That Einstein quotation...

[AlexB]

With only 100,000,000,000 neurons, the human mind simply cannot understand the universe in it's entirety, simultaneously. Computers have no hope either..

The brain is a superior computer, we just don't use it to it's full potential! Computers have a hard job with mapping out anything of serious and real complexity it seems! The Connectome of the brain for instance! (OK, this is a little bit of an exaggeration )

Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome | Video on TED.com

[ollypenrice]

With only 100,000,000,000 neurons, the human mind simply cannot understand the universe in it's entirety, simultaneously. Computers have no hope either..

The human 'mind' is maybe not the same as the human 'brain'. Mind is a curious word. Some psychologists prefer to avoid it altogether since it it seems not to be at all easy to define. Personally I quite like it because I'm not at all convinced by the brain-computer analogy. But that is a discussion in itself.

Olly

[AlexB]

Personally I quite like it because I'm not at all convinced by the brain-computer analogy. But that is a discussion in itself.

I agree, the brain is not a computer, it is more superior than that (and flawed in other respects of course,) and far more complex a 'device' than anything we humans will create to perform computational operations (at least for the foreseeable.)

However, I think that the way our minds work is entirely pertinent to the idea of comprehensibility of the universe.

[pvaz]

The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

I think he meant it as some sort of challenge. To me this sentence means something like "Don't stop looking for answers, even when there seams to be none."

For centuries we didn't understand why Mercury had a different orbit, now we do. In a few centuries maybe we'll know what was the big bang, and so on... that is if we keep searching and trying to "comprehend" what now seams "incomprehensible".

[pvaz]

I would argue that there is a difference between our understanding of (for example) "pi" (which can be defined as the factor relating the diameter of a circle to its circumference) and "i" which cannot be defined as anything other than itself.

When complex numbers where invented i had a strong graphical representation which was lost in time and now it's not even thought at school. i means a quarter turn (90º rotation) in the plane.

Watch this, it will be worth 14min:

[brianb]

When complex numbers where invented i had a strong graphical representation which was lost in time and now it's not even thought at school.

WHAT! How can you teach complex numbers without the complex plane? And electrical engineers absolutely need De Moivre's Theorem, whether they call it that or not ...

[pvaz]

WHAT! How can you teach complex numbers without the complex plane? And electrical engineers absolutely need De Moivre's Theorem, whether they call it that or not ...

I never seen the plane at school and did a lot of things with complex numbers, such as using Fourier transforms in digital signals processing.

I actually had to search some books for it, because I was having a hard time to grasp it. It all become easy(er) once I found it wasn't "imaginary" as in "part of Tolkien's middle earth", but just a different way to represent a point in a plane.

[narrowbandpaul]

well said zakalwe, Einstein certainly was atheist.

Your argument I read in that great book from Dawkins (not Dorkins, have some respect), The God Delusion.

In this sense, God is another word that describes the beauty of the universe, not that he actually believes that God made the universe.

[Velikovsky]

"The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle."

Not wishing to dis the great man, but surely if a universe has physics that is stable enough for intelligent life to evolve then as that life crosses the line where it is just smart enough to understand the complexity of the universe it will look in awe and say this?

i.e. earlier life didn't get it, and in 500 years it will be mundane...

I spent ages writing this - it still reads terribly.

I know what I meant:)

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Actually, we first need to define "incomprehensible." I think Einstein would agree to a definition of incomprehensible, if there was no way to predict anything going on in the world, i.e. that the universe did not obey any rules, i.e. was completely arbitrary in its behaviour (this is in part why quantum mechanics troubled him so much). However, in such a place, evolution could not take place, because there is possible way in which heriditary traits could yield improvements, because the effect of any trait would be completely unpredictable. Even more so, if you take Stuart Kaufmann's definition of life, namely as an autocatalytic cycle (put-simply: life causes new life), which is both broad and precise enough in my view, we could see that no such life could exist. This is because if nothing is predictable, life cannot even procreate. Even if it arose, it would be as unstable as a Hagunemnon during lunch.

Like so many things in physics, we see a universe around us which can support life, because if it did not we would not be there to see it. Because life can only arise when cause somehow has a (more-or-less) predictable effect, intelligent life can evolve which understands it. Indeed, some innate understanding of the rules of the world it lives in would be good for survival.

[ollypenrice]

I agree, Michael, but what I was thinking was that we can envisage (but not comprehend) a wider universe of which many aspects might indeed be random. Within that broadly random universe, non-random pockets might emerge and we might be of them. If this were the case only the non-random pocket would be visible to us, visible in all senses from the literal to the intellectual. And therein lies the weakness of the 'comprehensible universe' hypothesis. In order to be visible to us somethng has to be comprehensible to some degree, but that does not make all the universe comprehensible. So the original title quote seems to me to be close to tautological, if not entirely so.

You could dismiss this as the worst kind of fatuous philosophising, I dare say, but the probabalistic nature of the quantum world might give you pause. Could it represent the frontier of our pocket of non randomness within a random wider universe. Ooo-er!!

Olly

[AlexB]

The notions I find interesting are...

- The notion of this conceivable universe being a 'pocket' within a larger, not necessarily in terms of size I might add, universe.

- The notion that the laws of physics, as we know them today (and don't ask me to cite this as I cannot remember it's source,) enable a big bang event to happen at random... from nothing.

If both are true, you could perhaps make supposition on the ability of the universe to create another big bang or several or millions of them. What if one occurred on the fringe of our current 'pocket?'

Would it coalesce with our own pocket? Would it somehow be 'out of phase' with our notion of reality and we'd never even see it?

One idea I've thought about is one that is probably complete codswallop, where the universe as we perceive it has atoms and their constituents and stars and galaxies etc, but what if atoms are a recursive image of the bigger universe as we perceive it currently?

Atoms are spaced out to the order that all matter that we see around us, is in fact mostly space. This is the same with stars... and galaxy for the most part.

So what if there is no minimum size and no maximum but only infinitive recursion. What if our star is acting as one atom with the molecule that is our galaxy within the universe as a piece of 'matter' on a much larger scale, one that we will never be able to see?

A bit crazy a notion I guess and there's probably mathematics and physics that rule this out completely. A kind of fractal universe.

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

I agree, Michael, but what I was thinking was that we can envisage (but not comprehend) a wider universe of which many aspects might indeed be random. Within that broadly random universe, non-random pockets might emerge and we might be of them. If this were the case only the non-random pocket would be visible to us, visible in all senses from the literal to the intellectual. And therein lies the weakness of the 'comprehensible universe' hypothesis. In order to be visible to us somethng has to be comprehensible to some degree, but that does not make all the universe comprehensible. So the original title quote seems to me to be close to tautological, if not entirely so.

You could dismiss this as the worst kind of fatuous philosophising, I dare say, but the probabalistic nature of the quantum world might give you pause. Could it represent the frontier of our pocket of non randomness within a random wider universe. Ooo-er!!

Olly

I do not quite agree. We no longer see only with the senses that evolved for survival. We build instruments that allow us to see far more. If anything exists which does not exert any influence on any observable parameter of the universe, it is in fact causally decoupled from the observable part. It might be argued not to be part of our universe (there may be many, but as long as they are parallel, we will never intersect them, and they may remain unobservable).

There may well be things we have not observed yet, because we have not developed the right senses. Whether or not these as yet unknown things make sense is another matter. If their existence is real to the extent that science could acknowledge their existence, such unknowns are often found by curious anomalies in observations (HELLO DARK MATTER AND DARK ENERGY!! I feel a paradigm shift coming ). A well-known example is the inference of the existence of neutrinos by the unexplained loss of angular momentum in neutron decay.

Regarding quantum mechanics and randomness, this is often misunderstood. Randomness does not mean unpredictability. The waveform of a quantum system is predictable, indeed, even without quantum effects, thermodynamics allows prediction in the face of randomness. It is even possible to describe (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics as a deterministic process (the work of David Bohm). No relativistic version has been developed as far as I know, but Dirac's equations are NOT relativistic Schroedinger equations "merely" second-order Taylor approximations of such an equation.

I do agree the quote is somewhat glib .