Quote from Brass:
I'm not a scientist and I never pretended to be one, like you and Turder666. I just know what I read. Hawking qualified M-Theory. Penrose spoke as though Hawking did not do so in his book. That was my point. That's the straw man argument. As for the science itself, who am I to take on either of these guys? And for that matter, who are you or Turder666?
No, wrong. A plea of ignorance is no explanation. Some take the time to understand the science behind it.
Here is why Penrose is justified in saying its a collection of ideas and that M theory is hardly a science... so therefore the book is overstated. Penrose is telling you that Hawking just dreamed this stuff up, based on a unobservable, unverifiable conjecture tied to M theory that there could be 10 to the 500 universes.
Understand this paper or shut up.
If you really understand this... you will now understand why hawking states gravity causes the universe. In a way, if you follow along with the all the conjectures, it sort of does. If accept the conjecture you think because you are existing in one of the rare solutions which works amongst almost infinite possible solutions.
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http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0602/0602091v2.pdf
"But cosmology poses questions of a very different character. In our past there
is an epoch of the early universe when quantum gravity was important. The remnants of this early phase are all around us. The central problem in cosmology is to
understand why these remnants are what they are, and how the distinctive features
of our universe emerged from the big bang. Clearly it is not an S-matrix that is the
relevant observable
3
for these predictions, since we live in the middle of this particular
experiment. Furthermore, we have no control over the initial state of the universe,
and there is certainly no opportunity for observing multiple copies of the universe.
In fact if one does adopt a bottom-up approach to cosmology, one is immediately
led to an essentially classical framework, in which one loses all ability to explain
cosmologyâs central question - why our universe is the way it is. In particular a
bottom-up approach to cosmology either requires one to postulate an initial state of
the universe that is carefully fine-tuned [10] - as if prescribed by an outside agency
3
See [6, 7, 8, 9] for recent work on the existence and the construction of observables in cosmological
spacetimes.
1- or it requires one to invoke the notion of eternal inflation [11], which prevents one
from predicting what a typical observer would see.
Here we put forward a different approach to cosmology in the string landscape,
based not on the classical idea of a single history for the universe but on the quantum
sum over histories [12]. We argue that the quantum origin of the universe naturally
leads to a framework for cosmology where amplitudes for alternative histories of the
universe are computed with boundary conditions at late times only. We thus envision
a set of alternative universes in the landscape, with amplitudes given by the no
boundary path integral [13]."
