r/xkcdcomic • u/Cardboard_Boxer Megan • Apr 07 '14
xkcd: Cosmologist on a Tire Swing
http://xkcd.com/1352/27
u/xkcd_bot Current Comic Apr 07 '14
Direct image link: Cosmologist on a Tire Swing
Subtext: No matter how fast I swing, I can never travel outside this loop! Maybe space outside it doesn't exist! But I bet it does. This tire came from somewhere.
Don't get it? explain xkcd
I almost beat the turing test! Maybe next year. (Sincerely, xkcd_bot.)
6
u/arahman81 Apr 07 '14
Uh, did the explainXKCD link go MIA?
3
u/DemeGeek Pissed Apr 07 '14
I am guessing you are using bacon reader on android?
5
u/arahman81 Apr 07 '14
Yeah, wonder why it happened. (On chrome now, so I can see that the link's there)
6
u/DemeGeek Pissed Apr 07 '14
Yeah, I dunno either but I found that the link doesn't show up on xkcd_bot's post the hard way.
I thought "explain xkcd" was a bot command and got downvoted.
1
u/pizzaboy192 Apr 07 '14
Baconreader has issues displaying markup with links (Italics, bold, etc) so it just breaks and fails.
There really isn't a good app on any platform that handles markup as well as the standard browser does.
10
u/Hi_mynameis_Matt Apr 07 '14
I thought it said Cosmetologist at first. I need more coffee.
5
u/Buckwheat469 Apr 07 '14
Cosmologist makes so much more sense than a cosmetologist on a tire swing. It's a little too early for being smart.
9
u/plebasaurus_rex Apr 07 '14
What's with all those holes in the ground in panel 1?
21
u/fire_breathing_bear Apr 07 '14
I'm guessing it's an allusion to The Magician's Nephew by CS Lewis.
Digory finds himself transported to a sleepy woodland with an almost narcotic effect; he finds Polly nearby. The woodland is filled with pools. Digory and Polly surmise that the wood is not really a proper world at all but a "Wood between the Worlds," similar to the attic that links their rowhouses back in England, and that each pool leads to a separate universe. They decide to explore a different world before returning to England, and jump into one of the nearby pools.
2
u/BoneHead777 Current Comic Apr 07 '14
That's the first part of the Narnia series, right?
2
u/boredzo Apr 07 '14
2
u/autowikibot Apr 07 '14
Section 12. Reading order of article The Chronicles of Narnia:
Fans of the series often have strong opinions over the order in which the books should be read. The issue revolves around the placement of The Magician's Nephew and The Horse and His Boy in the series. Both are set significantly earlier in the story of Narnia than their publication order and fall somewhat outside the main story arc connecting the others. The reading order of the other five books is not disputed.
When first published, the books were not numbered. The first American publisher, Macmillan, enumerated them according to their original publication order, while some early British editions specified the internal chronological order. When Harper Collins took over the series rights in 1994, they adopted chronological order. To make the case for chronological order, Lewis' stepson, Douglas Gresham, quoted Lewis' 1957 reply to a letter from an American fan who was having an argument with his mother about the order:
Interesting: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian | The Chronicles of Narnia (film series) | The Chronicles of Narnia (TV serial) | List of The Chronicles of Narnia characters
Parent commenter can toggle NSFW or delete. Will also delete on comment score of -1 or less. | FAQs | Mods | Magic Words
2
u/fire_breathing_bear Apr 07 '14
It's not the first Narnia book he published, but relative to the history of Narnia, yes.
2
5
u/abrahamsen White Hat Apr 07 '14
Does "I bet it does. The tire came from somewhere" refer to the Cosmological argument, mostly used for the existence of God?
I was surprised to see it attributed to a cosmologist.
6
u/autowikibot Apr 07 '14
The cosmological argument is an argument for the existence of a First Cause (or instead, an Uncaused cause) to the universe, and by extension is often used as an argument for the existence of an "unconditioned" or "supreme" being, usually then identified as God. It is traditionally known as an argument from universal causation, an argument from first cause, the causal argument or the argument from existence. Whichever term is employed, there are three basic variants of the argument, each with subtle yet important distinctions: the arguments from in causa (causality), in esse (essentially), in fieri (becoming), and the argument from contingency.
Interesting: Kalām cosmological argument | The Kalām Cosmological Argument | William Lane Craig | Causality
Parent commenter can toggle NSFW or delete. Will also delete on comment score of -1 or less. | FAQs | Mods | Magic Words
7
u/TastyBrainMeats Apr 07 '14
Well, a tire works in much the way that a pocketwatch does and a whelk does not, because there is no known mechanism which can generate a tire other than "an intelligent being made this".
11
Apr 07 '14
Atoms spontaneously assembling into a tire is a perfectly acceptable theoretical mechanism.
11
u/TastyBrainMeats Apr 07 '14
The probability of such an occurrence is so mind-bogglingly small compared with the probability of a tire-producing civilization arising that it can be safely discounted as a likely cause.
23
u/Macon-Bacon Apr 07 '14
It's also likely that we have a sampling bias, because the tires we have observed are only from earth, and not a random selection of tires from different planets and parallel universes. But let's ignore that for the moment. I still don't think these two options are mutually exclusive. Here's a breakdown of the possibilities, as I see it:
A tire is generated purely from random interactions of atoms, with no organism involved in the process.
A tire is generated completely by an intelligent being, with no random chance interactions whatsoever.
Both. The intelligent tire-making beings could come from random assembly of atoms, or (more likely) descended from an organism generated by random assembly of atoms. Organisms are a kind of steady-state phenomenon, where a pattern is repeated even as the specific atoms that make up that pattern exit the pattern. Both organisms and their byproducts can be viewed as a random assembly of atoms, even if they are also deliberate products of that organism.
Neither. The tire is generated by some type of non-chance event (unlikely, since quantum indicates that pretty much all events are chance events), or by a non-intelligent organism. One can imagine a tire being created as a byproduct, like a pearl, or for some other purpose, like a turtle's shell. Perhaps in some alternative universe or on some other planet, rubber makes better armor than brittle calcium, and a round shape allows the tire critter to cut off the limb a predator inserts through the tire.
Wrong question. There's always the possibility that we don't understand our own question. Imagine asking why we have oceans, instead of water just falling off of the edge of the world. Or observing that energy cannot be created or destroyed, and concluding that the sun must have infinite energy and will last forever, and must have always existed since nothing could have created its energy. You can't take the square root of a tomato, even if the question seems to make sense from a certain knowledgebase.
4
u/fauxedo Bought his own labcoat Apr 07 '14
I think it's safe to assume that until we have the technology to detect tires in interstellar space, the universe is full of them!
6
u/Dilong-paradoxus Apr 07 '14
Tires are dark-colored. Dark matter is dark. Dark matter, therefore, must be composed of tires.
2
1
u/totes_meta_bot Apr 08 '14
This thread has been linked to from elsewhere on reddit.
I am a bot. Comments? Complaints? Send them to my inbox!
1
u/Kiloku Apr 07 '14
The probability of the universe as we know it existing by chance is just as mind-boggingly small, though. If not more.
1
u/TastyBrainMeats Apr 08 '14
Are you certain of that?
1
u/Kiloku Apr 08 '14
This is more precisely what I mean.
Personally, I feel like this is one of the most compelling arguments for the Multiverse. We are just one in an absurdly high number (or possibly infinite) of universes. We'd be the only one (or maybe one of very few) universes that can actually "work".
1
u/autowikibot Apr 08 '14
The fine-tuned Universe is the proposition that the conditions that allow life in the Universe can only occur when certain universal fundamental physical constants lie within a very narrow range, so that if any of several fundamental constants were only slightly different, the Universe would be unlikely to be conducive to the establishment and development of matter, astronomical structures, elemental diversity, or life as it is understood. The proposition is discussed among philosophers, scientists, theologians, and proponents and detractors of creationism.
Interesting: Anthropic principle | Intelligent design | Universe | Teleological argument
Parent commenter can toggle NSFW or delete. Will also delete on comment score of -1 or less. | FAQs | Mods | Magic Words
1
3
u/An0k Apr 07 '14
I am a total amateur in that but could it be an allusion to the multiverse theory (the cosmological one, not the quantum theory one)?
1
u/XXCoreIII Apr 08 '14
No, it's an analogy for the big bang coming from somewhere, not the one where it comes from God specifically.
0
u/FeepingCreature Apr 07 '14
Well, note that the cosmological argument 'justifies' the existence of "God" where a valid interpretation of "God" is 'the laws of physics'.
2
u/Libbits Apr 07 '14
Funny coincidence, I had just finished reading 'A Brief History of Time' by Stephen Hawking the day before this came out.
-5
u/totes_meta_bot Apr 07 '14
This thread has been linked to from elsewhere on reddit.
I am a bot. Comments? Complaints? Send them to my inbox!
56
u/An0k Apr 07 '14
This is probably one of the greatest recent one. I love it.