Black Holes May Supply Up to Half the Universe's Energy Output

Life is always one step ahead of language. There are lots of concepts for which we are struggling to come up with the appropriate new words; whereas on the other hand how many words are there that are waiting for meanings? Sarah Palin notwithstanding.

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Uh.... only the jargon of scholars even pretends to be logical. When left to the devices of the general population, they do the most utterly illogical things, like taking the "in-" off of "inflammable," which means "capable of being inflamed." Or turning "dive" into half of a historically incorrect strong verb, with "dove" as its past tense, but without completing the transformation with "diven" as the obvious and logical past participle.

I avoid using the word "universe." If I'm talking about the volume of space that we can observe, I use the proper term "our Hubble Volume." If I'm talking about the entire space-time continuum, regardless of its geometry (Euclidean or Lobachevskian and therefore open and infinite both spatially and temporally, or Riemannian and therefore closed and finite in all or most of its dimensions), and regardless of how infinitesimal a portion of it is not completely empty (if our Hubble Volume really is all there is--something that we don't even know for sure--then outside that paltry radius of less than one trillion light-years there's a whole lot of nothing, but what the heck, "space" is after all another word for "nothing"), I just call it "the space-time continuum."

The concept of a multiverse--which is usually defined rather imprecisely with a lot of arm-waving--shakes up our terminology.

This is a perfect illustration of language breathlessly chasing after civilization, lacking good words for new concepts and often being expanded with words that are anything but "good." I have often asserted on this website and elsewhere that scientists are notoriously bad communicators, and the language they invent seems almost deliberately crafted to impede understanding by laymen. Just consider how the definition of the word "theory" in science ("proven true beyond a reasonable doubt") is at odds with both its definition in mathematics ("absolutely true"), and its definition in detective work ("a hunch I came up with over breakfast"); is it any wonder laymen in all sincerity dismiss things like relativity and evolution as "just a theory?"

It's as though science is a medieval guild craft, and outsiders are not supposed to understand it until they've gone through their apprenticeship and sworn an oath of secrecy.

That depends rather heavily on what exactly the words "another universe" really mean. Sci-fi writers have no trouble crafting scenarios in which there is a greater or smaller bandwidth for the exchange of information and even matter and lifeforms among them. After all, if the ridiculous concept of a wormhole across "warped" space is now accepted as theoretically possible, if only in microscopic dimension, then why couldn't it also work across the boundary between universes, when--I might remind everyone--both "boundary" and "universe" aren't even properly defined yet?

In my capacity as Head Linguist around here I confidently and authoritatively insist on defining "the universe" as "everything that exists" in philosophical definitions. E.g., if everything we can see was built or otherwise given form by some invisible creature with enormous intelligence and power, then that creature clearly exists and by definition is part of the universe, so this model of the Big Bang does not answer the question, "Where did the universe come from?" and doesn't even get a grade of E for "effort."

But in scientific discussions the word is used in too many different ways, particulary meaning either "our Hubble volume" or "the entire space-time continuum." Many cosmologists are now leaning toward the conclusion that those two things are identical, but even if that's true I don't think clarity and understanding are enhanced by blurring the distinction between the two concepts. I'd like to read about why they believe that our Hubble volume comprises the entire space-time continuum, and in order to do that we need a precise vocabulary with different words for different definitions.

So as I said, I try to avoid using the word "universe" in scholarly, scientific discussions.

English is Anglo-Saxon, a Western Germanic dialect brought to Britannia after the collapse of the Roman Empire. It then went off to evolve in its own direction with a Celtic substrate, some Latin additions from the Roman monks who stayed behind, and then a massive superstrate of Norman French which resulted in wrenching changes to its grammar, phonetics and vocabulary. This was followed by centuries of scholarly absorption of words from Latin and Greek and finally business, political and technical absorption of words from all over the world. We also make up our own words, primarily from Latin and Greek but also other sources, and since the age of universal literacy acronyms have become a new form of word-building. In the last century we even invented a new grammatical form: the noun-adjective compound such as fuel-efficient, computer-literate and labor-intensive, which finally frees us from the limitations of our tiny, almost unexpandable set of prepositions from the Stone Age which are supposed to be able to describe every possible relationship between two words.

Both of those statements are too extreme. The logic is there but it's hardly sound. It's only been since the rise of the classical civilizations (India, China, Greece, Rome, etc.) with their writing systems, that the task of creating new lexical components (words, syntactical techniques, etc.) has come under the partial control of scholars. Before that it was almost entirely intuitive. The vector of intuition is still powerful: we all know that "humongous" is a word that was made up for fun and we wink at it, but how many of us know the same is true of "rambunctious," a word that is no longer considered slang?

Why do words like "cleave" have two exactly contradictory meanings? The hold of logic over language is tenuous!

"Universe" in fact is a venerable old Latin word, formed from the roots un- for "one" and vers- for "turn," meaning literally "all turned into one" or "all together." "Universe" was coined as a translation of Greek to holon, "the whole" (cf. "holistic," "holography").

Need I point out that in the Greco-Roman era the concept of a/the universe was considerably different than ours? They had the most naive and mythical ideas about everything that lies above the earth's surface, most of what lies below it, and anything beyond the regions on the surface of which they had reports from explorers. They would not understand the context within which we're arguing over the meaning of the word. For us to go back to the days of the word's origin and use what we find as a basis for clarifying its definition today is a misguided effort.

 

Don't be too respectful. I'm not a professional linguist, I just play one on the internet.

Thanks for bringing this interesting thread to my attention. I've been too busy at work lately and haven't been able to stray as far from my own subforums as I like to.

My credentials in physics are even less respectable than in linguistics. I'm a former future scientist who did three years of undergraduate work at Caltech before I changed majors and universities. And that was fifty years ago when we thought everybody should increase their energy consumption, drink three glasses of milk every day, and smoke only filtered cigarettes.

However, as I already noted I have a big problem with the terminology used by scientists. I believe we all have the qualifications to speak out on this problem, since all but a handful of scientists are dismally bad communicators and need all the help they can get. "Theory" is perhaps the most obviously horrible choice of names for its referent, but "universe" is right up there. Whether or not "the universe" is exactly congruent physically with "our Hubble volume," it is not identical conceptually. Macrocosmologists have not yet convinced me that they've determined beyond a reasonable doubt that the entire space-time continuum is squashed into our Hubble volume, which would mean either that it has been proven to be a finite Riemannian space, or else that they're using an exponential coordinate system to make a finite space look infinite. That's just as dirty a trick as calling a canonical principle of science a "theory." Or telling us with a straight face that empty space is expanding, even though it's not really empty, and all the light waves in it are being stretched, but not the light waves within solar and planetary atmospheres, but that's okay, go away kid you're bothering us with your impertinent questions.

Don't just protest, please argue. This is a discussion board so let's have a discussion. I'm hardly an authority here.