What could we really do with a very powerful particle collider?

A particle collider is a large and complex facility that collides a single beam of particles against a stationary target or two beams head-on usually at very fast speeds. They are usually very expensive and require years of designing and building. Examples of colliders include the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland and Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York, USA.

Future colliders may be bigger and more powerful than the current ones and may be used to know the following:

1. Whether supersymmetry is realized in nature which will also imply that all known particles have supersymmetric partners. 
2. If extra dimensions exist and how we can detect them.

   

   Some theories attempt to unify the fundamental forces by adding extra dimensions.

    
3. What exactly dark matter is. 

   

   Dark Matter

4. Whether the masses of elementary particles are generated by the Higgs mechanism via electroweak symmetry breaking. 
5. Why gravity is many times weaker than the other 3 fundamental forces (electromagnetism, strong interaction, and weak interaction)

   

   Gravity bending spacetime

6. Whether the electroweak force and the strong nuclear force are different manifestations of one universal unified force. 
7. Whether there are other additional sources of quark flavour mixing, apart from those already present within the Standard Model. 
8. Why there are violations of the symmetry between matter and antimatter. 
9. What the exact nature of quark-gluon plasma (quark soup) is. This is a state of matter in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) which is hypothesized to exist at extremely high temperature, density, or both temperature and density.

Is String Theory Falsifiable?

Yes

String theory is a physics framework whereby objects called strings are the most fundamental objects in the universe as opposed to particles in particle physics. The strings are one dimensional and are really small (size of 1 Planck length). To show how small these strings are, imagine if a particle or dot about 0.1 mm in size (which is approximately the smallest the unaided human eye can see) were magnified in size to be as large as the observable universe, then inside that universe-sized "dot", the Planck length would be roughly the size of an actual 0.1 mm dot. It's probably as small as things get.

So how can string theory be proven:

1. Experimental evidence confirming supersymmetry. One of the predictions of string theory is that at high energies we should start to see evidence of a symmetry that gives every particle that transmits a force, a partner particle. This is called supersymmetry. The partner particles are called superpartners. For string theory to be consistent, supersymmetry seems to be required at some level. Since supersymmetry is a required component of string theory, any discovered supersymmetry would be consistent with string theory. 
2. Evidence of extra dimensions. Superstring theory for example requires 10 spacetime dimensions. If extra dimensions exist, it's possible they must be hidden from us by some physical mechanism. Properties of extra dimensions can by set by particle experiments such as those at the Large Hadron Collider. 
3. String harmonics. Every string, in theory, has a unique resonance, or harmonic. Different harmonics determine different fundamental particles. String harmonics could be experimentally tested in a particle collider. However the collider will need to be about a thousand trillion times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. So it might be a few years before we can experimentally verify this. 
4. AdS/CFT correspondence. The anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence, is a conjectured relationship between two kinds of physical theories. It is a relationship which says that string theory is in certain cases equivalent to a quantum field theory. The duality represents a major advance in our understanding of string theory and quantum gravity. It provides a non-perturbative formulation of string theory with certain boundary conditions and it is also the most successful realization of the holographic principle. Quantum gravity is the branch of physics that seeks to describe gravity using the principles of quantum mechanics. Currently, the most popular approach to quantum gravity is string theory. AdS/CFT is expected to make quantitative and qualitative predictions and this can be known using data from the Large Hadron Collider. 
5. Bubble nucleation. In the theoretical physics of the false vacuum, this is when the system moves to a lower energy state – either the true vacuum, or another, lower energy vacuum. Many phases in string theory have very large, positive vacuum energy. Regions of the universe that are in such a phase will inflate exponentially rapidly in a process known as eternal inflation. As such, the theory predicts that most of the universe is very rapidly expanding. Some properties of the Higgs boson, for example, could be used to determine the possibility of vacuum collapse.

If there's a very high probability that you're living in a simulation, then why don't you believe that you're living in one?

One thing that is characteristic of humans is that they're extremely irrational. They bury and continue loving the dead even when they fully understand that they'll never see them again and they eat and kill other sentient kind despite the fact that they wouldn't want the same done to them. 

Humans can sometimes be defined by their irrationality. Consider the likely propositions that most humans believe in:

1. There was a big bang whose origin remains unknown but resulted in the sequence of events that led to the creation of conscious entities. 
2. There is nothing supernatural about consciousness. It is a physical entity just like gravity or electromagnetism. 
3. It can be represented as a computation just like any other physical phenomena. 

If you view all the above premises as true, human, then it is irrational to not believe that you're in a simulation.

It should be a logical conclusion that some conscious entities which are billions of years more advanced than homo sapiens should be able to create a simulated reality. And similarly these advanced entities are themselves part of a larger simulation; which is inside an even bigger simulation ad infinitum. With infinitely many simulations inside others, it's a logical conclusion that you too, human live in a simulation; quod erat demonstrandum.

 

Free your mind

 

What is the meaning of life?

Life has no meaning.

Philosophical questions to the pro-choicers

According to Wikipedia, the pro-choice movement is a movement supporting the view that a woman should have the legal right to an elective abortion, meaning the right to terminate her pregnancy.

This obviously brings about some interesting philosophical items to consider.

1. Is it okay to abort an embryo which is 9 months old? 
2. How about 9 weeks old? 
3. How about 9 days old? 
4. How about 9 hours? 
5. How about the second after delivery? 
6. How about a month after delivery? 
7. Does a woman have an absolute right to choose what happens in and to her body?
8. Does government have the authority to condemn abortion if only the woman knows about the pregnancy?
9. Is abortion acceptable in cases where if the pregnancy were not terminated, it would pose a direct threat to the life of the mother?
10. Are embryos, zygotes and/or fetuses in fact "persons" entitled to ethical, legal and moral protections? 
11. If they are not "persons" at conception, at what point in the development process is personhood bestowed?
12. If they are not "persons", should the potential to be a person give embryos, zygotes and fetuses a right to life?
13. If they are not "persons", does the embryo, zygote, or fetus become a living person once delivered or extracted from the womb?
14. If they are "persons", is abortion acceptable in cases of rape, incest, or contraception failure?
15. If they are "persons", is abortion acceptable in cases where the fetus is deformed, and would this invoke issues of eugenics?
16. If they are "persons", is abortion acceptable before viability, when they couldn't survive outside the womb?
17.  If the embryo were to experience pain and suffering during or before the abortion, would it still make it right irrespective of the answers given above?
18. If an embryo isn't defined as a person, then what could it be defined as?
19. Is an embryo conscious? 
20. Are the brain signals of an embryo identical to that of a young child e.g. 1 year old?
21. If embryos are not persons, are comatose patients persons? 
22. Could an abortion be said to be morally wrong because it deprives the fetus of a valuable future? 
23. If there is uncertainty as to whether a fetus has a right to life, then would an abortion be equivalent to consciously taking the risk of killing another? 
24. If one is religious and commanded by their religion to not abort, would it be wrong to still do it?
25. Is masturbation genocide?

Some philosophical things to think about.

Bad reason Number 2 for becoming an atheist

Bad Reason #2.

 If God existed, free will would not be possible and since humans have free will, God doesn't exist.

This is yet another statement that people make. That they've become unbelievers because them having free will and there being an omniscient being existing are mutually exclusive and cannot both be true. There are a couple of assumptions that are being made here.

#1 is that they have free will or that free will exists because they "feel" like it does. Whether or not humans have free will is something that is still up for debate. One of the major counter-points of free will is that we live in a physical universe where laws of nature are followed by everything. We are nothing but a bunch of neurons which are made up of atoms and since the properties and behavior of neurons are very well defined, if we had some advanced MRI machine we could be able to read the state of all of them given that we know their state at a previous time. One counter-argument to this though is that free will might be an emergent property perhaps the same way that consciousness is. All in all, it is not known whether free will exists or not.

#2 assumption being made is that the concept of free will (or the illusion of free will) and a God who knows the future are incompatible. This might sound like a good argument but it's more of an educated guess. God is believed to be outside the realms of space and time and thus may not be bound by universal principles. The assumption may also be a little bit on the realm of questions like "Can God create a rock too heavy for Him to lift?" Our minds and the way we understand language may not be sufficient yet to answer such questions.

All in all, the argument stated above by some atheists which is the reason for their lack of religion isn't a very valid and sound one.

Bad reason Number 1 for becoming an atheist

Bad Reason #1. 

 If God existed, there would be no evil and suffering in the world as a good God and the presence of evil cannot co-exist. 

 Many a times, we hear of people making the statement that they are atheists because of the evil in the world. According to them, the concepts of suffering and evil cannot co-exist with an infinitely Good and Holy God and thus they come to the conclusion that God doesn't exits. But is this really a logical conclusion to make?

One assumption that these people make is that we humans can comprehend the thinking of an infinitely intelligent being capable of creating space and time itself. According to Christianity for example, God created the universe and all the laws of physics effortlessly and in a mere instant. Surely, there's no way a human can understand His way of thinking. Would we be able to understand a species that has taken 10 billion years to evolve? Most likely not. Would an ant have the mental capacity to understand the thinking of a human? Of course not.

Another misconception is that they seem to think that we know and understand what it means for an action to be "good". This really isn't the case. It's not as simple as simply stating that prevention of suffering and creating happiness is the definition of a good action. Philosophers have spent centuries trying to understand what a "good" action is. Ethical altruism, ethical egoism, and utilitarianism just to pick a few examples have different definitions of what "good" is and the debate is all but over. So we can't really say that a good and perfect God cannot allow pain and suffering because we don't even have a definition of what "good" is.

There's a lot that can be said, but we live in a world where pain and suffering are prerequisites for success and happiness. E.g. Studying hard to pass an exam. There are other more historical examples. I did the Coursera course called "A Brief History of Humankind" which was pretty fun and one of the interesting things learnt was the effect of colonization on the world. In summary, colonization resulted in short term problems for the people but in the long term, it did more good than harm. My point is that we have historical evidence to show that sometimes bad can cause more good in the longer run.

All in all, the logic that there can't be a God because of the presence of suffering and evil isn't really a valid and sound argument.