T
Tao_Equus
Guest
This equation dz/dt=xy-z will be known to most of you as the Butterfly Effect. I will here attempt to demonstrate that the implication of this equation on the nature of reality leaves no possibility for the existence of a creator bearing any resemblance to the concept of god, as preached, in the universe we observe.
Unlike the old Newtonian laws suggest at first glance there is fundamental unpredictability in everything. The butterfly effect, chaos, and unmeasurable variables exist in everything. The developing mathematical models that try to describe instability in anything can do so only in the most limited respect. This is because everything is influenced by so many variables that are in turn subject to their own network of variability which in turn are...ad infinitum.
Newtons laws of motion, for example, can predict the orbit of two bodies around each other from now until infinity. And we have used these physics to great advantage, they work. But the reason they work is because inherrant instability does not usually have time to manifest, but sometimes it does. Introduce a third orbiting body and Newtons laws no longer work. Sooner or later some unobservable variable will begin to influence the system and very rapidly, almost instantaneously, chaos will be introduced. For example I think the general perception is that astronomers can predict the orbits of the planets indefinitely by use of Newtons laws. This is not true at all. The complex interaction of all the bodies in the solar system allow for only relatively short predictions of position. We can only really make approximations. And they have margins of error attached to them.
We have easily adopted Newtons thinking as it fits well with our cultural history of a monotheistic creator god that designed everything in a mechanistic, almost clockwork, perfection. Thinkers like Laplace compounded our ignorance by promoting the idea that everything was measurable, understandable, reductable and ultimately could thus be controlled. I think many people I have debated with here think I am of that school, and I appreciate that I can give that impression, but look closely and it is far from true that I accept anything on its reducibility alone.
We have briefly discussed Chaos Theory here. And all who partook marvelled at the computer generated imagery that gave humanity, for the first time, the ability to visually comprehend infinity. If you recall from that thread somebody dug up the term "Gods Fingerprint" to describe the laws of chaos. This has had me thinking a lot. Wondering if the discovery of this law was indeed evidence for an active creator. In fact for me it became the most compelling bit of creator suggestive mathematics I had ever encountered. For at face value such an irrefutable pattern inbuilt into the form of everything seems like a code for creation. But it was my misunderstanding of what it is, and its influence on the material universe, that was flawed. In actuality it is powerful evidence for the non-existence of a creator.
Edward Lorenz, the scientist who coined the term "The Butterfly Effect" sadly died this year. His work on divergence shows the bigger truth of chaos theory. It is easy to get drawn into the beautiful symmetry of a Mandelbrot set and think there is order there. But such a set is artificial. It is the generation of infinite repetition of a closed system. But there is no such thing as a closed system.Nothing in the observable universe is alone and unaffected by a wide range of dynamic influences each with their inbuilt and unmeasurable divergent properties. A Mandelbrot set is a human construct of perfect chaos. But such perfection exists nowhere.
An all knowing creator god has an impossible task. It would have to know with exact precision the divergent potential and predict what every particle, and sub-particle, in the universe would not only do, but what its divergent influence on every other particle would be from the beginning till the end of time. You can imagine this is mathematical task of such scale that it has to be ruled out as a rational possibility.
To give an example of the chaos involved. Just to predict the turbulence within a cup of coffee when milk is added to it you would need to measure 10 to the power of 40 degrees of freedom. There is no computer that can yet make such accurate measurement. And that is just the internal dynamics. The thermal turbulence of the cup on its local environment takes it into numbers that are incalculable.
Now if you scale this up to the turbulence within a star, or a galaxy, or a galactic cluster, then you begin to see the scale of the mathematical calculations any creator would be faced with. It is tempting to argue that our universe is stable, that there must be laws we don't understand that allow a creator to short cut all these calculations. But that is not so. The more we look the more we realise that the universe we observe is wholly at the mercy of divergence. We date the universe at about 13.8 billion years old. I think it is pretty safe to say that this was the last time that chaotic divergence caused a massive breakdown in the stability of the laws of physics that existed prior to that time. Cosmologists are continually finding anomalous objects that defy their best predictions and again the reason for this is divergence allows no standard prediction to be made. They can generalise but there will always be anomalies that crop up due to inherrant instability.
What all this says is that we can infer laws from studying the universe. But no matter what the law is everything that is supposedly governed by it can have a divergent potential that breaks the law. This potential is unmeasurable. So there can be no creator. A creator would not dare create a butterfly, lest it destroy all its work.
tao
Unlike the old Newtonian laws suggest at first glance there is fundamental unpredictability in everything. The butterfly effect, chaos, and unmeasurable variables exist in everything. The developing mathematical models that try to describe instability in anything can do so only in the most limited respect. This is because everything is influenced by so many variables that are in turn subject to their own network of variability which in turn are...ad infinitum.
Newtons laws of motion, for example, can predict the orbit of two bodies around each other from now until infinity. And we have used these physics to great advantage, they work. But the reason they work is because inherrant instability does not usually have time to manifest, but sometimes it does. Introduce a third orbiting body and Newtons laws no longer work. Sooner or later some unobservable variable will begin to influence the system and very rapidly, almost instantaneously, chaos will be introduced. For example I think the general perception is that astronomers can predict the orbits of the planets indefinitely by use of Newtons laws. This is not true at all. The complex interaction of all the bodies in the solar system allow for only relatively short predictions of position. We can only really make approximations. And they have margins of error attached to them.
We have easily adopted Newtons thinking as it fits well with our cultural history of a monotheistic creator god that designed everything in a mechanistic, almost clockwork, perfection. Thinkers like Laplace compounded our ignorance by promoting the idea that everything was measurable, understandable, reductable and ultimately could thus be controlled. I think many people I have debated with here think I am of that school, and I appreciate that I can give that impression, but look closely and it is far from true that I accept anything on its reducibility alone.
We have briefly discussed Chaos Theory here. And all who partook marvelled at the computer generated imagery that gave humanity, for the first time, the ability to visually comprehend infinity. If you recall from that thread somebody dug up the term "Gods Fingerprint" to describe the laws of chaos. This has had me thinking a lot. Wondering if the discovery of this law was indeed evidence for an active creator. In fact for me it became the most compelling bit of creator suggestive mathematics I had ever encountered. For at face value such an irrefutable pattern inbuilt into the form of everything seems like a code for creation. But it was my misunderstanding of what it is, and its influence on the material universe, that was flawed. In actuality it is powerful evidence for the non-existence of a creator.
Edward Lorenz, the scientist who coined the term "The Butterfly Effect" sadly died this year. His work on divergence shows the bigger truth of chaos theory. It is easy to get drawn into the beautiful symmetry of a Mandelbrot set and think there is order there. But such a set is artificial. It is the generation of infinite repetition of a closed system. But there is no such thing as a closed system.Nothing in the observable universe is alone and unaffected by a wide range of dynamic influences each with their inbuilt and unmeasurable divergent properties. A Mandelbrot set is a human construct of perfect chaos. But such perfection exists nowhere.
An all knowing creator god has an impossible task. It would have to know with exact precision the divergent potential and predict what every particle, and sub-particle, in the universe would not only do, but what its divergent influence on every other particle would be from the beginning till the end of time. You can imagine this is mathematical task of such scale that it has to be ruled out as a rational possibility.
To give an example of the chaos involved. Just to predict the turbulence within a cup of coffee when milk is added to it you would need to measure 10 to the power of 40 degrees of freedom. There is no computer that can yet make such accurate measurement. And that is just the internal dynamics. The thermal turbulence of the cup on its local environment takes it into numbers that are incalculable.
Now if you scale this up to the turbulence within a star, or a galaxy, or a galactic cluster, then you begin to see the scale of the mathematical calculations any creator would be faced with. It is tempting to argue that our universe is stable, that there must be laws we don't understand that allow a creator to short cut all these calculations. But that is not so. The more we look the more we realise that the universe we observe is wholly at the mercy of divergence. We date the universe at about 13.8 billion years old. I think it is pretty safe to say that this was the last time that chaotic divergence caused a massive breakdown in the stability of the laws of physics that existed prior to that time. Cosmologists are continually finding anomalous objects that defy their best predictions and again the reason for this is divergence allows no standard prediction to be made. They can generalise but there will always be anomalies that crop up due to inherrant instability.
What all this says is that we can infer laws from studying the universe. But no matter what the law is everything that is supposedly governed by it can have a divergent potential that breaks the law. This potential is unmeasurable. So there can be no creator. A creator would not dare create a butterfly, lest it destroy all its work.
tao
