{"id":1784,"date":"2008-07-14T10:21:56","date_gmt":"2008-07-14T15:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2008\/07\/14\/beyond-the-room\/"},"modified":"2008-07-14T10:21:56","modified_gmt":"2008-07-14T15:21:56","slug":"beyond-the-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/14\/beyond-the-room\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the Room"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m sure <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gocomics.com\/tomthedancingbug\/2008\/07\/12\/\">Ruben Bolling<\/a> is making fun of people I disagree with, and not of me.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.gocomics.com\/tomthedancingbug\/2008\/07\/12\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/uploads\/1215845989gif.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"375\" height=\"133\" class=\"center\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The underlying point is a good one, though, and one that is surprisingly hard for people thinking about cosmology to take to heart:  without actually looking at it, there is no sensible <em>a priori<\/em> reasoning that can lead us to reliable knowledge about parts of the universe we haven&#8217;t observed.  Einstein and Wheeler believed that the universe was closed and would someday recollapse, because a universe that was finite in time felt right to them.  The universe doesn&#8217;t care what feels right, or what &#8220;we just can&#8217;t imagine&#8221;; so all possibilities should remain on the table.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, that doesn&#8217;t mean we can&#8217;t draw reasonable <em>a posteriori<\/em> conclusions about the unobservable universe, if the stars align just right.  That is, if we had a comprehensive theory of physics and cosmology that successfully passed a barrage of empirical tests here in the universe we do observe, and made unambiguous predictions for the universe that we don&#8217;t, it would not be crazy to take those predictions seriously.<\/p>\n<p>We don&#8217;t have that theory yet, but we&#8217;re working on it.  (Where &#8220;we&#8221; means an extremely tiny fraction of working scientists, who receive an extremely disproportionate amount of attention.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m sure Ruben Bolling is making fun of people I disagree with, and not of me. The underlying point is a good one, though, and one that is surprisingly hard for people thinking about cosmology to take to heart: without actually looking at it, there is no sensible a priori reasoning that can lead us [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,25,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-philosophy","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}