Neutrino discussion

[Tom Johnson]

Per request from Jan Hauser....
-to

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jan Hauser <[hidden email]>
Date: Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 6:37 AM
Subject: Need help with Friam
To: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>, Jan Hauser <[hidden email]>


Tom, I still can't access FRIAM.  Would you please post this for me?

Make subject line match the one about neutrinos please.
- Jan Hauser


Lee Smolin has suggested this with Murray Gell-Mann saying  positive
things about it.

- Jan Hauser

http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/z-Ch.17.html


Once I asked the question, an answer appeared very quickly: the
properties of the particles and the forces are selected to maximize
the number of black holes the universe produces. This idea came right
away, because of two ideas I was familiar with from my work on quantum
gravity. The first is that inside a black hole, quantum effects remove
the singularity that general relativity says is there — and that we
know is there from the theorems of Penrose and Hawking — and a new
region of the universe begins to expand as if from a big bang, there
inside the black hole. I remember Bryce DeWitt, who is one of the
great pioneers of quantum gravity, telling me about this idea shortly
after I began to work for him, on my first postdoc. The second idea —
which comes from John A. Wheeler, another great pioneer of the field —
is that at such events the properties of the elementary particles and
forces might change randomly. All I then needed to make a mechanism
for natural selection was to assume that these changes are small,
because reading Dawkins had taught me the importance for natural
selection of incremental change by the accumulation of small changes
in the gene. Then, with the universes as animals and the properties of
the elementary particles as genes, I had a mechanism by which natural
selection would act to produce universes with whatever choices of
parameters would lead to the most production of black holes, since a
black hole is the means by which a universe reproduces — that is,
spawns another.

This was in 1989. I still don't know if the idea is right. But what
I'm very proud of is that the idea is testable. Most ideas about why
the elementary particles have the properties they do which have been
proposed in the past few years aren't testable. This is the main
reason the field is in such a crisis. But this idea leads to a
prediction, which is that if I could change any of the properties of
the elementary particles the result should be either to decrease or to
leave alone the number of black holes the universe makes. This is
because the idea implies that almost every universe, and therefore
most likely our own, has parameters that maximize the numbers of black
holes it can make.


Sent from my iPad with auto-fill typos

--
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J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --   Santa Fe, NM USA
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com                  [hidden email]
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