The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel

[John F Sowa]

The subject line comes from an article in the New York Times (excerpts below).  Data from the James Webb telescope is raising serious difficulties with long-held  assumptions about the evolution of the universe and the things in it.

This raises yet another objection to the idea of a universal formal ontology of everything.  But it adds further support for the idea of an open-ended collection of specialized ontologies for any particular topic or system that anybody may be working on or with.

The overall framework of everything may be more like a dictionary or encyclopedia written by humans for humans (and also computers).  Wikipedia is a good example.  The editors of Wikipedia post warning notes about articles that need more or better references.  But the best articles are far more reliable than anything that can be derived from LLMs -- and they have reliable citations, not the phony citations that the LLMs generate (or hallucinate).

This is one more reason for abandoning the project of creating a universal ontology of everything.  Science and engineering have made excellent progress without them.  The task of determining what should replace them is a very important issue for Ontolog Forum.

John

_________________________

The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel

Sept. 2, 2023

By Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser

www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/opinion/cosmology-crisis-webb-telescope.html

Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope began beaming back from outer space its stunning images of planets and nebulae last year, astronomers, though dazzled, had to admit that something was amiss. Eight months later, based in part on what the telescope has revealed, it’s beginning to look as if we may need to rethink key features of the origin and development of the universe.

According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies.

The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy.

It was not, unfortunately, an isolated incident. There have been other recent occasions in which the evidence behind science’s basic understanding of the universe has been found to be alarmingly inconsistent.

Take the matter of how fast the universe is expanding. This is a foundational fact in cosmological science — the so-called Hubble constant — yet scientists have not been able to settle on a number. There are two main ways to calculate it: One involves measurements of the early universe (such as the sort that the Webb is providing); the other involves measurements of nearby stars in the modern universe. Despite decades of effort, these two methods continue to yield different answers.. . .

Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution.. . .

The standard model today holds that “normal” matter — the stuff that makes up people and planets and everything else we can see — constitutes only about 4 per.cent of the universe. The rest is invisible stuff called dark matter and dark energy (roughly 27 percent and 68 percent).

Cosmic inflation is an example of yet another exotic adjustment made to the standard model. Devised in 1981 to resolve paradoxes arising from an older version of the Big Bang, the theory holds that the early universe expanded exponentially fast for a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This theory solves certain problems but creates others. Notably, according to most versions of the theory, rather than there being one universe, ours is just one universe in a multiverse — an infinite number of universes, the others of which may be forever unobservable to us not just in practice but also in principle.

Cosmology is not like other sciences. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations.

 

[Ricardo Sanz]

Hi,

That physical theories change when new observations appear -as those of Webb telescope- is the essence of the scientific method. I see physical theory as a form of ontology. The question is then if this evolution of physical theory is converging into "a universal formal ontology of everything" or it is just wandering around because there is no point of convergence. 

R.

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Ricardo Sanz

Head of Autonomous Systems Laboratory

Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales

Center for Automation and Robotics

Jose Gutierrez Abascal 2.

28006, Madrid, SPAIN

ricard...@upm.es

http://www.aslab.upm.es/~sanz

+34 913 36 30 61 | +34 630 89 11 63

Aviso / Disclaimer

[Steve Newcomb]

In a thread about the growing inconsistency of telescopic evidence with existing consensus about Astrophysics, on 9/8/23 16:09, John F Sowa wrote:

The overall framework of everything may be more like a dictionary or encyclopedia written by humans for humans (and also computers).

I think ontolog-forum's focus can be seen as an ongoing account of an epic struggle with the Promethean gift of language itself.  Even Wikipedia is merely a collection of shared opinions about the semantic loads of a changing set of symbols.  Wikipedia's weakness, as well as its strength, is its unspoken conviction that the definitions of symbols can/should be shared universally.  Language itself depends on the same implicit conviction. 

I'm uncomfortable with the fact that my brain (and the brains of others) confuses symbols with realities.  It's a feature (or bug, if you prefer) that makes branding potent and lying easy.  That looks upside-down on the face of it, at least to me.  It's a huge security hole, if nothing else.  Like many longstanding security holes, it's there for a reason, and the reason is probably pragmatic.  It's important and necessary to confuse a symbol with its applied load.  The priority of symbols over loads makes reasoning, makes conversation more efficient.  It's less work for our brains.

I still think that subjects of conversation enjoy a kind of existence that's distinct from any symbols used to invoke them.   Even when I find that I can't quite believe in the independent existence of subjects of conversation that haven't yet been spoken or thought, I remain convinced that we all implicitly agree to *pretend* that even a brand-new subject of conversation already existed, or at that least its potential existence was always enjoying some kind of existence.  That pretense/assumption may be nothing more than a practical way to slide past the conundrum of the existence of a subject of conversation while getting on with the task of saying something novel and specific to persons in alien linguistic and experiential contexts.  When we talk, we have to behave as though what we're talking about exists, at least in some sense.

The pretense is intriguing.  Is it feasible for something intended to compellingly define a unique subject of conversation -- a potential subject of conversation -- to be represented in language (how else) but inseparably from its authority?  I think yes;  for that purpose, we have a method called "citation".   Can such a citation itself be used a symbol whose semantic load is the subject of conversation usefully exist independently of any of the linguistic symbols that may be used to invoke a subject of conversation?  The answer to this question may also be "Yes", I think, but only if technology can make it convenient enough (practical) to use for communication.  I suspect it would require a universe-of-discourse-sized quantity of implied nature-of-reality commitments, and it may be impossible, or at least impractical, even to enumerate the necessary commitments. 

However, on an optimistic day, I'm not at all convinced that such set of commitments, or more atomically such a citation-as-symbol, need be formal or complete.  Like language itself, it needs to work, but it doesn't need to work in any specific fashion.  It only needs to invoke the right subject in the mind of its audience.  That goal is artistic, not scientific.

So I guess I agree with John that "The overall framework of everything may be more like a dictionary or encyclopedia written by humans for humans (and also computers)."  The question remains as to exactly what the computers will bring to our Promethean gift of language, if anything.  Something fundamental, perhaps?  Something that obviates or evades Babel in some sense?  Or will computers just create charming but misleading illusions, as LLMs (e.g.) do?  Misleading illusions, such as the illusion that computers appreciate meaning, have perspective, etc., have lessons to teach us, but even entirely new classes of misleading illusions -- something I don't think we're seeing now even from LLMs -- are unlikely to be a recipe for any revolutionary Engelbartian Augmentation of human understanding. 

Maybe citations-as-symbols would be a good way for computers to tell us things we don't already know, while remaining ready to explain what they mean.  An AGI would not think in the upside-down way that humans process the symbols they use, as if the symbols were their referents.  In my limited, special-case understanding of reality, I surmise that an AGI would think "in terms of" subjects of conversation, and not worry about human-linguistic symbols at all until it needed to talk to a specific human.  That would be one hell of an illusion.  (Like many others, I hate the Turing Test.  Illusions are not enough for me, even though they may be all I have.)

[Ravi Sharma]

Steve Newcomb

Great commentary on John's writing that itself was vast experience based.

few brief comments

• Can not lump essential communication transliteration for travel, purchases, etc at multilingual transliterators with those in Physics or Math.
• Math and philosophy generate models, physicists build and use them and reality differs from models except in small REAL overlap areas, thereafter perturbations for extensibility or new training set (ML) are needed.
• Example: Evolution of US English and prevalent use from 60 years ago when we came to the US and today's US English have vast differences and like elsewhere the communications are ever changing, no language is static.
• Ontologies have these challenges!

Regards.

Ravi

(Dr. Ravi Sharma, Ph.D. USA)

NASA Apollo Achievement Award

Ontolog Board of Trustees

Particle and Space Physics

Senior Enterprise Architect

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[hpo...@verizon.net]

So Ravi, I read your brief comments to say that we need to embrace diversity and change/evolution.

 

We need to focus on how to detect differences and changes, how to analyze the nature and consequences of those differences and changes, once detected, for the purposes of a particular information exchange, how to determine if the differences can be bridged, and what the appropriate mechanism/approach might be for doing that, given both immediate and longer-term objectives for the information exchange. Even determining that a particular difference/change cannot be bridged is a useful outcome – usually a lot better than acting as if one understands the information exchange correctly. And in many cases the bridging might be partial in nature, or “good enough” for the purposes at hand – as long as the participants don’t assume completeness or accuracy for all possible purposes. Kind of like error bars in scientific measurements.

 

Hans

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