But everybody has a livejournal; everybody has a blog, and it seems odd to do it when everyone else in the world is doing it.

And I got busy...very, very busy...

(I still haven't taken any vacation time this year, and not sure when I will, either...) Something had to give...

So I took a break.

No apologies for same. No guarentees when I'll post again, either.

I've done this consistently for years. But other things are occupying a lot of my attention.

Like cosmology.

Stephen Hawking has backed off his claim that the matter and energy sucked into a black hole are gone forever. Eventually they are returned...not to another universe, as some supposed....

But this one.

That bodes ill for some theories based on the idea that black holes spawn other universes. Smolin's "evolutionary" idea---that other universes are spawned by realities with black holes, and that those laws which have more of a chance of having black holes...are more likely to have "progeny"---other universes with laws that favor black holes.

It might have explained the anthropic "coincidences", if the same laws that favor black holes happen to be the ones that allow intelligent life to develop...

But that's history.

The matter and energy returns to this universe, albeit in an extremely garbled form.

Bang goes another way to create other universes.

Bang goes other ways to naturally create them.

If Hawking is right. He was wrong before. Is he right now?

I don't know. But we'll see....

And can any of us claim to know more about the subject than Hawking?

Very, very few.

Why am I so resistent to the idea of alternate universes?

Well, because it's an excuse for sloppy thinking. (Not to mention rotten stories...)

If anything---literally anything---is possible...which at its broadest, an idea of alternative universes encourages---especially if the laws of nature vary from cosmos to cosmos...

Then what's the use of saying anything is unlikely? Unlikely in what sense?

What happens to the idea of the truth? Is there anything that can be a lie, if anything is possible?

I find it amusing that some atheists and agnostics....not all, by any means.... embrace the idea, as a good way of denying God. As if they have to embrace the idea that everything else may exist...

To deny that one thing exists.

That to disbelieve in a Creator, they have to believe in everything else existing...somewhere.

Ignoring the fact that, if anything is possible, a Creator above all and ordering all is among the possibilities...

It's a hypocritial and biased selection of their own principles...

And yet my own stand has its own contradictions. My resistance to alternative universes ignores two facets of my own religion...

Heaven and hell.

One might be seen as an "optimum state". The way a universe "should" be run.

The other as the "worst case scenario".

They don't seem to be here...in this universe...so if they really exist...

Then they must be...somewhere else.

So my own religion holds at least two alternative dimensions (in the Rod Serling sense) or universes...

Might there be more?

Sure.

I just don't think there's an infinite number....

Perhaps the atheists aren't the only ones with hypocritical and biased thinking...

Maybe I should work on making myself more consistent before criticizing others...

I guess...

There's no alternative.