It doesn’t even matter - it was an analogy someone used - when someone uses an analogy, they say “it’s like this, and resembles this in the following list of attributes” - and there’s no reason why the analogy and subject are beholden to resemble each other in any additional, unmentioned attributes.
Indeed, an analogy is by definition imperfect.
All of it is true. Of course we live inside a black hole. A black hole is an amount of matter compressed to the Schwartzchild Radius for that amount of mass. The entirety of Universe was compressed into a naked singularity which then exploded in the big bang. A singularity is a black hole. We live in a black hole.
As for the rest, you can google it pretty easily. The bit about a black hole’s ‘skin’ being holographic is pretty well established. For the proof that information is conserved, google the debate between Susskind and Hawking on the event horizon of black holes. Susskind won, information is conserved.
I’ve been thinking in terms of our universe being, essentially, inside an even horizon for years now, ever since the idea of a holographic universe became clear to me.
Also, the idea of matter at subatomic levels being zero-dimensional points of pure energy (singularities?), sort of gives you an interesting perspective on the nature of physical matter itself.
Indeed, the universe is a möbius strip of seemingly separate, yet one, phenomenon twisted and intertwined back in on itself.
I’ve said the below, looping phrase here before:
…time, being an aspect of space which is bent and curved by matter is really just a form of energy that gives rise to gravity which dilates time, being an aspect of space…
Moving the goalposts a little? Because I sure don’t see that in your OP.
You weren’t talking about people who don’t understand the answer, but give it anyway. You were talking about the answer itself.
After a dozen years in this zoo, some people still don’t catch on to the notion that we can roll tape, so to speak, anytime we like.
Cite?
FinnAgain, not to hijack this thread, but most of what you’ve been posting about physics here is misinformed. To pick the low-hanging fruit, the current best evidence suggests that we are not living inside a black hole. That was a realistic possibility a couple of decades ago, but it seems to have since been ruled out.
Back on the thread topic, if the author/book analogy is problematic, how about instead a programmer/computer program analogy? I’ve written computer programs that have gone on to do things completely outside my expectations of them, and I don’t mean that in just a compartmentalization-of-my-own-mind sense. I suppose that the results were implicit consequences of things that were already in my mind, but the consequences themselves weren’t in my mind. And yet, every bit of those results, in some sense, bears my fingerprints: The results existed because of my actions.
Now, of course, this analogy is also flawed: The reason the consequences weren’t in my mind is just that my mind was inadequate to anticipate them, and one would not want to attribute such inadequacy to God. It’s still a reasonable analogy for what it’s trying to explain, though.
Speaking of rolling tape, Czarcasm has asked this thread’s question before, such as in his own thread “Outside Space and Time”-where and when, again? and in the thread How do theists reconcile disbelief in predestination with an omniscient deity?
I suspect he’ll keep asking this same question every year or two until he gets the response he’s looking for, which is for theists to admit that they can’t physically point to God and say “There He is” and for them therefore to “give up” and admit that God doesn’t exist after all.
All very true; I was simply defending it against a suggestion that it was flawed in a way that I think it wasn’t necessarily. As Isaac Asimov suggested, in “The Relativity of Wrong,” some analogies are more wrong than others.
No. That the Big Bang occurred from a singularity is bedrock. The only remaining question would be if it could be better modeled as a black hole or a white hole, but that doesn’t really matter for this discussion as Conservation of Information will still hold sway. If you require a citation that the BB was a singularity:
[
](http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html)
The only difference is that we’re in a naked singularity which is, for the purposes of this discussion, still going to work like a black hole in terms of information. The only real difference is that the black holes we know are localized within spacetime while the BB is (our) spacetime. But we are most certainly living inside a singularity.
There are many, many different kinds of singularities. Just saying that something is or has a singularity in no way implies that it’s a black hole.
No, there aren’t, unless you’re being hyperbolic and referring to the limited taxonomy of singularities as “many, many”.
And while there are certainly differences between the BBS and the BHS’s, none of them alter the basics of Conservation of Information.
Are you sure there is “conservation of information?” As I understood it, from information theory, it requires energy to destroy information, but it can be done. It’s as easy as erasing a disk.
When a civilization gets scientific, and starts writing immense libraries full of data – isn’t that “creating” information? Where is the corresponding loss that compensates for it?
I Googled the phrase, and didn’t find any immediately promising leads. Can you, maybe, point me to a good starting reference?
What does creating information entail? To me it seems it is just us rearranging the stuff of the universe in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Destroying it is as simple arranging it once more.
If I decide 3 red pebbles touching is relevant to my life, have I created information? I can go around arranging pebbles in such a configuration, but so too does the universe.
I believe the conservation of information has more to do with the wave-functions of quantum particles themselves. For any given particle, it has an associated wave function that are a range of probabilities of that particle playing out some event. If this wave function is destroyed upon entering a black hole, then it would mean their wave-functions would collapse or evolve to the same state.
IANAPhysicist, so, I could’ve totally screwed that up.
Reminds me of the final scene in Men In Black, with the god-like alien playing marbles with all the worlds/galaxies.
Isn’t it necessary to exist any,being must exist in space? if they are not in existence then they (or it) doesn’t exist.Existence is space and more.If energy exists then it must be in existence!
So, God is hiding in black holes. No wonder he never seems to answer my prayers. We just need to, somehow, unscramble the Hawking radiation.
As a theist who has used this point in the past, this is all it means. Yes, there are some theists who will throw it out there not really understanding what it means, but it is an ad hominem fallacy to discount the point simply because the person putting it forth doesn’t understand it. From my perspective, the only real point of that statement is as an answer to “well, if God exists, where-when is he in space-time?” It’s simply to point out that there isn’t a meaningful answer to that question. That question more or less presupposed materialism, that if he exists he is made of matter and energy and has space-time coordinates but the case for most theists would be that they are not materialists, they believe in some sort of supernatural or ethereal plane, and thus describing God in purely materialist terms is meaningless.
I understand how this comes across as disingenuous, ignorant, or some kind of intellectual game to an atheist asking the question, but it’s really just an impass in how theists and atheists view the world differently. I think there’s plenty of other interesting discussions to have about theism and atheism, but this is just one of those things I think that we just have to sort of understand is part of the other perspective and, unless explicity trying to fit the concept of God into a materialist view or atheism into a non-materialist view, just isn’t going to be fruitful.