light. But this idea is now widely rejected even by the scientific community, that last bastion of sanctioned irrationality.