Quote:
Originally Posted by Tricky D
Originally Posted by esselcue  I don't think animals have ESP.
The reason why a dog's sense of smell is superior to that of a human is because he is designed that way.
I'm sure that if a dog had the same sense of smell as a human he would be considered handicapped by the other dogs. |
I have to agree. I think a lot of people underestimate the power of a dog's nose. I've read a lot of stories where a family stopped at a rest stop only to have their dog run away. They couldn't wait forever so they just left the dog thinking he was lost. A couple of weeks later, the dog shows up at their house. Realizing that some dogs can smell the simple trail of a human being sometimes weeks after they've been in some place, I don't think it's entirely implausible for a dog to distinguish the scent of humans riding in a car, or for that matter, perhaps even the exhaust trail of a car on a highway.
Considering that many dogs can detect the difference (with their noses) between one molecule of odor; I don't think that this is at all unlikely and has a completely Darwinian explanation.
Many times, when I go to my parents house and bring my dog, he usually just sleeps. However, asleep or not, the second I pull into their neighborhood his head perks up and he gets very excited. Perhaps he's very directionally oriented - which is a possibility - but I think he recognizes the scent of something particular since he perks his head up at the same location every time.
Let's also not forget that while dogs have one ultra sensitive sense in that of smell, their eyes and ears are not as powerful. Therefore, they rely very heavily on their sense of smell as well as their hearing abilities which are quite good indeed but not equivalent to their sense of smell. In essence, they have less to confuse themselves over while our brains are more well adapted to follow our intuition of five relatively equivalent senses. This is very noticeable in blind humans who have developed echolocation such as using clicking noises to determine where walls, curbs, and other obstacles exist in their path.
As far as extra dimensions are concerned, extra dimensions do not necessarily mean parallel universes - although Neil Turok did an interesting examination into how brane theory could explain the origins of this universe. Rather, extra dimensions imply a universe that is made up of particles and matter beyond our observational viewpoint. If you were to look at an ant crawling on a high tension wire from a distance, it would not look like a three dimensional observation. Indeed, from a distance, it might look like a two dimensional viewpoint because from a distance we do not notice the depth of the ant or the high tension wire. However, the closer we get, we realize that both the high tension wire and the ant are three-dimensional but if we examine the high tension wire further, we realize that it is wound up with multiple "strands" of wire as well. While it looks three-dimensional on the surface, there are many different strands making it up to begin with that elude our perception until we get quite close indeed.
What is fascinating about String Theory is that it becomes the grand unification theory that Einstein so hoped to tie everything together with. We find that in the mathematical center of black holes and highly dense "singularities" (such as before the Big Bang) that the four forces of our universe - gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces break down. Because gravity is so much weaker than these other three forces we are unable to put it within a singularity such as a black hole. So, it is the hope of String Theory and the Large Hadron Collider (which will be firing up shortly) to capture a "graviton" - a messenger particle similar to an electron or photon - escaping our three-dimensional universe. This would explain with wonderful clarity why gravity is so much "weaker". In essence, it should be just as powerful as the other three forces, but if some of it is escaping into other dimensions we might be prone to say that it is just as powerful within a singularity - but unobservable on a more Newtonian expanded scale.
Where multiverses come into play is more or less outside of our universe - although some have suggested within brane theory that these universes could indeed be elements within our own universe right in front of our face but undetectable. Simple multiverse theory just says that if our universe began that other universes may have begun as well. There could be other universes with different physical constants, different Big Bang orientations, different outcomes, and perhaps even different lifeforms. It is somewhat similar to suggesting that because life on this planet started, why couldn't life on other planets start given the sheer number of planets? What is fascinating about multiverses is that we cannot define - except within infinity - how many possible multiverses there might be. Therefore, it almost becomes tangible within a mathematical and Aristotlean viewpoint to think that there could be an almost infinite amount of multiverses with not only different laws of physics but the exact same laws of physics that spawned, get this, very similar if not exact Earth's with the same exact events.
Max Tegmark has proposed four different types of multiverses. Type I, Type II, Type III, and Type IV. Some of them deal with brane theory and the extra string dimensions - the possibility that these extra universes exist right in front of our face but are not seen - as well as the simple thought that other multiverses outside of this universe are a possibility within mathematics as well.
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