Do parallel worlds exist?
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That question is way above my pay grade, being argued with fervor by people who know much more about such things than I.
I’ll sit back and wait patiently for the press conference.
I believe many unimaginable things may be possible.
Thank you for alerting me to this upcoming experiment. I will follow it closely.
It’s hard to say whether they do, but even harder to prove that they don’t. I personally am inclined to think it possible enough that the question is worth investigating, but stop short of saying Yes.
@Hypocrisy_Central That seems like an odd answer for a Theist. Hear me out.
Since we have already proven that Heaven is not physically above us, at least not in the same dimension(s) as Earth, the only possibilities left that I can see are that either alternate dimensions exist or Heaven does not, and I feel safe assuming that your piety eliminates one of those choices.
If parallel realities exist though, a simple change of vantage point will place Heaven “above” Earth, thus reconciling your faith with scientific fact. And it seems to me that a devout person such as yourself would be at least mildly pleased to see the “heretical” ideas of Science prove in no uncertain terms that the Bible is (or even can be) literally true and force the non-believers to be hoisted by their own petard.
Things are getting theoretically wacky right now
@jerv
Where is this “proof of no heaven” physically above us?
Without that, your post is just a clever set of words.
@Apparently_Im_The_Grumpy_One We’ve sent out enough space probes and peered through enough telescopes that I feel NASA would’ve seen it by now if it were an actual place in our realm/plane/dimension.
If one asserts that Heaven does exist, then I see no way to reconcile faith and fact that does not involve some sort of rethinking of our understanding of dimensions in a manner that allows for the possibility of parallel worlds.
Regardless, I can see how many may take interest in this experiment for reasons other than academic research of Physics. It this experiment bears fruit, it will raise some serious questions of a philosophical/theological nature.
@jerv So our random exploration didn’t find anything. Seems legit.
To assert something as a main point in your argument requires that it have more of a foundation than “well we looked.. but we didn’t see it”.
As far as the linked experiment.. it hasn’t proven anything yet. It’s just an article. Let’s see the results before we jump to conclusions.
@jerv We’ve sent out enough space probes and peered through enough telescopes that I feel NASA would’ve seen it by now if it were an actual place in our realm/plane/dimension.
Yeah, I don’t know. Space is one huge bastard, and when you consider how vast it is, our probes and telescopes really haven’t been all that far. It is quite possible that if something else is out there, our science isn’t advanced enough to get that far. Don’t know nothing about space exploration much though. Have any human devices ever managed to go beyond the milky way?
How’s this?
Assuming you’re looking for the Biblical “heaven”.
Genesis chapter one states, “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven.”
Yay, Bible Derby competitions.
Heaven, as literally described in the Bible, is the sky, as a solid dome holding up half of the ocean from which Earth was created.
(because God never actually created water, in the story, and apparently had no method of destroying it. It was there already. More than a few pastors got red under the collar when I asked about this point. It was then and remains a favourite question.)
Since we have gone up, up, up, and not hit “heaven”, then “heaven” as described in the Bible cannot be there.
If you have another source of description for “heaven” other than that which is in the Bible, I’d be more than happy to look at the supporting evidence for it.
@jerv Since we have already proven that Heaven is not physically above us, at least not in the same dimension(s) as Earth, the only possibilities left that I can see are that either alternate dimensions exist orHeaven does not, and I feel safe assuming that your piety eliminates one of those choices.
(checking my pulse because we seem closer in agreement than not) I will concur with that, Heaven cannot literally be above us here on Earth, or below depending on how you orientate the universe. Heaven is in the spiritual realm. An alternate universe would be a created thing, as the universe we are in. Thus, from this universe, if God had another universe out there, it would be in a totally different dimension and totally inaccessible from this dimension, to for the sake of the question, for me there are no alternate universes.
However, what struck me more was your ”It’s hard to say whether they do, but even harder to prove that they don’t.” One can say that of God, I have yet to find someone who can prove, here or anywhere else, that God doesn’t exist. When you have a relationship with Him, you have evidence of His existence even if you rule out all the mysteries of nature. You will hold a candle out that they are plausible when there is no evidence that can be observed personally or through nature, yet summarily dismiss the existence of God in spite of the fact.
@Apparently_Im_The_Grumpy_One One nice thing about science is that it evolves as provable facts emerge. I’m not saying that it definitively and in no uncertain terms isn’t there, merely that we’ve, after gathering and processing all the data that we have, the weight of the evidence is very, very, very, very, VERY much against it. To my mind, once certainty exceeds a certain number of decimal places beyond a mere 99.999%, that is enough to consider it true until proven otherwise.
@Symbeline It appears that @Seek beat me to the punch. The Bible is either wrong, metaphorical or speaking from a trans-dimensional viewpoint.
@Hypocrisy_Central I try to be an equal opportunity skeptic.
@Symbeline – I linked to a picture above that was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. All those shiny things are other galaxies.
How about something simple like there is no up.
We are on a globe, a round ball. If I am no the North pole and you are on the South Pole then my up is your down and vise-a-versa. And, just to complicate things more, someone on the equators up is my (and your) sideways.
So, where is up? Where is Above Us? It is all relative to your own perspective.
@Apparently_Im_The_Grumpy_One It would help if you could point the way to Heaven but I would settle if you could just show me which way is above.
I don’t see why not. Parallel universes would certainly help to explain many things.
As far as I’m concerned the majority of the “scientific” things which people think the Bible explains are primarily metaphorical.
Jesus used parables as a teaching tool in order to get across larger points than the actual story being told. So similes and metaphors abound and those who insist upon super literalism present themselves with innumerable headaches trying to explain things logically. Metaphor doesn’t work that way.
I’m continually amazed at the number of people who insist upon a literal hell of eternal fire which will consume sinners.
Well which is it? Is it consuming them? (which means an end at some point because once something is completely consumed the fire dies out).
Or is it eternal? (literally without end.) you can’t have it both ways. There’s no logic to that at all. It’s either literally all-consuming or it’s literally endless. It can’t be both if you insist upon a literal interpretation.
But metaphor opens up an entirely different set of possibilities.
And likewise the literal upward or downward “direction” of heaven or hell.
Alternate universes make a whole lot more sense than any type of literalism ever could.
I find this whole idea fascinating and look forward to what they find.
^ Parallel universes would certainly help to explain many things.
Such as?
Apparently you didn’t read what I just wrote.
Such as : if there are parallel universes then trying to determine the upward or downward direction of either heaven or hell becomes totally irrelevant.
Also, tho I won’t go into much detail about it, with parallel universes, time itself can be largely irrelevant (I already think it is anyway, at least in spiritual matters) and the entire concept of reincarnation can be explored in an entirely different way (other than linear, that is.)
If you let your imagination drift a little, there are all sorts of possibilities.
But if one chooses to persist with absolute literalism regarding spiritual things then the entire concept of parallel universes becomes rather a moot point as far as I’m concerned.
@Buttonstc Such as : if there are parallel universes then trying to determine the upward or downward direction of either heaven or hell becomes totally irrelevant.
If there is one parallel universe there might be many, however, determining the directional orientation of Heaven or hell would have nothing to do with any parallel universe.
If you let your imagination drift a little, there are all sorts of possibilities.
I can let my mind drift through all the science fiction of it, only in the attempt of an entertaining muse.
“If there is one parallel universe there might be many, however, determining the directional orientation of Heaven or hell would have nothing to do with any parallel universe.”
Maybe I’m reading it differently then.
Okay, the universe that we can see without even thinking about has three physical dimensions that are obvious. Call them Length, Width and Height, or maybe X,Y and Z, but in any event, we have three dimensions that (at least by our perceptions) are all perpendicular to each other.
But suppose that someplace existed existed in the X, Y, and Q planes. We would still have two shared dimensions with that place, but we would not be able to see it, or even prove it’s existence… at least not with our bare eyes. I mean, how does one prove something that literally has no thickness exists? (I’m not talking zero thickness; I’m talking that it doesn’t even have anything to even be be zero.) As it stands right now we just plain can’t…. unless the hardon…HADRON collider can do it, in which case it will be a major scientific breakthrough.
Notice that that hypothetical XYQ space has three dimensions as well though. If Q is perpendicular to both X and Y yet is not Z, then it could still be truthfully claimed that it is “above” the XYZ space that us humans are used to.
The implications of a place that is both in the same place as another place yet also nowhere near it is… well, the sort of thing that makes philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians great fun at parties after a few drinks.
Yes, but they aren’t all like we think, actually, I think it quite likely that not a single one would necessarily have ANYTHING to do with “our” reality whatsoever. Anyone who has TRULY left This Reality will tell you that if you were in parallel universe you could never ever know because there would be absolutely no connection to it or anything that you know, or could even possibly fathom. Oh yea.
Has anyone ever done any research into whether there are perpendicular universes?
I don’t think so, but I loved the show Fringe, and a few others that worked on that premise.
I fixed the topics. :)
@rojo I believe some serious* research has been done in that direction, but it’s a little tricky since even if all the math checks out, the answer is still something that us humans cannot really see. While the same could also be argued of anything involving a microscope, at least whatever is under a microscope is still in our… reality.
By “serious” I mean something more academic than Robert Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast that involved dimensional travel caused by simultaneously precessing a gyroscope in all three “normal” axes, thus causing it (and the craft it was attached to) to go dimension-hopping. The title is from the fact that the underlying theory posited the existence of (66)6 dimensions; three sixes.
I’m a topic editor. I don’t do it as much as I should, but when it’s pointed out I fix it.
@jerv But suppose that someplace existed existed in the X, Y, and Q planes. We would still have two shared dimensions with that place, but we would not be able to see it, or even prove it’s existence… at least not with our bare eyes. I mean, how does one prove something that literally has no thickness exists? (I’m not talking zero thickness; I’m talking that it doesn’t even have anything to even be be zero.) As it stands right now we just plain can’t…. unless the hardon…HADRON collider can do it, in which case it will be a major scientific breakthrough.
Perhaps in X, Y, Z there is a G dimension running through it and because it cannot be detected by usual (physical) means, people do not believe it is there or exist, so the method of detection which the inhabitant of that dimension gave goes unused and thus perpetuates the notion it is not there, if one really thought, in that dimension is God.
@Hypocrisy_Central If I read that right, it seems you’re really close. The G-axis would not run through XYZ-space, nor would it run through XYQ-space, but XYZ-space, XYQ-space, and XYG-space would all be perpendicular to each other. The issue is that that may theoretically open the possibility of multiple Heavens as there would be multiple spaces that had a G-axis. Just using the axes mentioned so far would yield ten different three-axes spaces each containing a G axis.
At this point, I think it safe to say that, thus far, this discussion has been very simplistic compared to the actual reality. For instance, the assumption that our physical reality has only three axes makes things a little easier to visualize, but is also unprovable; mankind simply doesn’t know enough about dimensions and how they work to even have words for the concepts involved anything n-spatial where n > 3.
The trick now is to build instruments capable of measuring in the G axis, and if we manage to do that, it would be a breakthrough. But before we can do that, we might want to have at least a half-baked guess as to handle the mental contortions involved and a few new words/terms in our vocabulary to describe them.
Unlike The Doctor, us humans really have a hard time viewing things from a non-linear, non-subjective point of view, which is why, unlike The Doctor, we humans go through time slowly and in the right order.
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