4 ms·
Quite a lot of people worrying about the definition of the word 'universe' in this thread.
by codeulike 9y ago
Quite a lot of people worrying about the definition of the word 'universe' in this thread.
- pegasus 9y agoAnd with good reason. "Discovering a parallel universe" is nonsensical in the common acceptance of those words. Parallel lines never meet and the universe by definition contains all there is. So people are grasping for alternative definitions of the words that might make the statement satisifiable.
- codeulike 9y agoJust leave it be. We don't worry about atoms not actually being atomic anymore either.
- Symmetry 9y agoAt one point "Split an atom" was by definition nonsensical because atoms were conceived of as the smallest, unsplittable bits of matter. But then we found out that we could split these pieces of matter we'd mistakenly called "atoms" and rather than renaming them we just changed the definition of "atom" to correspond to what we'd always been calling "atoms". In practice I don't think this was unreasonable and I wouldn't strongly object to doing the same with what we've been calling "The universe".
- exodust 9y agoMight we think of a new word to describe a "sub-universe", like the one containing all our galaxies? This would allow for "universe" to be the thing that contains many or infinite sub-universes? Okay.. I'm done, I just confused the hell out of my brain.
- tim333 9y agoThe concept of another universe is pretty commonplace - see 'Star Wars expanded universe' and similar. The fact that we haven't found a real one doesn't mean the concept is nonsensical.
- 24gttghh 9y agoWouldn't we just use the word, "Multiverse"? >Our conjecture strengthens the intuition that holographic cosmology implies a significant reduction of the multiverse to a much more limited set of possible universes.